Daniel Reedy
Recently a former coworker and I have been having conversations about leadership in the Air Force. Despite him being an active duty officer, and me being a former Non-Comissioned Officer in the Air National Guard, our views align pretty closely. One of our more recent discussions was on the ever present phrase, “Do more with less.” This got me thinking about intent versus application. Let me tell you, these aspects are drifting further apart every day.
When I typically hear someone in leadership mention "Do more with less" they usually mean we’re either losing resources but responsibility is staying stagnant, or resources remain stagnant while responsibility grows. Unfortunately, that’s not the reality that Airmen face day to day. The Air Force has a problem of taking away resources while simultaneously adding responsibility to its people. We’ve seen multiple years of failing to hit recruitment goals, with retention being problematic as well. Despite problems with readiness rates across the force, the Air Force approved over 800 Airmen to voluntarily separate in 2021 as part of a voluntary force management program. On top of this, standards have been intermittently lowered for incoming Airmen, resulting in less skilled Airmen requiring additional work to become proficient in their career field. Just one example of this is the recent change to the 1N0X1 Operations Intelligence course being reduced from six months to just three, in addition to the ever-changing length of BMT.
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