Published: August 31, 2008 11:11 pm         

Vance personnel participate in town hall-style meetings

Most airmen who serve at Vance Air Force Base will never have the opportunity to go the Pentagon, where many decisions affecting their jobs are made.

So this week the Pentagon came to them, in the person of Craig Duehring, assistant secretary of the Air Force for manpower and reserve affairs.

Duehring held town hall-style meetings with Vance personnel Thursday, as well as attending a luncheon with members of Vance’s Top 3, a group of senior noncommissioned officers, before returning to Washington Friday.

“I give them a chance to ask questions, make comments, present complaints,” Duehring said. “I like to joke, when I open my town hall sessions, if you ever wanted to get your hands around the throat of the guy who, then you fill in the blank, if it wasn’t me, I probably know who it was and I’ll be happy to go back and do it for you.

“I had a gentleman come up yesterday after one of the meetings and he said, ‘I just wanted to say thank you. I’ve been here either in the military or as a civilian now for 23 years and we’ve never had anybody come down from the Pentagon like this.’”

Many of the questions asked at Vance centered around the future of the Unmanned Aerial Systems program, which involves remotely-controlled aircraft such as the MQ-1 Predator, MQ-9 Reaper and RQ-1 Global Hawk, operated by Air Force pilots sometimes sitting in control rooms half a world away.

“They want to know if there are going to be any assignments coming directly to that program,” Duehring said. “The answer is they haven’t made the decision yet. What I was able to do was turn the question around and say, ‘What would you like to see?’”

There also were questions about Air Force personnel numbers. The plan was to reduce the active-duty force to 316,000, but in June Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the service had been cut too deeply and called for the final number to be 330,000.

Duehring’s job allows him time to visit bases throughout the country, and his area of expertise makes him relevant to all airmen.

“We can go to any base and it’s applicable, because we handle the people, spaces and faces,” he said.

Duehring said the visits are as valuable for him as they are for the average airman.

“I think I gain more out of it than anybody does,” he said. “It’s a two-way exchange, though. We give them the latest information, answer their questions as honestly as we can. Plus, the stories we hear in return, the vignettes that are given to us, I use in discussions. We have to be transparent, we have to be totally open. It really pays dividends for the Air Force.”

Duehring spent 28 years in the Air Force, serving as a forward air controller during the Vietnam War as well as piloting the A-10 Thunderbird II attack aircraft. He also spent time as a T-37 instructor at the now-defunct Craig Air Force Base, Ala., which made his trip to Vance something of a homecoming.

“First off, there’s a tremendous amount of energy at Vance,” he said. “You’ve got a young group, they’re motivated, they’re focused. My batteries are charged, my meter is pegged. I tried, for the last 24 hours, to trade jobs with anybody. I haven’t had a single person take me up on it.”