WASHINGTON: New policy, released in March, streamlined redundant and outdated ancillary training programs and aligned expeditionary skills training with warfighter requirements. However, Air Force leaders recently addressed the time requirement to complete ancillary training after discovering a common misperception existed among Airmen that all ancillary training could be accomplished in 90 minutes.
“In 2007, the Air Force chief of staff expressed concern that Air Force ancillary training had expanded to a level that was consuming too much of Airmen’s time,” said Lt. Gen. Richard Y. Newton III, the deputy chief of staff for Air Force manpower and personnel. “As a result, he tasked us to take a hard look at required training and implement processes to remove, revise or reduce training.
“Our primary goal is to eliminate redundancy in our ancillary training to provide Airmen much-needed time to focus on their primary and expeditionary missions,” General Newton said. “We’re going to do that by taking a realistic approach with required training in the future.”
The bar was set high: 90 minutes per member, per year for annual Total Force Awareness Training requirements. However, according to Col. Harrison Smith, deputy director for force development, deploying Airmen to a combat zone requires extensive predeployment training; thus expeditionary skills training never fell into the 90-minute standard.
Colonel Smith further explained that since TFAT was launched in 2007, new requirements have emerged necessitating an increase to the 90-minute format. To prevent unconstrained growth in the Air Force’s ancillary training program, manpower and personnel officials in A1 at the Air Staff recently established “gatekeeper” bodies to vet emerging requirements and ensure senior leader oversight.
The policy released in March designated the Air Force Learning Committee and the Expeditionary Skills Senior Review Group as the gatekeepers for ancillary and expeditionary skills training, respectively.
“This ensures senior leadership has full situational awareness on training requirements, and allows for establishment of priorities, setting limits and communicating results,” Colonel Smith said.
The new policy also defines expeditionary tiered training to tailor requirements for skills needed by Airmen, based on deployment mission and location.
Ancillary training that is no longer required or has been combined with other courses includes Constitution Day training, crime prevention, family care plan brief, local area survival training, equal opportunity for supervisors of civilians and initial security orientation-‘uncleared’ version.
For more details, the new ancillary and expeditionary skills training policy memos are available at the e-publishing Web site, http://www.e-publishing.af.mil, under AFI 36-2201, Volume 1, Training Development, Delivery and Evaluation.
