Liz, a friend of mine who went through this two years ago, has tried to explain to me what happens when you go through a Force Shaping* board, whether you're cut or not. It disillusions you and destroys your morale. You either get the ax yourself, or you watch while your peers do. The process--the idea, even--seriously reduces mission effectiveness while everyone searches for a new, functional paradigm that helps them go forward.
* "Force Shaping" refers to both the overall program as well as a specific type of board which convenes and decides who stays and who goes. "Force Shaping" sounds much better than "downsizing," don't you think?
I've been through two such boards prior to this one, only they didn't...destroy my faith in the system, I guess. I watched while several lieutenant friends met the first "Force Shaping" board about 18 months ago, but I didn't personally know what their records looked like, and in many cases, didn't have any direct experience with their officership. Whatever happened, then, I could simply believe the Air Force knew best and had simply "trimmed the fat." (You see how this works, normally?) Then, six months ago, the results for the SERB (Selected Early Retirement Board) were released. No one I knew personally was affected. That made it easier to believe, again, that the Air Force knew best.
Liz had tried to explain how it feels to survive the process while your friends, some of whom are outstanding officers, get their pink slips. I guess what she was saying didn't really register for me. I didn't realize how much I'd been sheltered from the reality of it until yesterday. Liz is an Academy graduate who did so well that she received a follow-on scholarship to graduate school. She believed very much in the Air Force and what it stood for. She bought--if I may use such a word--the whole "Air Force family" line. She is a captain now, but she went through the Force Shaping board as a lieutenant 18 months back. She said her morale took a serious blow when the dust settled and she was one of five left of the original twelve lieutenants in her unit.
I wonder if triumphant gladiators felt like this. Just how many times can you walk into the coliseum and face the lions, even if you win, without being demoralized? If you survive, you know they'll just send you in again.
It would help if the reasons behind the Force Shaping initiatives made sense to me, but they don't. From where I sit, I see a small Air Force maintaining the highest ops tempo in decades on several fronts, including a war that the majority of Americans now acknowledge we shouldn't have been in in the first place. Then I see Congress deciding they want some sexy new equipment--F22s and whatnot--and deciding to sacrifice manpower for equipment I can't see a purpose for, particularly given the nature of our ongoing conflicts. (It isn't just me; I have asked a wide sample of people, including pilots who should be able to provide insight I don't have, to show me the rationale. I guess you could say I've been looking for a reason to keep believing. So far, no one can explain why we need new jets, etc, to fight very individual enemies.)
The whole mess makes me think of the movie Pentagon Wars, which is based on the true story of how the Bradley Fighting Vehicle evolved from a specialized troop carrier into a bunglesome contraption which was supposed to be highly versatile, but turned out being little more than an undependable and unsafe lump of metal (when it first came off the production line). The movie demonstrates the occasional serious disconnect between politics and reason.
So. In facing this board, I've looked even more for reasons the Air Force is chopping heads. No one likes uncertainty, but one can handle it if one is convinced there is ultimately a worthwhile reason. And one of the things that kept me from taking the voluntary separation pay was a basic belief that the cuts would somehow be rational, that the best would survive and the "fat" would be trimmed.
While today is the official release date of RIF board results, I was unofficially notified yesterday. Apparently, for boards like this as well as promotions, commanders receive the list of "nonselects" the day before (or earlier) in order to have time to break the news gently to those who didn't make it. The time-honored process is similar to news releases on what the President will announce during tonight's State of the Union address, which leaves you wondering why the actual State of the Union address is even necessary. Promotion and RIF board results work the same way: we all know the outcome, one way or another, at least the day before, because if you met the board and your commander doesn't seek you out to brace you for the fact that you didn't make it, then you made it. It all makes the "official" release date rather meaningless.
My department head (which is, I suppose, my equivalent of "commander" here, although it doesn't really carry over) didn't seek me out yesterday. I went to see her before I left. She told me she was happy to report that I made it, as well as one of my colleagues. The knowledge of who didn't make it, however, hit my already tenuous hold on the AF ideal rather hard. I know the "nonselect" to be a better officer than I, and I have every reason to believe he is a better instructor, as well, even though he arrived mid-year and started teaching--without experience or orientation or any of the nice stuff I got because I arrived in the summer--about two weeks later. Of the three of us who had our necks stretched across the proverbial block, he was the most confident of his ability to emerge unscathed from the whole thing because he has such a strong record. If he was concerned, he never showed it. The news, I hear, shocked him deeply. It shocked all of us.
We speculate that his nonselection may be because his Professional Military Education updates didn't make it into the system on time, or perhaps because he hasn't deployed. If it's the former, he has grounds to appeal the decision, but I don't hold out much hope for appeals in matters such as this. "Snowball's chance" springs to mind.
I can no longer tell myself the Air Force knows best. I've been stripped of that illusion, as well as the "Air Force family" one. We are all just numbers in the end. The closer I get to the whole mess, the more I see the arbitrariness of the process. I can hope Congress/the AF realizes the mistakes of the drawdowns overall and stops this madness, but I don't expect it. Usually, any given program takes a lot of time and effort to get going. The bureaucratic wheels roll slowly, but inexorably, onward, long past the point they should have stopped. Then the Powers That Be panic that they went too far and the pendulum swings back in the other direction. I give it about five years before said panic kicks in again, and they go overboard recruiting new officers again.
It occurs to me that, if the 3 nonselects of the 30 eligibles in DF (Dean of Faculty) had all been in different departments--people I don't know, or know well--the tone of my post would have been very different. I'm sure I'd still believe that there was reason behind it all, and the cuts were justified. It's human nature, I guess. We all want to believe, and will often cling to any excuse that offers itself in order to bolster our belief.
What lies in the future? Well...the new "Force Shaping Initiatives" will be released mid-August. There's a good chance they'll come after me again; the AF has limitations on how many people they can cut at a time, and they've only just begun to prune the "overages" from 2000 and 2001. I'm still interested in continuing to teach and pursuing my PhD, and of course retiring in about 9 years, but if I face another board, my response to the whole deal may be very different now.
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