New secretary presses for culture change
WASHINGTON — New Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson stood in front of a room of airmen in the Pentagon recently and presented an unconventional proposal. What, she asked, if she eliminated every single one of the Air Force’s regulations and required service members to ask for the ones they need back?
Wilson paused for a moment, and dozens of airmen in the room laughed. It was a “bad idea,” she acknowledged, but then she pressed her point. The Air Force has too much bureaucracy, too many regulations and too many people stuck doing busy work, she said, as several senior officers sat listening.
“Now, we all still want to drive on the right side of the street and so on, but some of these things are not only not written in the English language, but if something goes wrong we’re going to say, ‘Oh, you didn’t follow Air Force instruction 210-dash-2.1, subparagraph X, and we’re going to hold you accountable,’ ” she said, according to a video viewed by The Washington Post. “It’s like, are you kidding me? And you know, there’s a whole bookshelf of these.”
Wilson concluded: “Let’s not try to tell them how to do everything. Let’s tell them what to do, and let them surprise us with their ingenuity.”
Wilson’s approach — folksy at times, but with a background as a Rhodes Scholar — is a shift in a service that has 660,000 airmen and a $132 billion budget, but is struggling to keep up with its demands. While the Trump administration has promised to bolster the military, the Air Force is currently coping with an aging fleet of jets that have been used heavily in the air war against the Islamic State and what senior service officials have called a crisislevel shortage in fighter pilots.
Wilson has said repeatedly that the Air Force is “too small for what the nation expects of it,” advocated adding additional aircraft and people. She also has called for the service to do more to take undue bureaucratic and training requirements off airmen, something that critics say has driven many Air Force pilots out of the military and into a more financially lucrative career in commercial aviation.
When Wilson touches on those points, she is fond of mentioning the service of her Scottish grandfather, George “Scotty” Wilson, who flew planes for the British Royal Flying Corps in World War I and the U.S. Army Air Corps in World War II. He and his wife, Annie, played an integral role in her life, especially after a car accident changed her family forever.
“My father was actually killed when I was 6 years old, and my mother remarried to someone who had his own set of problems with alcoholism,” Wilson said in an interview. “I didn’t much like that, and so at 17 years old, I left. My life arched towards my father’s family, and my grandparents were still alive and very much involved in my life.”
Wilson, a native of Keene, N.H., was recruited for the job by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, a science and engineering university where she served as president since 2013. She and Mattis did not know each other well, but she appealed to him because her experience was wide-ranging and included time as a former congresswoman in New Mexico, he said.
“Heather Wilson is a leader for all seasons,” Mattis said in a statement. “She distinguished herself as an active-duty Air Force officer and as the president of a university. Her experience in Congress and the private sector made her the ideal choice to lead the Air Force.”
Wilson, 56, could have gone to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she said. But after spending her childhood hearing aviation stories from both her grandfather and father, a commercial pilot and former airman who flew out of Boston, she sought her grandfather’s blessing to join one of the first Air Force Academy classes to allow women.