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New rules help couples serve on same base

Maj. Benjamin Jacobson and Capt. Angela Jacobson lived apart the three years they dated and the first year of their marriage.

For a time, he was stationed in South Korea and she in Wyoming.

Now, the Jacobsons are together at Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., where he’s commander of the 96th Ground Combat Training Squadron and she’s an acquisition officer with the 676th Armament Systems Squadron.

The Air Force has about 16,200 married couples with both spouses in the service and is trying to make their lives a little easier by cutting down on the time they’re separated.

A shift in permanent change of station policy, one of two rules announced in June by the Air Force Personnel Center, reduces the time-on-station requirement for a government-funded join-spouse move from two years to one year. The second policy change establishes higher base manning thresholds and will allow more airmen to be assigned to their preferred bases.

Both changes, according to AFPC, will give airmen more flexibility in assignments and a greater quality of life for them and their families.

The changes, though, will result in more PCS moves, which the Air Force can now afford after keeping a close eye on its moving expenses in the past couple years, said Letty Inabinet, chief of the assignment programs and procedures branch at AFPC.

“We had some PCS budget challenges in the past, and things have improved,” she said

The new join-spouse policy returns to the standards in place before fall 2006, when the Air Force decided to save money and decrease the number of PCS moves by doubling the amount of time on station before an airmen can PCS at the government’s expense to join a spouse.

Returning to the 12-month policy is recognition of the financial and emotional hardship of separating married couples, Inabinet said.

“With join-spouse policies, our intent is to keep the family together when at all possible,” she said.

Despite the change, a join-spouse PCS will still have to fit into the mission requirements of the receiving base. A billet appropriate for the airman has to be open for a move to be approved, Inabinet said.

Maj. Benjamin Jacobson said he welcomes the policy change but thinks it will benefit junior enlisted airmen and company-grade officers more because of the greater number of billets in these grades.

“Once you get into the senior NCO and field-grade officer realms, there are fewer assignments because there are fewer billets,” he said. The new policy “may help certain folks, but I would guess that for senior NCOs and officers it’s still going to be fairly difficult.”

Staff Sgt. Kenneth Kline of the 1st Special Operations Security Forces Squadron at Hurlburt Field, Fla., is married to Staff Sgt. Alison Kline, a weapons loader with the 46th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron at nearby Eglin. The policy change, he said, will help couples’ family lives but could disrupt careers by moving after only a year in an assignment.

“That’s probably about the time you would actually get settled in and comfortable,” he said. “At that 12-month mark, you’re uprooted again.”

Inabinet acknowledged that disruption of careers is a possibility.

“It’s always a concern with any move,” she said. “When you’re moving folks like that you are disrupting the unit, the mission and the family. But because we’re highly committed to taking care of our airmen and keeping military families together, we assume that risk.”

The other policy change increases the maximum manning that a base must accommodate base-of-preference requests.

Previously, airmen could not move between domestic bases unless they were coming to the rescue of a base that had fewer than 85 percent of its billets filled. Now, airmen will be eligible to go to their base of preference anytime the base is less than 100 percent manned, or less than the average for bases worldwide.

“We can actually provide more base-of-preference [assignments] for those airmen,” Inabinet said.

The change is also expected to open up more opportunities in the Voluntary Stabilized Base Assignment Program, which allows airmen to volunteer for stateside bases that have been historically hard to fill. The benefit to the airman is a stabilized tour of either four or five years, depending on the location.

With these policy changes, Inabinet said, “we want to improve the quality of life for our airmen and their families.”