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Smart Ops 21 puts Airmen

  • Published
  • By Senior Airman Stacia Zachary
  • Staff writer
POPE AIR FORCE BASE, N.C. --  The Air Force is stepping away from out-dated mindsets by rolling up its sleeves and finding new solutions to new obstacles and mission requirements.

Gen. Michael Mosley, chief of staff of the Air Force, has decided to make the missions and personnel "lean across the Air Force."

With the help of other senior leadership, he has developed a new approach to fulfilling Air Force obligations with a program called Smart Operations 21.

Smart Operations is the Air Force's response to trimming the fat off of overextended procedures.

"Pope is paving the way for the Air Force with the Smart Ops program," said Capt. David Marce, 23rd Fighter Group and AFSO21 trainer. "General McDew is a true visionary for the Air Force. He saw the need for this and wanted to be the first base to give his Airmen the tools and responsibility to make the Air Force more effective and successful."

The secretary of defense and the secretary of the Air Force recognized the need to revise the way the Air Force does business.

"(Leadership) knows that in order to keep doing our job with the extended budget cuts and downsizing of manning, we needed to become smarter in how we complete mission requirements -- not work harder," said Captain Marce. "We now have to do more with less and efficiency is the key."

The key to being more efficient is to revamp the process jobs and missions are handled and completed. When a system is not working, the goal should be to fix the root cause not to put a band-aid on the problem and continue pressing ahead.

"Many organizations fail to change their culture because they spend all their time trying to convince the cave dwellers to change," said Mike Maquet, Smart Ops contractor. "Instead, the goal should be to work together as a whole to enhance (the entire process) rather than just the broken parts."

By giving Airmen ownership and empowering them to make things better often boosts morale and increases productivity.

"The military has this mentality of ‘shut up and color' is you are not in leadership which frustrates Airmen with valuable ideas," said Captain Marce. "We do ourselves a disservice by shutting people down. All it serves is to draw a line between leadership and the rest of the force. That is Smart Ops' goal: to gives an Airman's ideas more weight."

General McDew's philosophy is to give the masses more responsibility in their Air Force.

"I'm routinely amazed by (Team Pope)," said the general at a December 2005 commander's call. "I'm constantly impressed with your ideas on how to make things newer, better. All I have to do is ask for ideas and I have ten different solutions."

While Smart Ops challenges people to find solutions to problems and question out-dated procedures, there is a difference between questioning procedures for improvement and questioning just because a person can.

"Senior leadership writes Air Force Instructions governing how we do things, but they rely on the Airmen ‘in the trenches who turn the wrenches' to be their eyes and ears and sound the alarm when something isn't working," said Captain Marce. "We hope to render the ‘because that's the way we've always done it' mindset obsolete. There's always room for improvement — and that's what Smart Ops is all about."