Remember Those Old Career Colonels We Learned From?

By Larry Chandler, PhD, Colonel (Ret) USAF

On Memorial Day weekend I always find myself thinking back over my Air Force career, enlisted and officer, about the leaders who always made our organization win. What makes those memorable leaders stand so far above the average? There is something they have in common. They were all totally confident, took charge, led from the front… they all seemed to intuitively know how all the pieces should fit together.

Even though we had many more people in the Air Force when I enlisted (850,000 versus the 333,000 today), I don’t remember any meetings where 15 general officers met for half a day to discuss what should be done, but I do remember colonels who knew exactly what to do and did it. These colonels had grown up in the munitions and aircraft maintenance business and knew every aspect of their operations, they put the right people in the right places at the right time to get the mission accomplished… even when things went wrong, as they always do, these career colonels made changes on the fly and without missing a single sortie, got the job done every time.

These career colonels were not worried about being promoted to general officer because they loved the jobs they were doing.  These colonels were not on the way to a bigger job, they were in THE job! These career colonels were at wing level, numbered AF level, MAJCOM LGMs and LGWs and they were at the Air Staff and Joint Staffs and defense agencies… and at each level these colonels were growing their replacements.

Career colonels were hard and demanding but most officers under their leadership learned all there was to know about the munitions and aircraft maintenance business… you had to!  That said, nothing is as personally satisfying as being an expert in your chosen profession and there must be nothing worse than feeling like a useless hood ornament because everyone else in the unit knows more about what they are doing than you do.

So, the message on Memorial Day weekend is let us all work to be those career colonels and to teach those we are fortunate enough to serve as supervisors, everything there is to know about our business…especially the AMMO-Munitions business. When our business goes wrong people die and the mission can not be accomplished without the munitions.