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New codes may come for intelligence officers

The Air Force is considering additional Air Force Specialty Codes for intelligence officers that would let the airmen focus on specific skills and make it easier for the service to identify who has the skills for selected missions.

Specific skills would be related to technical and geographic areas, Air Force spokeswoman Maj. Angie Blair said about the possible AFSC restructuring, prompted by the growing focus on cyberspace.

A technical requirement, for instance, would be signals intelligence, typically picking up communications such as satellite signals; southwest Asia and Africa would be examples of geographic areas.

Air Force officials undertook the career field review on the recommendation of Rand Corp., a California-based think tank, which last year looked at all officer job categories.

The intelligence AFSC was the only one that Rand suggested should be broadened. Enlisted airmen are divided into 15 intelligence AFSCs.

Rand pointed out that all 3,087 Air Force intelligence officers come under the same AFSC — 14N. The Air Force uses “special experience identifiers,” or subcategories, to 14N but those descriptions are too generic, according to the report.

“Given the diversity of jobs, having such a catch-all categorization could easily lead to under-preparation or over-preparation of Air Force intelligence officers,” according to the report.

Now, an intelligence officer who specializes in analyzing intercepted communications has the same AFSC as an intelligence officer who works for a fighter wing briefing pilots about missile threats or for a joint command.

Of the service’s 3,087 intelligence officers, 1,917, or 62 percent, work at Air Force wings and squadrons; 459, or 15 percent, work for other Air Force organizations; and 711, or 23 percent, work for joint commands or Defense Department agencies such as the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The other services all have multiple career field categories for their intelligence officers, according to Rand. The Army and the Marine Corps both have six categories for 4,240 and 1,380 officers, respectively; the Navy has eight specialties for its 2,140 officers.