Leaderboard

The lesson the Air Force can learn from Netflix, especially recently, is that making random changes that benefit no one for the sake of making changes tends to piss people off.

Mmmmm...bacon.

FG, Reminds me of a story- Dragging Marine equipment to OEF just before Christmas. The escorts didn't realize it was a Reserve keeper msn, meaning we don't crew swap when running out of duty, we crew rest and keep the jet. It's not uber efficient, but if I have to miss a holiday, I would at least like to avoid extra bag drags! There were four custodians for the equipment on 2 jets, deploying for some god awful number of days. We got to crew rest after a long day and I found out the Gunny and his 3 PFCs have no $ or orders or plans for the lodging. I knew there was a barracks somewhere as it was a Navy base, but it was Christmas eve and a quick phone search was no joy. I put them up in a room each for $50 each for the night. Next day our msn slipped due to congestion at the destination. The Gunny and I found the barracks, which were near the rec center. Their deployment orders said nothing about lodging conditions and they had no idea they weren't in for back to back crew changes and quick turns all the way to OEF from the east coast. When we dropped them off, I told the Gunny they could pay me back IF they ever got lodging fixed on their orders, knowing that wouldn't happen. I'm sure it's some kind of writeoff, but knew there wasn't any way to get the $ back from uncle sugar w/ a barracks technically available. The base had a decent chow hall, turkey dinner and places for them to hang out. One of my favorite Christmas gifts I've ever given was knowing those grunts were taken care of before heading in country. Best gift received was the thanks from the Gunny.

Chaos and a get-it-done is acceptable during a contingency environment, such as the outbreak of conflicts (early 2002 et al). Ours has been a period of relative peacetime for the majority of AF members and as such, peacetime leadership abounds. This is where your bibles of regulations come from; monday morning quarterbacks with idle hands. I don't think there's anything one could do to effect change of consequence during periods of peacetime. More importantly, I'm not about to propose wartime as a solution to it, though I very much recognize it is wartime that "fixes" your stated problem. When you're statistically more likely to become a casualty as a result of a training sortie than as a result of a combat engagement, normalized per capita, you simply have no imperative need for unconventional and creative change. Even in the Reserves I've witnessed this... "Hey we have a deployment opportunity coming up, we could use your experience.." 'Oh yeah? We dropping?' "Um, no." 'Meh, pass.' Wartime has always been the incentive to fix your problem. It's a catch 22.

Next slide....

I think it's desirable for Air Force officers to see what makes a company work and what doesn't. At the same time, there's a fundamental flaw here: the Air Force is not a corporation. We're a war machine. The just-in-time logistics process that Walmart uses will lead to severe capability degrades if we adopt it. As generations past learned: TQM is great for making Toyota...not as great when your product is aircraft availability or # of pounds / gallons airlifted. We're in the business of flying, fighting, and winning...that business leads to what corporate types would call "inefficiencies." Sometimes, those "inefficiencies" are actually buffers against shocks to the system (what staticians call war)...like the number of pilots we have employed, the number of GBU-38s we keep at each base, and the number of redundant systems we build into each airframe. Here's my pitch to the next generation of Air Force leaders: there's lessons to be learned from corporate success or failure. At the same time, we're not a corporation...frame those lessons appropriately.