COMACC outlines command’s focus

  • Published
  • By 1st Lt. Jason McKernan
  • Air Combat Command Public Affairs
LANGLEY AIR FORCE BASE, Va. (ACCNS) --  Air Combat Command Commander Gen. Ronald E. Keys recently emphasized his commitment to ensuring Airmen are the best led, best equipped and best trained ... so ACC can win today’s wars and be ready for tomorrow’s.

“We’re involved in seven different wars right now -- OIF; OEF; ONE; relief for hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma; and earthquake relief in Pakistan,” General Keys said. “That puts a tremendous stress on our people and our organization to make sure we do that quickly, effectively and safely. Our people make us the greatest Air Force in the world, and we need to make sure they are properly trained, motivated, safe and healthy to continue supporting contingency requirements around the world.”

His five focus areas -- people, expeditionary operations, recapitalization, organization and transformation -- are tailored toward ensuring ACC is prepared to successfully accomplish the missions it’s called to perform.

“The first area is our people -- Airmen of courage, commitment, discipline and honor,” General Keys said. “Our people are the motivating force of all the equipment and infrastructure we have.”

He said ACC Airmen must understand what they “signed up for” is to go and fight and win America’s wars, whenever and wherever called to do so. A “Leader-Wingman” culture that ensures we do it as a team of professionals that are trained and look out for each other is critical for successful and safe operations.

“The mission is important; the mission has inherent risk, but we need to know what they are. We need to balance risk with the mission, and we certainly don’t want to take reckless risks,” General Keys said. “Good wingmen will never let their leaders do something dumb, and a leader never takes his wingman into a situation he can’t survive. We’ve got to have the courage in many cases to say, ‘This is not right’ or ‘Let’s look at how we can do this better’ or ‘Let’s stop and start this over.’”

Growing an expeditionary mindset and culture is very important to help Airmen understand their roles in the Air Force, General Keys continued.

“We want to fight and win the ‘away game’ ... we don’t want to have to fight the ‘home game,’” he said. “That means we are going to pick-up, pack-up, get to where we are going, unpack, plug-in and operate. We need to focus on how we are going to do that in an expeditionary sense.”

The expeditionary culture must permeate all aspects of ACC operations, General Keys emphasized.

“Any time we are buying a piece of equipment, or setting up a training program or writing a rule, we need to ask ourselves, ‘Will this work on the road?’” General Keys said. “Being expeditionary extends beyond the traditional things like training and equipment -- it’s more about how we approach everything, our processes, our rules, our training ... everything.”

The areas of people and expeditionary operations lead to the commander’s focus on recapitalization.

“Recapitalization ensures I can execute tomorrow’s mission and the one 30 years from tomorrow,” General Keys said. “Our aircraft are old and getting older, and they’re requiring more maintenance hours. They’re breaking in unheard-of ways that we are not prepared for, and we also have infrastructure that is becoming increasingly more expensive to maintain.

“We have to look at (the budget) differently and understand what we can stop doing -- what we can just walk away from and create the fiscal headroom so we can recapitalize.”

General Keys also highlighted how important it is for the command’s organizations to be built around the expeditionary mindset.

“We need to ask ourselves, ‘Are we organized as we should be for expeditionary and homeland security operations?’” General Keys said. “If we started with a clean sheet of paper, would we have (organizations) like we have them today?”

One of those organizational efforts includes the command headquarters itself, which is reorganizing into a standardized Air Force A-staff structure.

The organization focus also stresses the alignment with Guard, Reserve and active duty forces. “For Future Total Force, there is going to be a much closer alignment between associations of these different units,” General Keys said.

General Keys described his fifth focus area of transformation as “a different way of looking at what you have to do” and looking at a problem from a different perspective.

“In some cases, transformation is as simple as saying, ‘No, I’m not doing that anymore -- I’m transforming to a different kind of force,’” General Keys said. “Transformation is the thread that runs through all the focus areas, and is an ongoing search for efficiency and effectiveness in different ways of attacking problems.”

“If you look back to Afghanistan, we put a young man on a horse in a wooden saddle with a laptop and a laser range finder. He was sending targets up to a B-52 that was dropping GPS-guided bombs,” General Keys said. “No one would have thought of putting those systems together unless they had a transformational mindset. We have to think about how we get from where we are to where we want to be.

“When someone comes to me and needs to buy widget X, I ask, ‘Does it do it cheaper, faster and better?’ For example, if a time-sensitive targeting cycle takes 7 minutes and a $50 million widget can make the cycle 43 seconds faster, we need to ask if the 43-second difference is necessary -- if not, then we need to walk away from it.”

Other transformational examples are existing chat room and user-friendly Web-based technologies that can be adapted to the needs of the warfighter. “We need to use existing technology like that and harness it for our needs,” General Keys said.

Above all else, General Keys reiterated, it’s the people that make America’s Air Force the best in the world.

“Our talented people are the ones industry wants -- for their ethos, as well as their skills,” General Keys said. “Our people understand integrity first, service before self, and excellence in all we do.

“As we continue facing budget challenges, Base Realignment and Closure issues, and the Quadrennial Defense Review, I’m committed to making sure our Airmen have the best leadership, the best equipment, the best capability and the best training when they’re called to go into harm’s way.”