DISTRIBUTION
A:
Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited.
Published Airpower Journal - Fall 1987
LOOKING OUT over the 80-plus shiny, squeaky-clean, company grade officers gathered in front of me at the Johnson Manned Space Flight Center in Houston, Texas, I could not help but think that if this group of young men and women did not make a person feel great, then feeling great was simply not in the cards. We were halfway through a day-long seminar I bill as the "Company Grade Officer Training Program, or Lots of Things Someone Should Have Taught You Along the Way But Probably Didn't!" and it had been a day to remember. Since beginning this free-lance program over two years earlier, I had traveled all over the country speaking to young officers and had never met a more enthusiastic group. We had talked about everything from military justice and how to put a bad actor in confinement to social etiquette and how not to feel like a fool in a receiving line. Their response had been exhilarating; the young officers were eager, bright, and hungry for traditional military values. Their response was all the more exciting when I reflected upon how far removed from the mainstream of Air Force lives these engineers and computer experts were; the Space Flight Center did not even have a BX! Nevertheless, these young officers showed the same desire for traditional military values I had witnessed in well over 1,500 of their contemporaries all over the country.
I introduced the first hour of the afternoon session by stating the topic of discussion: military customs and courtesies and the senior/subordinate relationship. For 30 minutes I extolled the accepted formalities and courtesies exchanged between officers of different rank and especially between commanders or supervisors and their subordinates.
"There is a long-established tradition of courtesies and customs," said I, "all designed to show proper respect for persons of higher rank and authority and to clearly define and to make more workable the senior/subordinate relationship." I then spent several minutes discussing why it is wrong to use a senior's first name. From the back of the room a second lieutenant raised his hand.
"Sir, I have a problem with that," he said.
On the one hand, I was not surprised at his comment, since a certain aversion to special
treatment for higher rank is not uncommon among officers of this young man's generation.
On the other hand, this particular group had been so receptive, to my strict military line
that I was taken aback just a bit by the lieutenant's objections.
"What's your problem?" I asked.
The lieutenant stood up, looked me straight in the eye and replied, "Sir, I'm an engineer and I work for a major who keeps telling me to call him ‘Jim’. Sir, if I'd wanted to call my engineering boss 'Jim,' I'd have gone to work for Hewlett-Packard!"
And in 35 words, that young second lieutenant said it all. We as an institution, as a profession, are denying to a fine, eager group of company grade officers the very military values for which they raised their right hands. We fail to train them in long-established military customs, courtesies, and traditions; we fail to demand proper and enthusiastic execution of duties along traditional military lines; and then we wring our collective hands and with bowed, shaking heads bemoan in officer corps that "just isn't what it used to be." The problem is big and getting bigger as year after year we fail to give our young officers the basic underpinnings of military virtues that will carry them through their careers.
How does one truly discover the issues posing the biggest problems for our lieutenants and captains? How do we really find out what they need to develop into the best officers they can be? For two years, from 1984 to 1986, I had a rare opportunity to explore these questions with over 1,500 young officers.
As a four-time aircraft maintenance squadron commander, I had discovered that my own officers were very uncomfortable in certain situations and, not surprisingly, did not perform well at certain critical times. My officers were terribly uncomfortable with officer/enlisted relationships, not an uncommon or unexpected malady for a 24 year-old second lieutenant faced with leading 100 enlisted members. Similarly, my young officers viewed military justice and discipline as a hot potato to be tossed either to the first available NCO or to the commander. And last, but far from least, my officers almost totally tacked those basic social skills that are a proud part of our military heritage.
To attack these weaknesses, my young officers and I developed the Company Grade Officer Training Program, a slightly unconventional series of weekly training sessions using lectures (by both me and my officers), role-playing, and field trips to expose the young officers to topics that were essential to their professional development. The course was so successful that we subsequently presented it to officers throughout the base and eventually took the show on the road. Through nothing more than word of-mouth advertising, invitations began rolling in from all over the country. Eventually the program was presented to hundreds of lieutenants and captains from coast to coast. At every stop, the company grade officers were literally bursting with questions, problems, and issues that they were understandably uncomfortable broaching with their superiors but that they readily revealed to a relatively safe source of information like me.
Throughout all the seminars, no matter the locale or the professional specialty or source of commission of the audience, an amazing unanimity of concern immediately became apparent: our young officers are far more militarily conservative than one would ever have expected, and they want far more military in their lives, not less. From Los Angeles to Boston, from Florida to Utah, the refrain rang true time and time again.
Today's lieutenants and captains entered the Air Force for many reasons, and high on the list were traditional military values. Today's young officers were not teenagers during the 1960s when nearly all traditional values, both civilian and military, were suspect. Today's young officers were teenagers in the post-Vietnam years. They saw the renewed stature of the armed services in the 1970s, and the general return to basic values throughout our country. These officers came into the Air Force expecting to find well-established (and well-enforced) codes of conduct and department; well-defined and proudly executed relationships between members of different ranks in both the officer and enlisted corps; and probably most important, they expected to find a cadre of field graders prepared to turn them not merely into good engineers, pilots, or administrators but into good officers. In far, far too many instances, these expectations have been frustrated.
The list of examples is almost endless. A first lieutenant graduate of the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) seriously asked if he was required to salute all ranking officers and chief master sergeants. (Probably not a bad idea, but one not supported by regulations!) A second lieutenant nurse related that she had been reprimanded by her nurse-in-charge for not encouraging her enlisted men and women to use her first name. A captain who graduated from the Air Force Academy asked why he was expected to limit his social contacts with enlisted men and women when his supervisor, a lieutenant colonel, was openly dating a staff sergeant. Literally hundreds of young officers uniformly stated, "My boss always finds time to talk to me after I've messed up…. I just wish I'd received some help a little bit sooner." And the list goes on and on and on.
This question seems so basic, and the answer so obvious, that we need not tarry overly long with it. Military customs, courtesies, and traditions are vitally important to our Air Force because shared traditions are one of the few things remaining that can bind officers of widely differing skills and specialties into one professional corps.
One hardly needs to perform a detailed document search to discover a perceived rise in careerism and the accompanying decline in cohesion and professionalism. A Squadron Officer School (SOS) survey of 613 officers showed that 76 percent of operations officers and 63 percent of support officers associated themselves more readily and strongly with their career colleagues than with the Air Force as a whole.1 While one may be displeased with this fact, the fairly parochial allegiance shown by young officers should come as no surprise. By its very nature, the Air Force is a compartmentalized service, the greatest and most obvious distinction being between those who fly those who do not. But while "rated/nonrated" is the most obvious distinction, it is not the only one that tends to promote compartmentalization within the Air Force. It is hardly surprising that the contracting officer who has never administered the many Air Force personnel programs has little in common with a personnel officer who, in turn, has never supervised 100 enlisted men and women around the clock as has the maintenance officer who, in turn, has never had to make the highly technical decisions of the computer or engineering officer who deals with civilian contractors.
Is compartmentalization bad? The question is moot since career specialties are here to stay, as well they should be. National defense in general and the Air Force in particular are far too complex to be administered by anyone not possessing specialized skills. There is no other choice. But specialization has its price, and lack of cohesiveness is a big part of the bill.
Given the existence of some 217 career specialties based on 60 academic disciplines, the bonding effect of a solid body of traditional military values can hardly be overstated.2 The navigator, administrative officer, civil engineer, and doctor may have little in common in terms of job description, but they may nevertheless be bound together by the shared customs, courtesies, and traditions embodied in officer/enlisted relationships, military discipline, and professional social protocol. These topics, and many more, are no less important to one officer than to another, regardless of career specialty. At the risk of waxing excessively eloquent, I submit that there exists over all Air Force careers a patina of military values and officership skills that offers to all members a common bond of professionalism. But the veneer grows thinner by the day.
My experiences with hundreds and hundreds of officers all over the country revealed that the officership skills they need--and which we fail to provide--are very similar to those problem areas articulated by my own squadron officers and alluded to earlier.
The special relationship between officers and enlisted members can be one of the most rewarding facets of military service, or one of the most confusing and frustrating. For the officer properly schooled and trained in the complementary roles of the enlisted and officer corps, the relationship is nothing short of wonderful. What a thrill it is when an officer, junior or senior, can help guide a young airman through the early, trying years of service. What a thrill it is when a young airman matures both personally and professionally as a result of a concerned, involved officer in charge. The same thrill is equally intense when roles are reversed, when the master sergeant takes a young officer in tow and helps turn that officer into a fine leader. The memories of hours spent working with and learning from fine NCOs will remain in an officer's heart long after the roar of the engines grows quiet.
For the properly schooled and trained officer, the opportunity to work closely with the fine members of the enlisted corps is reason enough, in and of itself, to join the Air Force. But for the unschooled, untrained officer, relationships with the enlisted corps can be a source of constant uncertainty and consternation. All too many of our young officers find themselves in this latter category, and they suffer terribly. For most of our young officers, the relationship with a corps of enlisted men and women is a totally new phenomenon, one without corollary in the civilian world. Our lieutenants and captains are too young in both age and service to have learned how to properly and effectively work with enlisted members, yet they are expected to do so from day one. The questions they raise show the immediacy of the problem and their concern.
"Can I date an airman who does not work directly for me but who is in my squadron? And if I legally can, should I?"
"I don't think the chief likes young officers. What should I do?"
"When we're TDY, some of my NCOs call me by my first name, Is this OK?"
"My NCOIC is 10 years older than me and has a personal problem. How is a young person like me supposed to help?"
These questions and hundreds more like them came forth in seminars all across the country as our young officers highlighted a glaring omission in their professional upbringing. For the most part, schooling in officer/enlisted relationships receives short shrift. Formal training invariably consists of seminars in which a cadre of enlisted members attempts, in two or three hours, to impart some feeling of NCO expectations and responsibilities to our young officers.3 The effort is noble but only marginally productive. And if 1,500 young officers are to be believed, counsel from their own officer superiors is woefully lacking. The young lieutenants and captains apparently are expected to learn by osmosis the intricacies of one of the most important, meaningful, and sensitive relationships in military service. That our young officers experience so many difficulties in this arena should be no source of surprise to those of us whose duty it is to properly train them. It should also be no source of pride.
Young officers almost totally lack the skills necessary to do their part in maintaining a fair and effective system of military discipline. Their shortcomings in this critical area of military life result from the lack of experiences that accompany their short time in service and from a near-total failure of their superiors to explain to them both how they fit into the military discipline/justice system and how they can effectively discharge their duties. At best we glibly toss at them trite phrases and little more.
"Enforce standards!"
"Don't permit shoddy performance!"
"We've gotta have discipline!"
Though noble assertions, these phrases do little to tell three-year lieutenants how to execute their disciplinary responsibilities. From the minor--but significant-- offense of avoiding a salute, to theft of government property, to the thousands of events in between, the young officer is ill-prepared to take the proper action. Most ROTC instruction is by officers who have yet to hold command and who have never, in most cases, imposed administrative or judicial discipline on any military member.4 Subsequent formal training dedicates very little time to the topic. Of 268 hours at SOS, only 3 1/2 hours deal with military discipline.5 Further, most superiors spend little or no time discussing discipline with their officer subordinates. Ask the next five captains you meet the difference between a letter of counseling and a letter of reprimand; ask them to describe an unfavorable information file; ask them to identify the key elements of any offense in the Uniform Code. Unless you are extremely fortunate, you will not receive learned responses.
This is not to say that one should expect a young lieutenant or captain to be the equivalent of a squadron commander or a military trial counsel. Because the disciplinary task is so difficult and because the effects of disciplinary action are so significant, we purposefully reserve this task for field grade commanders or at least for officers with many years in service. But this does not mean that the young lieutenant or captain has no role in the disciplinary system. The young officer must be able to distinguish acceptable conduct from unacceptable, must know when to act, and must know how to act. The vast majority of the young officers with whom I spoke did not possess the requisite skills for this critical duty. And they are not to blame. How can we blame them for what we never taught them? As a result, they either avoid their disciplinary responsibilities altogether or make well-intentioned but fatal errors in administering discipline. In either case, both they and the Air Force suffer.
Inherent in all of the military services is a proud history of professional social contact, a history of protocol and social etiquette that helps distinguish our profession of military service from its civilian occupational counterparts. From a New Year's Day visit to the commander's home, to the formal military ball, to the daily customs and courtesies exchanged between military members, professional social etiquette has been a continuing thread throughout military history. Yet our young officers know almost nothing about their social obligations and how to gracefully execute their social duties. One hears "an officer and a gentleman" or "an officer and a lady" far more often than one sees proper execution of all that is denoted in those phrases.
What do our young officers not know about the social aspect of their profession? Plenty! With very few exceptions, the officers with whom I spoke do not fully appreciate their responsibility to actively support the officers' club and its attendant associations, do not know how to extend thanks to the hostess for a club or home party, do not know basic rules of engagement for receiving lines, do not know when and for whom to stand (either socially or at work), and many do not even know proper etiquette for the national flag! Again, we should not be surprised at the absence of social skills shown by these fine young officers. In most cases, their civilian rearing offered little opportunity to acquire even rudimentary social skills, and, for the most part, Air Force efforts do not get the job done. ROTC instruction relies heavily on a yearly dining out as the primary reaching tool; current SOS curriculum offers only 90 minutes of instruction on the subject, 30 minutes of which is preparatory reading.6
Should it be our objective to turn our officers into simpering dandies who, with little fingers property extended, nibble watercress sandwiches while making cocktail party conversation? Hardly! But the objective should be to make our officers comfortable in a broad range of social situations, to be able to effect proper manners and protocol both at home and abroad, to complement their strong technical and leadership skills with equally strong social skills, and to represent the Air Force as polished officers, ladies, and gentlemen. Amazingly enough, our young officers are eager to learn. They have, felt uncomfortable on far too many social occasions, and they do not like the feeling. They want to do the proper, courteous, gracious thing but simply do not know what to do. They see the value of the professional social contact but are often deterred from participation by their lack of social proficiency.
In the final analysis, the sincere, honest assertions of hundreds and hundreds of our finest lieutenants and captains can lead to only one conclusion: no matter how well we think we are training our young officers in traditional officership skills, we are simply not hitting the mark. Our best intentions and efforts notwithstanding, we are not giving them what they want, what they need, what they deserve.
What can be done to return military traditions to their rightful place in Air Force life? What can be done to make our time-tested military values part and parcel of the professional development of each of our fine young officers? There is much that can be done, both institutionally and personally; and if we are truly sincere in our efforts, the necessary actions are not all that difficult.
The institutional remedy requires only that we codify our important traditions in regulations, pamphlets, or curricula, and then use these as tools to instruct our young officers. We should by no means wait until an officer attends SOS to begin such instruction. From the earliest days at the Air Force Academy, in university and college ROTC programs, and at Officer Training School (OTS), our young officers should be instructed in detail on the three topics discussed here and on many topics of similar value.
The first step in this process is to clearly articulate in a regulation or similar document those military traditions we wish to foster. AFR 30-1, Air Force Standards, is generally accepted as the prime document that articulates basic values and is certainly the most widely read and best known. But AFR 30-1, in its current form, falls somewhat short of the mark in both content and specificity. While the regulation speaks to customs and courtesies, professional relationships, military ethics, dress and appearance, and the like, it does so in rather general terms. Our young officers need specifics to guide them through the specific problems of their daily lives. When the regulation says it is "inappropriate" for a subordinate to address a senior by first name, what it really means is that subordinate will not address seniors in so informal a manner. If this is what it means, why not say so? The regulation is a fine document but can be even better.
Amazingly enough, superb material already exists for teaching many of the subjects identified in AFR 30-1, but we do not make the best of what we have. Law for Commanders and the Decorum/Protocol Handbook used today at the Air Force Academy are exactly what the doctor ordered. The academy training outline on officer/enlisted relationships is an equally fine document. These texts deal with real issues in a thorough, detailed fashion. But one must be an academy cadet to benefit from them! Are these topics any less important to an officer commissioned via ROTC or OTS? Obviously not. This material should be the basis of instruction in all commissioning programs. The Other Half, a booklet created by a student at Air Command and Staff College and available at ROTC units today, is an excellent primer on social survival skills. However, the degree to which this booklet is used is left to the discretion of individual ROTC detachments. Finally, the Air Force Officer Guide, now in its 27th edition, is a fine book for teaching military customs, courtesies, and traditions but often spends more time on bookstore shelves than in the hands of a young officer. The Guide and the other texts mentioned here could form a solid nucleus for expanded professional education in our commissioning programs, at SOS, and in the Lieutenant's Professional Development Program.
The instruction should be meaningful. Military discipline should be taught by squadron commanders who have had to make those tough decisions that changed people's lives. I doubt there is a squadron commander (or ex-commander) who would not gladly visit an ROTC detachment, OTS, or SOS and share real-life experiences with a group of prospective or commissioned officers. If one truly wants to teach officer/enlisted relationships, let first sergeants visit our officer schools and offer their perspectives. A fine first sergeant possesses a wealth of experiences beyond compare. Let us use those experiences to better teach our company grade officers. To impart to our young officers the necessary social survival skills, who would be better suited than protocol officers or aide-de-camps, many of whom are company grade officers themselves? Their experiences would be invaluable to all company grade officers; and especially because of age and rank similarities, their experiences would be credible. We would never dream of permitting aviation skills to be taught by a nonflier, or medical skills to be taught by anyone other than a medical professional. Yet we all too often allow important officership skills to be taught by people who, through no fault of their own, simply do not possess the body of experiences absolutely essential to meaningful instruction.
The instruction must be sufficiently detailed to be of real value. Three hours devoted to military discipline would not achieve the desired goal even if the instructor were Oliver Wendell Holmes; and Amy Vanderbilt herself would be hard-pressed to teach social etiquette in 90 minutes! The expected objection to an expanded curriculum is that there is too little time to permit such a detailed examination of these specialized subjects. A valid rejoinder to this objection would be to restructure the current curricula in our commissioning programs and in company grade officer education. At the risk of speaking words of blasphemy, I submit that to the prospective or novice officer, basic officership skills are at l east as important as national grand strategy, system acquisition, or--dare I say it?--the Program Objective Memorandum (POM) process. But should it prove impossible to change existing curricula at ROTC, OTS, or SOS, the officership skills I have discussed and many more can be covered via correspondence school. A well-designed correspondence course, specifically designed to address traditional military subjects and mandatory for all company grade officers, could work wonders.
While the institutional remedy is absolutely essential to improve the officership skills of our young officers, the institution cannot solve the problem by itself. It is all too easy to point the accusing finger at a regulation, at a commissioning program, or at military academia. Indeed, the lengthy discussion in this very paper of institutional remedies could lead one to view them as the answer to the problem and to ignore that which actually is both the source of the problem and the key to its resolution. The real key to increased professionalism among company grade officers is the total commitment of their superiors to making them the best officers they can be. All the formal training in the world will be for naught unless there is complementary personal training and modeling by superiors. We cannot expect formal training to do in a few hours that which we ranking officers should be doing every day.
Every ranking officer should view as a total honor the fact that the Air Force has entrusted into their care the professional upbringing of subordinate company grade officers. With that honor also comes total responsibility for that upbringing. Discharging that responsibility is far from difficult, and little things do mean a lot. Two hours weekly spent with young officers simply discussing pertinent topics can do wonders. Monthly breakfasts, retreat ceremonies, celebration of special national and military holidays, and attendance at leadership school graduations are but a few easy ways to foster professionalism. Failure to teach one's subordinate officers everything needed for a productive Air Force life should be viewed as nothing short of dereliction of duty on the part of the superior. Officers who do not do everything possible to improve the professional qualities of subordinate officers have no right to expect high marks for their own professionalism at evaluation time.
How much contact, training, and interaction are required of the superior officer? The test is simple. One needs only to answer this question: "If the subordinate lieutenants and captains working for me were my sons or daughters, what would I be teaching them in order to make them the most professional officers they can be?" Both the analogy and the question posed by it seem totally appropriate, since in no small sense is an officer of superior rank the military parent of the subordinates placed in his or her charge. Whatever we would do for our own sons and daughters we should do with equal enthusiasm for all our young officers.
The simple question posed by a fine young lieutenant at the Johnson Manned Space Flight Center and recounted at the beginning of this article shows in the clearest terms exactly what our young officers want, need, and deserve. They want more military in their lives, not less. They want to learn and lead-today! Yet they are being denied the very officership skills they seek. Where lies the fault for this predicament? Is the problem insoluble? Has the decline in military traditions simply become an irreversible fact of Air Force life? Hardly. As Cassius said to Brutus when discussing their own shortcomings, "The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars, but in ourselves." The fault lies in ourselves as we institutionally and personally deny to our company grade officers the basic military skills so essential for their professional development. But what we have done, we can undo. We can take steps to once again instill traditional military values into the lives of all our fine young officers. We owe it to ourselves to do just that. We owe it to our company grade officers. We owe it to the Air Force.
1. Capt. James H. Slagle, "The Junior Officer of the 1980s," Air University Review, November-December 1981. 90-95.
2. Lt. Col. Donald R. Baucom, "The Air Force Officer Corps in the 1980s," Air University Review, September-October 1983, 50.
3. SOS Curriculum Catalog (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Squadron Officer School, Air University, August 1986), 40-41.
4. Headquarters Air Training Command, Special Duty Assignment Branch, telephone interview with author, 24 February 1987.
5. SOS Curriculum Catalog, 51.
6. Headquarters Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps,
Curriculum Branch, telephone interview with author, 24 February 1987.
Lt Col Stephen C. Hall (BS, Georgia Institute of Technology; MS, Troy State University) is deputy director for Logistics, US Atlantic Command (J4), Norfolk, Virginia. His previous assignments include almost four years commanding aircraft maintenance squadrons, five years on the US Air Forces in Europe staff, and two years at an air logistics center in the Air Force Logistics Command. Colonel Hall is a graduate of Squadron Officer School and the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, a Distinguished Graduate of Air Command and Staff College, and a previous contributor to the former Air University Review.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.
[ Back Issues | Home Page | Feedback? Email the Editor ]