NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — The Air Force’s online professional military education for many enlisted airmen is seriously lacking when it comes to interactivity and collaboration, and it must improve, Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force James Cody said in a Sept. 12 interview.
The so-called Course 15 program — which is a prerequisite for non-commissioned officers to attend the NCO Academy “is not there” when it comes to interactivity, Cody said at the Pentagon. The Senior NCO Academy program, formerly called Course 14, is evolving and has some interactive elements, Cody said, but needs to do much better.
But both programs fall far short of what the First Sergeant Academy distance learning program can do, he said.
“There is this ability for them to reach out and ask some questions about this stuff, but it’s not predicated,” he said. “An airman can go through that process and never collaborate or communicate with anybody else if they did that entire course. They could do some level of discussion with other people. We’re trying to make sure that we can add those things in to enhance the experience.”
Cody said the Air Force is now working on getting the NCO and SNCO distance learning programs working as well as the first sergeant program.
“We want to move to the right balance of where it would turn you [from] just reading a textbook online to something … where it can be a little more interactive,” Cody said. Features such as chatrooms and webcasts are “all on the table as part of the discussion.”
Cody could not offer a timetable for when the distance learning improvements would be finished, but said airmen will “see pieces of it every year.”
Cody, the 17th person to serve as the Air Force’s top enlisted leader, will retire in late January or early February, Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein said at the Air Force Association’s Air Space Cyber conference here Tuesday. Goldfein said he will begin searching for Cody’s successor next week.
Goldfein lauded Cody as “a great leader [and] an incredible chief master sergeant of the Air Force.”
“I’ve watched him fight for airmen at the highest levels of government,” Goldfein said. “If there’s ever a person who speaks truth to power, it’s Jim Cody.”
In the Pentagon interview, Cody noted the challenges that the service has faced during his tenure — particularly dealing with the budget cuts that led to tens of thousands of airmen being cut.
“Our Air Force has been through a lot,” Cody said. “It really has. We had to become the smallest Air Force in our history. I don’t feel good about that. I don’t think anybody does. It was a fiscal reality, and we had to do it. But I’m really proud of our Air Force because we went through some of the most significant changes in our history — certainly in the history of anybody wearing the uniform today.”
Among those changes Cody noted were the massive overhaul of how enlisted airmen are evaluated and promoted — which included dropping a heavily criticized system that allowed virtually all airmen to receive the highest performance ratings, effectively rendering the rating system useless at differentiating between levels of performance. Cody also cited ongoing changes to professional military education, and how the Air Force changed how it selects airmen to fill developmental special duty jobs.
And in his last five or so months in uniform, Cody said he will concentrate on preparing his successor — who has not yet been chosen — to take over several of the ongoing issues with which the service is dealing. That will likely include improving how squadrons operate, how the service communicates, and how it deals jointly with its sister services.
The Air Force will also continue trying to slash additional duties eating up airmen’s time, which would allow them to better focus on their primary jobs. Part of this will include reducing the amount of unnecessary computer-based training — “sooner rather than later,” Cody said.
Reducing these kind of unnecessary duties is one of the ways the Air Force is trying to improve morale, Cody said, though he cautioned that “there’s no panacea in this.”
“I think morale is dependent on where you go and who you’re talking to,” Cody said. “I think all the things that we described can, and in some cases do, have a positive effect on morale. But I can go into units that are just flat-out busier than anybody you’ve ever seen, and they have tremendous, tremendous morale. And I can go into another unit where they’re not even close to that ops tempo, and morale is not good. It’s very dependent on a unit environment, the leadership, the team that comes together, and how they operate together. You can’t ever undervalue that.”
Cody said the Air Force is likely to remain busy for a long time — but a high operations tempo isn’t necessarily the source of morale troubles.
“Morale starts at the unit,” Cody said. “When we were very, very large at one point and … had excess people, we had some of the greatest morale challenges we ever did in the Air Force, because people didn’t feel like they had a job that was worthwhile.”
Cody also said it is likely his successor will work on setting up an undergraduate degree program for enlisted airmen. Cody said the Air Force wants to include language on it in the 2018 Program Objective Memorandum, which helps shape the Pentagon’s budget requests.
The Air Force’s next enlisted chief will probably focus on examining basic military training, to see whether it’s providing the right environment for new airmen coming into the service, as well as producing the kind of airmen the service needs.
Cody said that he wishes he could have gotten more done to improve airmen’s work-life balance during his tenure, though he is glad the Air Force has started putting some improvements in place. For example, in recent years the Air Force has set a goal of reducing all dwell-deploy ratios to 1:2, meaning airmen who deploy for six months should have at least one year at home before their next deployment. For the most part, the Air Force is achieving that deployment goal.
“Time … is never on your side,” he said. “I wish we were further down the road, but I actually think it might be a good thing that it gets handed off to [CMSAF] number 18 and the chief of staff to get their heads wrapped around it, as they look at what the demand signals are on our Air Force. But that’s a tough one to quantify.”
Cody also does not foresee any notable changes to uniforms or physical training coming anytime soon.
The Air Force is now trying to rebuild its force to recover after the steep drawdowns of 2014. This year, the service aimed to grow from roughly 311,000 to 317,000 active duty airmen. And Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James wants to grow even further, saying the service needs anywhere from 321,000 to 325,000 airmen.
To help the Air Force hold on to experienced airmen in crucial fields such as maintenance and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance while it recruits and trains new airmen, the service is offering retention incentives such as high-year tenure extensions and re-enlistment bonuses.
Cody said those programs are having the desired effect. The Air Force will keep those programs in place, while reassessing them on a monthly basis to see if something needs to change.
“Some might come on, some might come off over time,” Cody said. “It just depends on what career field we’re talking about.”
