22 June 2023
Speakers:
Honorable Frank Kendall, Secretary of the Air Force, Moderator
Katherine Kuzminski, Senior Fellow and Director of the Military, Veterans, and Society Program, Speaker
Honorable Frank Kendall:
On the Dedication and Commitment of Military Personnel
-Their commitment, their dedication, their passion for what they do, their eagerness to help and move forward and I think is really refreshing.
-I'm very proud of the force that we have. I love getting out in the field.
-I get to do this very often and interact with our young people, in particular enlisted people in particular, and their commitment, their dedication, their passion for what they do, their eagerness to help and move forward and I think is really refreshing.
On the Impact of the Draft and All-Volunteer Force on Society
-I'm getting older to be the oldest person often in the room now, but it was an incredibly divided country. Huge polarization about the war and the draft was a centerpiece of that because people were being forced to go out and die."
-The one thing that it does has led to, to some degree is a somewhat more isolated military. I mean, the one thing the draft did was it brought people in from everywhere and it gave people that shared experience. So we don't have that today, and that's the price we're playing.
On Challenges of Recruitment and Retention in the Modern Military
-We're having some issues with recruiting we can talk about later, but retention is doing really well and I think we're offering people an awful lot that's attractive to people.
-I think that the all-volunteer force overall has been a success, and I think that we'll manage our way through the recruiting issues that we're seeing today, that there at least certainly for the Air Force, they're very manageable.
On Retention and Satisfaction within the Force:
I think this is a big part of our retention, frankly, when we're working for an institution that demonstrates that it cares about you that way and that it's going to help you become a more capable person and give you opportunities to grow. I think that pays huge dividends in retention.
On Utilizing and Rebuilding Recruiting Resources
-We use a lot of deferred entry people. We had a pretty good backlog of that. So in order to stay close to our goal last year, we had to draw a lot of that down and now we're trying to build that back up so that maybe people won't be coming in until they do another year of school or several more months or another semester or something. But we're putting them in the queue, so we're rebuilding our queue as one of our goals right now.
The Need for Greater Familiarity and Interaction Between the Military and Civil Society
-One of the biggest issues we're seeing is the lack of familiarity with the military. A lot of people are coming in, because family members are in. And we're increasingly seeing that.
-One of the things we're trying to do in general with the Department of the Air Force and I think DOD is to give people more familiarization, have more interaction with communities and let them educate people about what their military is and what it does and what it offers.
On Policy Changes and Flexibility for Recruitment
-We're not lowering our standards, but we are changing rules about tattoos. We change how we do body mass index to be consistent with what the other services do. We are being a little more liberal on a negative test for marijuana... So we're doing some things on the margin and we're seeing very specific increases coming out because of that.
On Adapting to the Preferences and Expectations of Generation Z
-I think it's interesting looking at a lot of the research coming out about Gen Z and their priorities, because that is who we're recruiting right now...they're more likely to join an organization where they can have multiple experiences over the course of a career, and then they'll stay loyal to that organization.
-We're trying to learn how young people today receive information and respond to that. So we're trying to do things to adapt to current causes and current needs.
On the Impact of Influencers and Social Media
-This is again a new thing we're learning through social media: how to interact, take advantage of the people that are our influencers. Parents are still an enormously important influencer for their children. So improving our outreach, improving our presence on social media, improving our advertising.
On Economy & Covid Impacting Recruitment
-We were plagued last year by Covid and not being able to get into schools. So we're back in school now and that's helping quite a bit. And the economy's very low unemployment. So those two things are kind of we're swimming against those right now.
On Need for Long-term Solutions and Strategy
-We're looking at it as a multi year issue, not as a one year or temporary issue.
The Role of the Space Force as a Test Ground for New Policies and Practices
-The Space Force is a good test ground for that. Absolutely. Building a new force from the ground up gives you some opportunities there.
Increasing Career Flexibility
-The idea that and also allowing people to move from one Air Force career field, if you will, one Air Force specialty code into another one if there's a demand for that. So we're trying to add to the flexibility of life in the Air Force or the space based.
Addressing and Improving Response to Sexual Assault in the Military
-It's one of the issues that I think there's a misperception that you're going to be at risk, high risk of sexual assault if you come into the services. I don't think that the risk is that disparate, but the degree to which people are trying to address that problem is much higher than in a commercial firm or the outside world.
On The Pilot Shortage and Career Decisions:
-We don't have a shortage of pilots to fly airplanes. We have a shortage of pilots to do staff jobs.
On Impact of Personnel Issues on Lethality and Readiness:
-You can't expect someone to be performing at their peak in their job when they can't find childcare and when they're worried about that or they can't find medical care for their dependent.
On The Importance of Cohesive Teams:
-There's tons of data that shows that cohesive teams with a high sense of purpose and trust in each other and high skill sets are much, much better and much more effective at solving problems and performing well, particularly under stress.
On Representation and Diversity in the Forces:
We wanted a military that reflects our society and inevitably it will. Right? So as America changes, so will the military.
On Talent Management and Career Progression:
-We're very conscious of and try to manage very aggressively the career professional progression for enlisted people. And we try to give them a lot of opportunities for advancement."
On the Importance of Education and Professional Development:
-A lot of young officers are now feeling like they've got to go get a degree. They don't. We're a lot of people without a degree. But if you have to happen to have a degree in something where you really value that should be an added addition to your record.
On the Role of Enlisted Personnel:
-The enlisted officer divide, if you will, is much more blurred, that enlisted people have very high capability. They're doing very technically sophisticated work.
-We have a fairly significant capacity to move, and some people on my staff have done this to move from enlisted over to the officer ranks and get commissioned, particularly in certain specialties where their experiences of enlisted people has a lot of value.
Q & A:
Countering Misperceptions about the Military:
-I talked about some of them earlier, you know, incredibly important missions for the country, challenging and exciting and cutting edge technologies.
-The positive story there is that we're working very hard to address sexual assault, sexual harassment. We've recently criminalized sexual harassment specifically in the UCMJ.
Diversity and Inclusion within the Military:
-We're doing a lot, as we mentioned earlier, about when there are victims giving them the assistance that they need and deserve. On the diversity side, where you know, the military is essentially a conservative organization.
-But it's a diverse force and getting more so over time. And we want it to be as effective and capable as it can be.
Guard and Reserve Relationships:
-I think it's going very well. There are some points of friction, as you know very well. Right. All the components bring a lot to the table and are important members of the overall Air and Space Force teams.
On Modernizing the Force Amongst China Threats:
-One of my aphorisms is that change is hard. Losing is unacceptable. Um. We are in danger, quite frankly, of losing. China is modernizing for the purpose of defeating American power projection, and they've been working on it for a long time. So we have to make changes.
Community Outreach
-We're basically asking all of our leaders at the installation level to get out and interact with their local communities.
-We have an institution. I think the Army also has, although I've gotten to know the Air Force's really well and it's called Civic Leaders, where we have a number of people from the communities around our bases who volunteer to spend time with us and want to support the military and can be sort of ambassadors for us in the communities as well as work with us on any local issues.
On AI and ChatGPT:
-The importance of human involvement in the application of AI in the military, especially for decision making. AI is seen as an assisting tool, not a replacement for human intelligence and judgment.
-A lot of times the discussion is AI replacing humans when in reality I think it's much more humans learning how to work well with AI and advanced decision making and whatnot.
-AI's potential limitations are noted, with the example of GPT making up case citations.
-Chatgpt is not is not reliable in terms of the truthfulness of what it produces.
-I am concerned that our higher value system will constrain us and that will be in some ways a disadvantage.
-Train the warfighter on how to use them and what you can. You know, one of the more effective ways to use AI is with human interaction.
[End]
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