OTS Restructures TFOT/COT Article

Here is an article posted by the Maxwell AFB Public Affairs which provides the basic details of the restructuring I mentioned in an earlier post about combining Commissioned Officer Training (COT) and Total Force Officer Training (TFOT) into one course. When I went to OTS I was pretty clueless about how OTS was organized, mostly because the organization itself was confusing. I was a 24 TRS cadet and I remember seeing our sister class from Det 12 in training and having no idea who they were or what they were training for until later in the course. Ever since I figured out who they were, I have always wondered why the 24 TRS and Det 12 had completely different cultures. I resolved in my mind that different squadrons just have different cultures, but the question still lingered in my mind… “Is that the right answer?” Is there a better way to train our future officers?

My Experience

The COT class used to be much shorter than TFOT so while I was there a class arrived after we started and departed before we graduated. One day while I was in TFOT we were standing in line at the DFAC and a COT flight was in the other bay entering the DFAC to eat lunch. They are already commissioned officers and we were cadets so military protocol required me to salute her. Their Flight Leader was a First Lieutenant and when she saw me she called her flight to attention and instead of adhering to protocol, she saluted me. I saluted her back but because she outranked me I held my salute until she dropped hers. The catch was that she never dropped her salute so we stood there awkwardly staring at each other for a solid five seconds. I dropped my salute and politely reminded her how we totally messed that up. I remember walking away from that interaction a little surprised. She was a First Lieutenant and she hadn’t yet worked all of the bugs out of her saluting. As a prior-enlisted cadet this was strange to me. To be fair, I have been commissioned for more than two years now and I still mess it up sometimes.

The Bigger Picture

The point of that story is that in the past each squadron and class were very different. Not only were there differences between how the 24 TRS and Det 12 trained TFOT, COT in itself was fundamentally different. Combining all of the above into one eight-week training course makes a ton of sense to me, and I think it is the right answer. An Officer Training School graduate should be of the same consistent standard of quality as an USAFA or ROTC graduate.

It seems like this is part of a much larger Air Force effort to fix broken processes. Throughout my career I have heard leaders say they want to fix something but fail to follow through or completely miss the mark. Our current senior Air Force leadership is absolutely amazing on this front. They not only have a vision for how to move our organization forward, they are making it happen. There have been countless things over my past 10+ years of service which I thought seriously needed to be fixed. In 2018 almost all of them were addressed and many of them were fixed. Huge changes and improvements are being made across the board… but I digress.

Hope for the Future?

It seems like creating a single TFOT course for all OTS graduates is evidence that the Air Force is getting serious about fixing the officer accession process. While TFOT is addressing the commissioning front, I have heard rumors of changes to the recruiting front. Instead of a line officer recruiter only recruiting line officer recruits, I have heard that an officer recruiter will recruit all officer recruits. Lack of officer recruiter manpower is a serious problem. There are tons of recruits out there who have been in the process for 1-2 years. I hear from frustrated applicants every few weeks who feel lost and forgotten by their recruiter. Recruiters are so over-tasked and under-manned that they simply do not have the time to give recruits an adequate level of attention. The ones I hear from feel lost, forgotten, and disrespected. In my opinion, this isn’t right. We as an Air Force can do a better job.

My hope is that consolidating the specialties of an officer recruiter will assist the Air Force with addressing the manpower issue. Instead of 2-3 types of officer recruiters, perhaps there will only be one type. Perhaps in the future they can hand-select officer recruiters, equip them with the training they need, then ramp up the manpower accordingly. We have already seen major improvements come out of AFRS through the TFOT guide and transparency with estimated TFOT classes for OTS boards. Perhaps we have hope of even more improvements.