San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Makeover kept basic training right on course
Air Force continued to turn out service members during pandemic
Airman Basic Matthew Deffer kept a brisk pace on his pushups until the 25th repetition, when he started taking an extra couple of seconds to recover.
At the 30th pushup, he began to show his age — 41.
Deffer paused, arched his back and straightened his arms, then plunged into more repetitions.
“And keep pushing and keep pushing!” a military training instructor barked at no one in particular on this late winter day at Joint Base San AntonioLackland.
Deffer did just that. A married father of three, he had signed up to serve in the Nevada Air National Guard and was going through Air Force basic training as the oldest of 631 recruits in the 433rd Training Squadron. This was his final physical fitness exam, with graduation a couple weeks away.
Basic military training has always called for maximum effort, but some things radically changed at Lackland when the coronavirus pandemic hit.
And that effort prevented the Air Education and Training Command’s biggest nightmare: a major COVID-19 outbreak.
In the 13 months after March 17, 2020, when masks and a makeover arrived, about 2,100
recruits tested positive for the virus. It delayed but didn’t stop them from being among the 35,382 who graduated, a number roughly comparable to the 37,000 who were trained in the 2019 prepandemic fiscal year.
In an incidental plus, a shorter process dropped the cost of training from $24,300 per recruit to $22,000, saving $81.3 million, officials said.
Training used to be more physical and more outside. Marching in close-order drill, 40 inches apart, was how recruits got everything from haircuts to meals to uniforms, taking maybe 40,000 steps a day — roughly 20 miles. But now it’s a bit more than half that distance.
They’re still organized in “flights.” But these units, on the small side at 40 trainees, spend their first two weeks in ROM status: “restriction-of-movement” isolation at a dorm.
The barbers and the utility uniforms now come to them. While they wait to get on with regular training, they learn the basics, such as how to make hospital corner folds in their bunks, and facing maneuvers (right face, left face).
And they learn a simple routine: If you’re coughing, sneezing, running a low-grade fever or simply not feeling well, report it — fast.
“The culture of safety, I think, is the single most important thing that we did,” said Maj. Gen. John DeGoes, former commander of the 59th Medical Wing, the physician who spearheaded the COVID-19 strategy that kept basic training from shutting down.
The arrival of the coronavirus briefly halted Marine and Army boot camps. That never happened in the Air Force, but senior leaders discussed it as a real possibility, recalled Maj. Gen. Ed Thomas, now the Air Force Recruiting Service commander.
“We did not want to put Americans’ sons and daughters at risk,” he said. “The more we looked at this, though, and the more we looked at the readiness and personnel numbers, the more we realized that we couldn’t afford to stop basic training if we had any other option because our readiness would fall off a cliff.”
Once out of ROM, the recruits go through the regular program, but that, too, has been modified. Until the virus, basic training ran 8 ½ weeks. It’s now a week shorter.
Leaders deny it’s easier. But in recent years, basic training had grown more physically and mentally demanding. Some of that, including battling with pugil sticks, has been dropped to combat the spread of the virus.
The only time recruits don’t wear masks is when they shower, sleep, exercise and sit down for chow.
And every week, a new squadron graduates, still in masks.
Family members can watch it on Facebook and YouTube but aren’t allowed to attend or even meet their graduates later to celebrate on the River Walk. The new airmen go straight to their new assignments to learn their specialties.
Readiness at risk
In facing the emerging pandemic, the Air Force had some advantages. One of the biggest: Trainees are younger, healthier and generally in better physical condition than other adults, a low-risk population even if they catch COVID-19.
So far, just one recruit has been sick enough to be sent to Brooke Army Medical Center, but they returned to training the next day.
Another big advantage is basic training’s coercive atmosphere. Recruits follow orders, including orders they dislike or doubt — such as wearing a mask.
The youngest recruit in the 433rd, Airman Basic Kenten Raiche, 17, said the only times he wore a mask back home in Iron Mountain, Mich., was “in stores and that was it.” But he did it in training.
Raiche was motivated — he figured his senior year in high school was going to be lousy and wanted to get on with his life. That meant the Air Force.
“I did school throughout the summer so I could finish early and join earlier,” he said.
One thing recruits have not been ordered to do, yet, is get the COVID-19 vaccine. That might change, given large percentages of active-duty personnel who have not done so voluntarily after a year of extravagant Pentagon investment in keeping the virus from spreading within their ranks.
“We realized early on that the readiness of the Air Force depends on keeping the recruiting and training pipelines open and running safely,” said Lt. Gen. Brad Webb, the AETC commander. “Leaders at every level looked at how to continue fighting through but do it safely.”
The key innovation was ROM, into which recruits are shunted upon arriving at Lackland. They’re all but locked down in their dormitories, which have dining halls and outdoor areas that allow limited physical training. Much of their exercise is indoors.
New recruits mix with no one outside their flights until they’re out of ROM status. They’ll still march to the Reed Clinic for medical appointments, but no one goes to the shoppette to get personal items. The shampoo, shaving cream, razors, deodorant, hair ties and tampons are brought to the dorm atrium, just like the barbers.
Six feet apart, young men still in their jeans wait for haircuts that, as always, are done in a minute or two. The line moves fast.
Once out of ROM, recruits still sleep head to toe, their mouths 12 feet apart. They wash their hands at least five times a day. They carry hand sanitizer wherever they go.
Planners reduced the number of people showering, shaving and brushing their teeth at one time. Training instructors are no longer allowed in the dorm while trainees are cleaning up.
In the dining hall, where they once sat four to a table, it’s now two — and never facing each other.
Weeks before he retired, Col. Michael Newsom, the commander of the 37th Training Group at Lackland, likened these adjustments to the critical thinking that must be applied in the fog of war, “the operational mindset of how you plan for something that you can’t see.”
Other examples abound. Training instructors used to tote a satchel filled with paper documents that included daily reports and schedules. Now they carry iPads and can update a trainee’s record before returning to the squadron offices.
Lackland is expanding its “AETC Learning Wifi” area to ensure instructors have connectivity wherever they are. When Newsom sends out a new policy, they’re able to read it in seconds.
“No one is having trouble using them,” he said. “This generation grew up on it.”
DeGoes, who directs the San Antonio Military Health System, the largest in the nation, isn’t sure who came up with the term “restriction-of-movement,” but the concept is similar to the 21-day controlled monitoring he helped set up for the Ebola virus with troops deployed in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
He also drew on Lackland’s experience with adenovirus outbreaks that killed three airmen and sickened 700 starting in 2007. The smaller flights, social distance and isolation efforts anticipated ROM.
DeGoes said his team began thinking of how to protect Air Force recruits as Americans were evacuated in early February last year from Wuhan, China, and isolated at Lackland. Passengers from a pair of cruise ships followed, living on the base under a program run by federal agencies.
Webb, the AETC commander, met with DeGoes and other leaders March 13, 2020, to go over the plan. The first ROM flights started four days later.
The Air Force Recruiting Service, meanwhile, alerted Military Entrance Processing Stations across the country to make sure prospective recruits knew what the symptoms were and didn’t show up if they were sick.
Mask adherence started at the airport, with two masks issued to each recruit.
Coronavirus cases tended to rise on the base when they went up elsewhere in the nation. With the pandemic’s winter spike, those headed to San Antonio were told to limit travel and movements for 14 days before getting on a plane, and the Air Force stopped pairing them in hotel rooms on their way to Lackland.
It cost more, but only a small fraction of recruits continued to arrive with the coronavirus. The trick was finding them.
At the start, the training command drew a red line that would trigger a slowdown or suspension of basic training in the event cases suddenly increased. It was never crossed.
The worst that happened was this: On three occasions, an entire flight of 40 recruits was stuck in a base motel, the Gateway Inn, for an additional two weeks of isolation, but then reintegrated into regular training with another squadron.
“We realized early on that the readiness of the Air Force depends on keeping the recruiting and training pipelines open and running safely.”
Lt. Gen. Brad Webb, commander of the Air Education and Training Command
Just as effective?
Standing with other airmen at an overhang near the firing range, Deffer, the older recruit, looked down at his rifle, in pieces on a metal table.
“Go ahead and dip the big pin in that oil!” one instructor yelled. “Just a little bit!” said another. “Just a little bit,” the first instructor repeated.
Instructions never end in basic training. The wonder of it all is the recruits, often tired and always stressed out, remember half of what they’re told.
“There’s a lot of reporting statements; there’s a lot of reactions
and remembering them all and making sure you’re sharp, you’re on point,” Deffer said. “I do my best. Sometimes I mess up or I perhaps forget a reporting statement, and that’s embarrassing — we’re in fourth week, I should be able to do that easily.
“It’s difficult to be on point 16 hours a day,” he added. “It’s difficult not to be tired and let yourself be tired. That’s the hardest part.”
A big question is whether the many changes have diluted basic training’s ability to produce combat-ready airmen. Newsom, commander of the 37th Training Group and an enlistee-turned-officer, doesn’t believe anything was lost.
“You know, you get a lot of people saying, ‘Oh, they’re missing out on the experience,’” he said. “I still believe that we are producing that lethal, ready airman and wingman for our service.”
Trainees still must complete an obstacle course; learn chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear defense; and do a version of tactical combat casualty care using mannequins — but not real human actors.
They still get combat arms training and maintenance and spend four days at BEAST — it stands for Basic Expeditionary Airmen Skills Training — a series of exercises in how to defend a forward operating base. Recruits get their dog tags when they complete it.
They still memorize the Airman’s Creed and a list of 22 people in their chain of command, from President Joe Biden and the Air Force chief of staff, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., to their squadron commander, Lt. Col. Anthony Erard.
But the dorm instruction keeps chairs 6 feet apart. Recruits are no longer packed into classrooms. The course materials are stored on USB drives that are plugged into televisions.
“The seriousness of this job has never been lost on me,” said Erard, who flew the F-15E in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Converting and transitioning U.S. citizens into United States airmen always had been serious business, but now we are constantly concerned in managing risk of viral infection.”
On a sunny day, a formation of 42 female recruits marched to the firing range, where they squeezed the triggers of M4 rifles for the first — and only — time in basic training.
“The yellow line that you are at — look down!” retired Air Force Master Sgt. Matthew Burkey, 54, told them over a loudspeaker. “Do not move in front of that yellow line unless you’re told to do so by a firing range official.”
Mishandle a weapon, he warned, and they’d be tossed off the range.
They practiced firing before qualifying — kneeling, prone and standing. One recruit had trouble with her rifle and asked her instructor, retired Air Force Security Forces Master Sgt. Mark Sanchez, more questions than others. He examined the weapon, found it was malfunctioning and got her a new one.
“It’s basically just coaching her so that she could be able to hit the target accurately,” said Sanchez, 44.
Everyone qualified.
Ordinarily, BEAST is held at the Medina Annex, a less developed part of Lackland west of the main base, but the 433rd couldn’t go because pipes broke during February’s historic freeze.
So parts of BEAST came to their dorm. Recruits Robert Lauer and Naithan Long learned to apply a tourniquet correctly to a mannequin in their dorm atrium.
The new exercise
Deffer, Raiche and the others in their flight didn’t run in their first two weeks at Lackland. Recruits were to do a 27-minute self-paced run starting in Week 3 but had to wait because of the winter storm.
Starting in the dorm during ROM, recruits also perform circuit interval training, a variety of exercises that can be done while standing in place.
Deffer, the old man of the squadron, could rattle off the routine — “a lot of jumping jacks, butt kicks, we do side-to-sides, a lot of stuff to get our heart rate going, a lot of core exercises, reverse crunches, lots of pushups, different types of planks,” he said. “We do a lot of situps.”
Before, instructors would order the recruits to run one day and concentrate on strength the next with a series of calisthenics.
“They cannot run in a formation because of COVID,” said Col. Rockie Wilson, commander of the 37th Training Wing at Lackland. “They never will be able to because formation is closer than 6 feet apart.”
The change has decreased injuries among the recruits, and “we found that physically they’re able to meet the same standards as even when they did traditional running,” he said.
Deffer had spent three months working out with one of his sons in Reno, Nev., where he’s an office manager for a landscape company.
On his final PT test, he put up better numbers than some younger counterparts, including 36 pushups. Deffer also shaved 40 seconds off his best 1 ½-mile run, finishing it in 10 minutes, 35 seconds.
His 20-year-old wingman, Airman Basic Jeff Acritelli of Phoenix, finished his run in 11 minutes, 30 seconds and looked a little sheepish about it.
The last leg of the exam was situps. Deffer did 60, one per second. It was nine better than his previous test.
Told he did well for an old guy, he replied, “I try. It’s hard to keep up with these young kids — or young men.”