When the call comes to leave your job and loved ones behind to defend and support our great nation, it is the Air Force Reserve that answers it. At the tip of this spear is Lt. Gen. Stenner, who took some time out of his busy schedule to answer some questions and shed some insight on the state of his command in another installment of the DoD’s Bloggers Roundtable.

For those unfamiliar with the Bloggers Roundtable, it’s a chance for bloggers and online journalists to get some one on one time with high ranking military officials. And this past one was was a great opportunity to ask the man in charge of nearly 67,000 Reservists at over 67 locations across the world some questions. But the Conference Call gods had it in for me.  6:30am PST on a Monday morning!?!?! Come on!!! Guess I could have asked the Gen if he wouldn’t mind rescheduling till after the sun came up. (just kidding General!).  But alarm was set and I dialed in!

Originally conceived as a “stand by” force for emergencies by President Harry Truman, the Reserves stand 67,000 strong and work the same mission and use the same equipment as their Air Force brothers and sisters. And I am proud to say that I have many Reserve friends.  A majority of the members of the Air Force Reserve are “traditional” Reservists, serving near where they live. They usually serve one weekend a month and two weeks a year, while keeping a regular job in the communities they live in.  But on occasion, these Reservists get called to active duty and are deployed. Just a part of the job and one they are ready and willing to do. I asked the General how he maintains the balance of sending his troops overseas, and yet still helping them retain those ties to their families and employers.

“And that in fact is the priority for the Air Force Reserve as well as for any of the other Department of Defense Reserve or Guard entities who have people who have three parts to their lives. In other words, they have the military job they do with us; they have the civilian job that in fact supports their family, and then they have their family themselves and then the employers are a big part of that equation as well. How we balance those, folks, though, is number one, trying to make sure that we are as predictable as possible. We tell them when they need to go, when they need to show up, and then we tell them when they will be home. Once they do come home, whether they come from an individual program or whether they are gone as a unit and have been deployed as a unit, we have quite a few things that we would do as far as the reintegration efforts, one of the primary of which right now, as a Department of Defense initiative, is called the Yellow Ribbon Reintegration Program.”

“What that does is bring the folks back. And generally it’s for those folks who have been gone 90 days or longer. And we actually have a — tracking mechanisms that we are required to do. But regardless of whether you’ve been 90 days or longer, or just have been and are coming back, what we want to do is make sure that everybody understands their entitlements; what happens when you come back; what about your health care; what about the retirement benefits; what about any of those kinds of things that you might have that would be small business association-related. So we have routine and regular get-togethers that everybody that has been gone for 90 days or more — we will pay their way to that and those that are coming in to the regular — our drill periods, our unit-training assemblies on the weekends are also very welcome to go to. And we try to get as many of the folks from around the interagency, from whatever department, to come in and discuss the kinds of things that are of benefit to not only the members but also to their families and to their employers as well. So those are routinely scheduled and regularly tracked. And we want to make sure that our families and our members are apprised of all the benefits that are available to them.”

Having friends deployed overseas, I know personally that my biggest concern is their safety and counting down the days when they come back. So when the General reinforced that it is also his top priority, I felt reassured.  One thing I learned about the General during my prep for this interview was how big a champion he is for maximizing benefits for the troops.

“..let me just clarify just a bit here. It’s not to get more benefits. It’s to get parity for the benefits that are actually out there for our service members and whether they be active, Guard or Reserve component. In the past and because of the processes that we’ve had over the years, as a strategic reserve, they have been inequities, if you will, based on just the realities of the world. In other words, when we were purely just a force in reserve and were only called in for the “big one,” if you will, the benefits only kicked in when you were put on orders for an extended period of time. Today’s world is entirely different, much different. And we are a strategic reserve, but we are called upon daily to be part of the operational force. And when you are fighting side by side with a regular Air Force member or any other service member, the benefits ought to be the same. And that is where we’ve been focusing the efforts. And right now there were 29 very specific benefits that we were looking at. And 25 of those 29, right now, we have solid parity with. The other four, there are some nuances to each of those that require that we don’t at that point, because retirement might be one of those and we aren’t going to get a full-time retirement until we reach age 60, dollars-wise. Some of those things are still being worked in Congress.  But when it comes to health care, when it comes to anything that has to do with pay and allowances, all of those things we’ve now got parity for those folks who are fighting side by side in the theater, active component, Reserve component and Reserve or Guard in that particular component, I think we’ve done a good job of highlighting the efforts, and it’s been a cooperative effort with our — (audio break) — make that happen. ”

And with the proper tools, the job will get done.  One thing the General is up to date on is getting the latest technology to keep his troops on the cutting edge.

“And a lot of the kinds of things that we’re looking at there would go along the lines of distributed mission operations or lie of virtual construct — those are big words; it means simulation. It means virtual kinds of realities. That means where we can in fact enhance the training and/or, in some cases, replace the training for each and every one of our individuals, we want to go ahead and do that.
So we’re looking at night-vision goggles. We’re looking at LITENING pods and the kinds of things that you fly on fighters. We’re looking at just the enhancements to safety as far as crew doors on some of our tactical airlift kind of airplanes. All of those are fairly minor, but — as far as dollars-wise — but fairly major as far as return on investment and the capability increases we get for a minor — for a fairly small dollar investment. So we’re looking at each and every one of those things that will both enhance capability, increase safety and be a value to the Air Force for not only the near term, but for the long term as we put our monies against that.”

And when asked by Captain Fishmam (who runs a cool blog that you should check out) “what’s your guide to the future about what your main priorities are as far as the actual equipment of the Air Force Reserve Command?” the General had this to say. “And it’s recapitalization and it’s modernization all rolled into one. And I feel pretty — pretty confident that we as an Air Force — a three component Air Force — active, Guard and Reserve — work very, very well together on the major weapons systems that we have because we are — all three components fly all of the weapons systems in some fashion or manner. So as an Air Force, we have a modernization and recapitalization plan that encompasses all of the airframes, no matter which component they’re in. That means that obviously you can’t get them all done at once. But it also means that we do what is logical and what is appropriate as far as the recapitalization on the airframes, no matter where they are — Guard, Reserve or active. As the Reserve component, we have a very unique position that we are in with NGREA, National Regard and Reserve Equipment Account, which is an account that the Congress gives us, or puts money in, that allows the Guard and Reserve to put those dollars against the highest priority recapitalization.”

“Tankers is everybody’s highest priority. That’s a major acquisition that we’ve got to get on the books. So we wouldn’t put money against that. But we would put money, the NGREA funds, against things that would have defensive systems or precision engagement equipment options; in other words, large aircraft countermeasure systems on 130s; on C-5s; on C-17s or precision engagement equipment that would be on fighter airplanes, precision pods, those kinds of things we would buy.
And what that does is it increases the output of those airplanes, those modifications, such that we can get our airplanes into the fight. In other words, when we can accelerate the production line, we will do that using National Guard and Reserve Equipment Account money as our part of modernizing the entire Air Force fleet.”

And that led me to my last question about the Reserves getting the F-22 and how they are integrating that latest technology into the Command.

“And we stood up our portion of the F-22 mission, because, if you’re familiar with associations, just about everything we’re looking at doing now for the future is done as an association. That means that one component, whether it’s active, Reserve or Guard, would have the primary responsibility for a weapons system, and the other component, whether that be active, Guard or Reserve, would join as an associate member. They would fly the same equipment. And that’s exactly what we’ve done with our F-22s both in Alaska and we are under way in New Mexico doing. The regular Air Force active duty is responsible and has operational direction on a daily basis. And we have our organization joining them as an association, flying those F-22s, which does a lot of things for us. That gives us that depth of experience that our Reservists, and Guardsmen as well, bring to the Air Force, because most of us came through the active Air Force. It also gives us the part-time piece that allows us to reach out and touch more people when there’s a requirement or there’s a surge or something like that. So we are into the F-22s, and we will continue to be into all of the new missions, whether they’re unmanned aerial systems; intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance. We are expanding our participation in B-52s, in bombers in general, as far as the Guard and Reserve together. Our Reserve piece is in B-52s. And that’s how we are going to look at everything that we do for the future, is through that lens of association, where we can bring the best of all the components together, whether they be active, Guard or Reserve, and leverage the goodness in each of those to increase the capability and actually to be more fiscally efficient as well. ”

Speaking to a couple of friends who have worked with the General before, they had nothing but praise for him and said that he could handle any question thrown at him. While I wanted to ask him what his favorite color was (I suspect Blue, but we’ll save that for the next meeting), I really enjoyed hearing him talk about this wide range of topics. Knowing that the Reservists are juggling life, work, and the Air Force, it is good to know that Gen Stenner is there to make sure they have the support, be it in the air with the latest technology or on the ground with money and benefits.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 7:41 pm and is filed under Adventures, Bloggers Roundtable, Life, Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.