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Wide range of dining reforms considered

Feel like buffalo wings at the club? Swipe your meal card.

Want a bag of popcorn from the snack bar? Swipe your meal card.

Got a hankering for a Double Whopper? Swipe your meal card — maybe.

The Air Force is working on a way to make the enlisted airman’s meal card as good as cash at other places on base besides the dining hall, even privately owned restaurants.

Officials don’t have the details worked out yet but know from airman complaints and the service’s own numbers — meals costing more and fewer being served — that the dining system needs to be fixed.

Of the service’s quality-of-life programs, airmen rate food service the worst. Last year, leaders set up the Food Transformation Initiative division to address your beefs: too few options, nasty-tasting dishes, junk food, limited hours of operation and generally bad service.

The initiative’s mission is to improve “food quality, variety and nutritious value; increase efficiency; maintain our organic warfighting food service capability; and save money,” Lt. Gen. Richard Newton, who oversees Air Force personnel and services issues, testified at a congressional hearing in May.

Newton told members of the House Armed Services military personnel subcommittee that the division would take its lead on any overhaul from “cutting-edge models of leading college, university and corporate campuses.”

Six installations will test the meal card plan this year: Elmendorf Air Force Base, Alaska; Fairchild Air Force Base, Wash.; Little Rock Air Force Base, Ark.; Travis Air Force Base, Calif.; and Patrick and MacDill Air Force bases in Florida.

The campus-style model is the one the Air Force seems to have settled on, though the initiative’s leader cautions that other options are under consideration.

“Our customers are telling us to look at different ways and different models, and that’s exactly what we’re trying to do,” Michael Szymanski said.

Open or shut?

Airmen aren’t shy about saying exactly what they think about Air Force food or about offering up suggestions for the dining facility, DFAC for short. AirForceTimes.com received more than 50 e-mail responses when it asked airmen’s thoughts on dining.

Much of the conversation focused on closing the dining halls and giving airmen a full basic allowance for subsistence.

The Air Force deducts $277.50 a month from an airman’s paycheck for a meal card; BAS without the meal card deduction is $324 for a 30-day month, or $10.80 a day. About 41,500 airmen use meal cards, said Kenny Pruitt, a spokesman for the Air Force Personnel Center at Randolph Air Force Base, Texas.

Airmen’s comments on the meal card vs. BAS debate lined up fairly evenly on both sides.

Airman 1st Class Matthew Hagan, based at Scott Air Force Base, Ill., made the case for BAS.

“In my opinion, I could eat cheaper, healthier and food that doesn’t taste like it was processed and packaged years ago if I were to receive BAS,” Hagan wrote. “I’m tired of pointing at what I want for dinner because I couldn’t guess what it was.”

Airman 1st Class Brittany Sidwell of Tyndall Air Force Base, Fla., thinks the Air Force is sending the wrong message by keeping the DFACs open.

“What is the Air Force shielding young airmen from? Does the Air Force really think that 17- to 27-year-olds cannot cook for themselves?” she asked in her e-mail. “We do not like the chow hall food or its hours and the Air Force will save money by giving its airmen BAS.”

Senior Airman Brandon Gallick spoke for those who want to hang on to their meal cards.

“When I was a single airman in the dorms at Eglin AFB, the chow hall was right down the street and you could always rely on it being there. It at least gave you the option to eat healthy meals as opposed to receiving BAS and eating fast food or expensive dine-in meals,” Gallick wrote.

Money matters

In the last decade or so, the Air Force has done away with 49 of its 325 dining halls — many because of installation closures, mission changes or force reductions.

The ones still open — only a handful are operated by contractors, and the food is typically prepared by military chefs — are not being used as much as the service wants, said Szymanski, the food initiative leader. Enlisted airmen use their meal cards about 40 percent as much as they could, he said; college campuses typically see usage rates of about 70 percent.

Shuttering dining halls would be a clear money-saver for an Air Force struggling to cut costs.

Newton said each meal served costs the service about $20. The Air Force served about 91 million meals in fiscal 2008, which adds up to roughly $1.8 billion.

Newton and Szymanski are quick to downplay the possibility of closing more dining halls, a decision ultimately made by each base’s commander, though the Air Force must sign off on all closures.

Lt. Col. Elizabeth Demmons, who managed Air Force dining facilities for 14 years, wrapped up her work for the Naval Postgraduate School’s MBA program with a research project on dining halls and determined that “if the cost of providing BAS to the dorm residents is less than the cost of operating the … dining facility, it may make sense to close the operation.”

In an interview, Demmons said base commanders generally don’t want to close dining facilities but often have no choice.

“Budget constraints play a big factor, and as we continue to see contract costs rise, it’s more difficult to make that decision” to keep a dining hall open, Demmons said.

Still, closure should not be an option for every base, she said — only those where the DFAC is not being used and dining services aren’t critical to the mission. For instance, the dining halls at training bases should be kept open, she said.

“There’s not one solution for every base,” she said. “Every base has its unique stakeholders and unique challenges.”

Capt. Michael J. Hickam put hard numbers to the dining hall dilemma in the 51-page cost analysis he did as his thesis project at the Air Force Institute of Technology.

In fiscal 2008, Hickam found, the service could have saved $12.1 million by closing the dining halls at four installations — Travis; Langley Air Force Base, Va.; Peterson Air Force Base, Colo.; and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio — and handing out BAS checks instead. At Langley, for example, the dining hall operating costs totaled $5.5 million; the BAS would have been $1.9 million, Hickam reported.

Other installations have real savings already in hand from closing their dining halls.

Andrews Air Force Base, Md., now Joint Base Andrews, has saved more than $560,000 a month since it closed one of its two dining facilities in May 2008, base spokesman Capt. Christian Hodge said.

Andrews leaders closed the doors of Liberty Hall after a base study showed a daily average of 14 airmen with meal cards — out of 350 — ate at the dining hall, a 4 percent usage rate. The other 336 airmen ate either at the base’s other dining facility, Freedom Hall, or went elsewhere.

Laughlin Air Force Base, Texas, closed its Chaparral Dining Facility in March 2007 after a survey found 89 percent of the base’s dorm residents preferred BAS to a meal card. The annual savings: about $815,000 per year, base spokesman 1st Lt. Courtney Kippenberger said.

Beyond dollars and cents

There are plenty of nonfinancial reasons to save the dining halls.

Szymanski gives three: remote bases, airmen’s well-being and what he describes as “warfighting feeding capability,” or training Air Force chefs. All would be hurt, he is convinced, if airmen have the freedom to buy or prepare their own meals.

Close the DFACs, Szymanski argues, and cooks won’t have a place to practice skills especially crucial now in Iraq and Afghanistan, airmen will be more tempted to eat at fast-food joints, and remote locations will be left out in the cold, many miles from alternative dining options.

“If you close, you’re driving that customer off the installation,” Szymanski said. “It will have a negative impact — it could reduce productivity, have an impact on their health. … I have a son [in the Air Force], and if it wasn’t for food services operations on the installation, he’d be eating Ramen [noodles] every day.”

Senior Master Sgt. Jarrod Drevalas and Senior Airman Todd Biggs drove home Szymanski’s points.

“As a young airman, I enjoyed being places on full BAS and not being forced to eat at the dining facility,” wrote Drevalas, who works at Scott. “However, I quickly noticed I started to feel unhealthy and gained a few more pounds due to the ease of obtaining fast food.”

Biggs, a guardsman who has served at McConnell Air Force Base, Kan., and Keesler Air Force Base, Miss., wrote that “if there is no chow hall, we would then be faced with calling a cab at times to take us off base to get some chow. Keep the chow halls open! Please!”

The biggest reason, though, comes from the Air Force’s top uniformed leader.

For Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz, chow halls are places for airmen to gather, share stories and ideas, and build camaraderie.

Before a packed auditorium at the Air and Space Conference in September, Schwartz worried aloud that the Air Force has lost over time its sense of being a small-town community.

“We’ve closed dining facilities that for decades have served as the evening dining table,” Schwartz said.

Recapturing that sense of community is no small part of the campus-style model that the Air Force is working to put in place. Letting noncommissioned officers use their meal cards at clubs and snack bars will bring them together with officers, retirees and the civilians who work on bases.

“We expect that will be a morale booster, a way for us as one of our goals to restore a sense of community,” Szymanski said. “Just like in a university, those community commons is some place faculty, family, friends can break bread together. We don’t have that central place where everyone feels at home.”