Air Force first: Woman nominated for 4th star - Air Force News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Air Force Times

Air Force first: Woman nominated for 4th star

The Air Force officer poised to become the second U.S. woman to pin on a fourth star is accustomed to making history. Lt. Gen. Janet C. Wolfenbarger will become the Air Force’s first female four-star if the Senate approves her Feb. 6 nomination by President Obama.

The historic achievement — and the flurry of attention that has surrounded it — is not unfamiliar to Wolfenbarger, who in 1976 was among the first group of women admitted to the Air Force Academy.

Those pioneering women had set out in search of opportunity rather than special recognition, said classmate and retired Col. Beverly Plosa-Bowser, and the same can be said of Wolfenbarger today.

As a four-star general, Wolfenbarger would head Air Force Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, where she was vice commander from December 2009 to September 2011. She would replace Gen. Donald Hoffman, who is scheduled to retire.

Wolfenbarger now works at the Pentagon as military deputy in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition. She oversees research and development, testing, production and modernization of an annual $40 billion in Air Force programs.

Wolfenbarger is not giving interviews until after her confirmation hearings are complete, said Capt. Matthew Stines, an Air Force spokesman.

She shed light on her rise through the ranks at a women’s conference in San Diego last year, according an Air Force news release.

At the academy, Wolfenbarger told airmen, she was challenged “physically, mentally and emotionally” but learned “I could withstand those kinds of experiences and come out on the other end realizing I was far more capable than I ever thought I would be.”

Wolfenbarger was one of the first 157 women cadets to attend the academy. They were welcomed by 2-foot-tall letters spelling “Bring Me Men,” placed at the entrance more than a decade earlier.

It wasn’t easy being first, Plosa-Bowser said.

“It was a tremendously huge media event,” she said. “All the reporters swarmed around the women being there. This turned around to bite us when the upperclassmen saw us in the paper.”

Plastic flowers decorated the urinals in men’s bathrooms converted to women’s. The freshmen women used showers in the upperclassmen’s quarters, and they endured embarrassing walks each morning in bathrobes and slippers carrying a bucket of soap, Plosa-Bowser said.

“The upperclassmen looked at you like you were an alien they wanted to attack,” she said.

And when their feminine voices called out greetings as was required of all freshmen, the upperclassmen would often answer back with a derogatory name, Plosa-Bowser recalled.

“That’s a very minor example of what you dealt with every day,” she said.

Wolfenbarger, though, was “very upbeat … very humble and very confident. Janet was always academically on top. She was very, very capable.”

The male cadets in her own class began to see women as colleagues with a common goal, Plosa-Bowser said.

“That was really what all of us were trying to accomplish when we went to the academy: that we were willing and capable,” she said.

Wolfenbarger graduated in 1980 with a degree in engineering sciences. She first worked as a technical intelligence analyst in the Armament Division at Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., then went on to earn a master’s degree in aeronautics and astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985. She received a master’s in national resource strategy in 1994.

Wolfenbarger has held multiple positions in the F-22 system program office at Wright-Patterson and was the F-22 lead program element monitor at the Pentagon. She served as director of the B-2 system program for the Aeronautical Systems Center at Wright-Patterson. She commanded the Mobility Systems Wing of the ASC’s C-17 systems group, was the service’s director of the Air Force Acquisition Center of Excellence at the Pentagon and director of the AFMC Intelligence and Requirements Directorate at Wright-Patterson.

Wolfenbarger was promoted to brigadier general in February 2006. She spent less than six months as major general before being promoted to lieutenant general in December 2009.

“I wanted to do well and be recognized because I worked hard,” Wolfenbarger said at the San Diego conference last year. “I did the very best I could at every job I held.”

When she joined the Air Force, Wolfenbarger said, an executive order allowed service officials to discharge women if they became pregnant, gave birth, adopted or became a stepparent. Many career fields were closed to women.

“Clearly we’ve made progress. We now have not only maternity leave but also paternity leave for our service members,” Wolfenbarger said. “We can now, as a service, proudly say that we have 97 percent of our career fields open to women. The generations today may not understand how much progress has been made in the past 30 years, but I think that they certainly benefit from that progress, and there is still more progress to be made.”

Women today make up about 9 percent of general officers in the Air Force. They account for 19 percent of the service.

In 2008, Gen. Ann E. Dunwoody, commanding general of the Army Materiel Command, became the first woman in U.S. military history to receive a fourth star.

Plosa-Bowser said such a promotion would have been hard for any of those 157 women to imagine in 1976.

She spoke to Wolfenbarger soon after she became brigadier general in 2006.

“She privately wondered if she would do a good enough job to be kept around. And here she is, making history,” Plosa-Bowser said. “The attention she’ll get she’ll tolerate because she knows it comes along with it.

“As a four-star general, she is simply trying to do her best … not to be a woman leader, but to be an Air Force leader,” she said.