AETC aims to lower war-zone job washouts

By Michelle Tan - Staff writer
Posted : Saturday May 15, 2010 9:13:16 EDT

Training for battlefield careers is so grueling that more than half of airmen fail it, pushing education command officials to rethink how they select and prepare candidates.

The Air Force considers all eight of the war-zone jobs — combat rescue officer, special tactics officer, air liaison officer, pararescue jumper, combat controller, tactical air control party, and enlisted and officer special operations weather technician — “stressed,” or undermanned. About 2,110 airmen are in those Air Force Specialty Codes, almost 780 shy of the billets authorized.

“It’s a hard career field to get into and stay in,” said Brig. Gen. Scott Bethel, deputy director of operations for Air Education and Training Command at Randolph Air Force Base, Texas. “It’s hard all the way from recruitment.”

Pararescue jumper and combat controller trainees have the toughest go — only 15 percent to 20 percent graduate most years. In 2007, for instance, 69 of the 480 PJs-to-be airmen finished their schooling.

The washout rates for TACPs and weather technicians are considerably lower. About half generally make it through the training. Last year, 175 out of 311 aspiring TACPs — 56 percent — made it through the pipeline.

Bethel and his staff are troubled by the high attrition rates and are looking at how they can put more airmen in the jobs and still maintain rigorous training standards.

“We do not want, under any circumstances at all, to dilute the quality,” he said, “but we want to select the right candidates and help them succeed.”

Dual challenge
Picking airmen who can survive the demands of the training would be hard enough if that was the Air Force’s only test.

It’s not.

Recruiters also have to deal with a limited pool of qualified young people and competition for candidates from their Army and Navy counterparts.

New statistics show the Defense Department rejects about 30 million or so Americans ages 17 to 24, or 85 percent of that demographic, because they are overweight, abuse drugs and alcohol, have a criminal background, have too many dependents and have low aptitude.

For the fewer than 5 million eligible and available for service, the Air Force has to go head to head with its sister services. The competition gets even more heated for the cream of the crop, those recruits interested in and able to do the battlefield jobs.

The Army, for example, has a new Special Forces group and a Ranger battalion to man, and the Navy needs candidates for a new SEAL team, according to Lt. Col. Pat Barnett, who as commander of the 342nd Training Squadron at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, oversees the initial training of battlefield airmen.

“The biggest challenge is not something we can fix here” at the schoolhouse, Barnett said. “There’s a limited pool of guys who have the physical and mental makeup to do something not everybody can do, and we’re competing with the other services.”

Barnett and Bethel advocate recruiting a small number of candidates to hold down costs. Training runs about $250,000 for a PJ and about $100,000 for a combat controller, Bethel said.

“If we recruit more people and screen them out, it’s expensive. We want to get as many graduates from the smallest population of recruits,” Bethel said.

To that end, Barnett said, the Air Force has tasked 12 PJs and combat controllers to help recruiters. This summer, the selection process will be honed even more when recruiters begin testing candidates to get a sense of how well they will do in training. Scores from the test, called the Emotional Quotient Indicator, will be compared with the scores of PJs in the field, Bethel said.

“We can’t just focus on what the instructors are doing here [at Lackland] because if you don’t get the right clay in the door … he’s not going to make it,” Barnett said. “We’re looking at recruiting smarter.”

Airmen can also switch career fields and become battlefield airmen. Like recruits, they must meet stringent requirements: no quality-control factors, such as pending administrative action; no pending assignment actions; no availability limits; attainment of 5-level skills; minimum scores for the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery; and physical fitness, strength and stamina standards.

Up-close view
Airman 1st Class Patrick Moore had thought after he graduated from college that he might want to be a lawyer. Then he decided he wanted to join the Air Force. Now, he’s on his way to becoming a PJ.

In mid-April, Moore was getting ready for his next-to-last week of the nine-week PJ indoctrination course.

Much of the focus for the two months is on physical training, especially swimming. A few of the exercises, which get more difficult as the course progresses: Do the 500-meter crawl in less than 12 minutes, swim underwater 50 meters, dive with their hands tied behind their backs and their ankles bound together and share oxygen flowing through a snorkel with another trainee.

Airmen have missed the 12-minute mark by mere seconds and others have come up for air a meter short of the required 50. They all knew as soon as they failed that they needed to start looking for a new career field.

“There were a lot of days I thought, ‘I can’t make it through tomorrow, but I can make it through today,’” Moore said.

Family and friends also helped Moore keep perspective. His father mailed him an inspirational quote every day.

“I wanted to do something rewarding,” Moore said about his decision to become a PJ. “Rescue was where my heart was, and that’s what sold me.”

For Airman 1st Class Bryan Lowen, the camaraderie of his fellow candidates has helped him make it through the training.

“I’ve known about PJs my whole life,” he said. “I was a firefighter, an [emergency medical technician]. I always had this in my mind, so I figured I’d step up and give it a try.”

Retooled training
Even though a good number fail, many recruits leave battlefield training of their own free will, the officers said.

“The main reason people drop out, and the majority of them self-terminate, is they didn’t know what they were getting into,” Bethel said.

To give recruits a heads-up about what they’re in for, the Air Force plans to give basic trainees more chances to interact with experienced PJs, combat controllers and other battlefield airmen, as well as launch a four-week class next summer to prepare candidates for their respective training pipelines.

“We’ve consulted with physiologists and experts who say to get candidates to peak physical condition takes four weeks,” Bethel said.

Called the Battlefield Airmen Development Course, the class will replace all the existing preparatory or indoctrination courses except the nine-week PJ indoctrination course.

Overhauling the training means the Air Force must add 40 to 50 instructors to the 30 or so who run the existing preparatory courses and add buildings to Lackland, Bethel said. A pending $30 million military construction request would finance new dormitories, an aquatic center and classrooms, he said.

“We understand that we cannot just continue to [recruit] indefinitely,” he said. “We need 178 PJs a year. We can’t recruit 1,500 [people] for that. It’s not practical. These are hot-commodity guys.”

The more successful the efforts are to bring down the attrition rates, the better the Air Force will be to keep its battlefield airmen.

Low retention is an issue within these career fields, he said. Many airmen are burned out or injured or just tired from the high operational tempo demanded of them.

“We have to properly man these career fields so you can mentor and prepare and upgrade the younger guys and bring them along as appropriate,” Bethel said.