A MSgt recently told me that he believes that Air Trans will soon merge with TMO, and eventually Supply to form a generalized Logistics career field. He told me to expect TMO stuff in my future 7 and 9 level CDC's possibly. Anyone know more about this?

It is already started, right now TMO and Vop's are merging and 2011/12 is when the 2T2's will get wrapped into it to i believe into a 3Dxxx. It sucks, I am glad I will retire before the 2T2 merges with them.

Yea, I'm 605, 2T2 and not sure where it goes next, but I made the transition to a Guard tanker unit from a Guard 130 unit, mostly because of convenience, but being a prior 605, I feel offended, as if our career field has been sold out somehow.

The AFSC mergers already have taken their toll. Personnel cut so short in enroute stations because AMC needed to pull manning to create a "wing" in Hawaii for unknown reasons. Top brass says "ORM" which means he took the risk at cutting enroute manning to make his pet project.

The enroutes are so undermanned a new airmen pops in and the only thing he has on his .mil drivers license is a 60K. Used to be you had to be Sra or atleast something else on your license before driving a $2 million vehicle loaded with 60,000 pounds first.

New airmen screws up and ends up dropping prototype piece for the US Navy that's critical to national security and it goes all the way to SECDEF.

Airmen that failed doesn't get punished. NCO on shift gets Article 15 even tho he was doing what he could with what he had trying to manage downloads/uploads and coordinate delivery with Navy. **** rolls down hill and lowly NCO gets punished because higher up command pulled manning for other areas leaving this enroute with no manning.

Expect more lowly NCO's getting Article 15's and getting hosed over upper managements screwing them with more mergers, adding yet even more jobs, and generally screwing the whole operation up to the point it ceases to work.

How about contracting out sucking crap from airplanes since it isn't a wartime tasking GI's should be doing in non-combat zones? There are things they could be doing to make this merger sain and plausible...but they are not doing it.

Federal Regulation was changed so DLA can decide who and what they use to move cargo. It's cheaper to go commercial. So the AF is using this household goods/tmo merger to justify keeping airlift and trying to hold household goods from DLA.

This is silly. Household goods should go DLA, amc airlift disappear as commercial outfits take it over. AMC should be combat aor ops only....allowing a few airmen to quit being hosed and burried in work with more added year by year so officers can justify their positions and method of getting money from the Treasury.

Why do we have RFID's on cargo already tracked with a computer system? RFID's are a worthless expenditure as the assets are already tracked. Except in AOR where defense contractors are doing what they wish with cargo and it disappears-never reaches end users. Sometimes they ping the RFID then to try and find it after a contractor loses it in Iraq.

If GI's were doing the combat ops cargo support it would have never been an issue. Now we're backwards from how we should be.

They want the combat ops contracted and the stateside household goods mission military. ??

It's all to create jobs/positions/ contracts for officers and a means for them to $$$$$.

One of the worst things they've done is the CRG's that took manning from the working force to create squadron's that don't effect day to day operations. Little teams to go do special projects once in awhile, otherwise useless. Back in the day they had something other than this, it was called "TDYs" which were a break for some from the nightmare of day to day ops.

Yes the career field has been sold out.

Good Morning Air Transportation Warriors! Hope you all have a wonderful Memorial Day and before it begins I wanted to try and dispel some of the myths and rumors about merger of specialties.

I work in HAF/A4LF and we're leading the merger of Traffic Management (2T0) and Vehicle Operations (2T1). I can tell you upfront that its not based on money or even manpower. We're not trying to save dollars, save an Air Force function, or compromise the history and prestige of any AFSC.

I'm a retired Chief who not only appreciates the work we do as a service but who understands the importance of tradition and innovation. I mention the two of those together because in some cases, AFSCs were formed based on need and maintained based solely on tradition. Consider for example the case for 2T0 and 2T1 merger- it is based solely on the process and was initiated based on questioning the process, not the money, not manpower...just the process. It is actually low-hanging fruit and as automation took root in the LRS (innovation) worforce reorganization should have followed (restated, innovation should have made some merger considerations SOP and this one should have been done a while ago).

Consider that to receive commodities onto an installation, we use three AFSCs (2S0, 2T0, and 2T1) and four in the case of movement by air. Now, it's not that the specialties should be combined just because it does take three AFSCs, but it is necessary to look at whether the AFSCs should remain the same. If the data indicates they should stay the same, then they should, but in this case the data was overwhelming that the change was viable and necessary.

As for the 2T2s, there is a 95% task match between the 2T0 and 2T2 but the 5% difference is HUGE and quite frankly is a key reason the specialty was not considered upfront and may not be included in the future. The plans to merge 2T2s into the 2D AFSC are not final; have not been completely analyzed; have not been approved; and require a great deal more study. In short, they may never happen and believe me when I say the 2T2 Career Field Manager is focused on protecting the mission of the Air Force and capability of his specialty. We cannot risk compromising job completion simply to reduce AFSCs. I would tell you that we are likely not to see any discussion of the addition of the 2T2 for anywhere from 10 - 15 years from the date the 2T0 and 2T1 AFSCs merge.

The training infrastructure is vital to the success of any merger and if we can't provide adequate training (and that takes money) then no change will take place including the 2T0 and 2T1 merger.

I hope this helps but if you have questions, comments, or concerns, I would love to hear them and I promise to use them only to help make it better and won't share outside of subjective analysis on my desktop. You can email me anytime at rickey.clay@pentagon.af.mil and I will respond within 72 hours to any inquiry.

Have a great holiday weekend!

Rickey

Well Rickey, I'd like for you to provide some concrete examples of the "innovation" you speak of when you talk about the SUPS/TRANS merger that created the LRS (Larger Reorganized Supply squadron) to begin with. Can you cite some specific metrics from any given function/flight or wing customer that show a marked increase in effectiveness/efficiency as an LRS as compared to SUPS & TRANS separately organized? From my stance the LRS is an unmanageable beast of an organization that lacks any synergy or focus because of the myriad of functions under the control of a clueless/oblivious/overworked/always at a meeting Supply commander and clueless Supply SNCOs/officers that know nothing about TRANS. I worked in TRANS squadrons for most of my career and unfortunately finished up my last 6 years in the LRS. Transporters working in an LRS are basically the red-headed step child. All of the officers that had TRANS experienced disappeared within the first couple years of the merger and today the LRS is led by officers and civilians that know SUPPLY, but jack diddly squat about anything else. In hindsight what the Chief of Logistics Review did was cut off the head of TRANS and realigned the body under SUPS. It removed all leadership and functional expertise/judgment/common sense at the officer level and pushed it down to the TSgts and MSgts/SMSgts. No LTs, Captains, Majors or LtCols within the LRS or MSG can talk smartly about TRANS issues anymore.

Daily issues that TRANS officers and commanders used to be able to address, handle and resolve at their levels without help are now being referred to the NCOs/SNCOs. LRS/MSG leadership can't answer the most basic questions when it comes to TRANS, and the 2T NCOICs/SNCOs end up spending countless hours each day answering the mail for this clueless leadership chain. I'd say at least 3 to 4 hours of my day used to revolve around jumping through hoops to respond to last minute "hot tasker" emails and phone calls from my commander because he couldn't speak smartly about TRANS capabilities or policies. To a man, an overwhelming amount of 2Ts working in LRS will say they feel like *******s because of this loss of TRANS functional expertise at the SQDN & Group leadership positions. (incidentally, 2Ts feel no bond and share no camaraderie with the 2Ss). How the mighty logistics leadership has fallen, from a time back in the day when there was an 0-6 dedicated for logistics (as the Logistics Group commander) to today when we have an MSG group commander who only has experience with MPF and SVS. WTF???

You guys at HQ can talk all you want about "over specialization", but when you continually keep combining/merging/transferring jobs/functions/organizations, eventually you end up with an organizational culture that is too overwhelmed with constant changes and more work being done by less people with less experience. TRANS NCOs/SNCOs used to have time in the day to mentor/train/lead their troops while focusing on their functional basics. But that time has been taken away from us in today's LRS (and AF in general). The last 10 years of countless logistics reorganizations and meddling with AFSCs has not produced any benefits, only organizational turmoil, confusion, chaos, lack of identity & leadership, and a DO MORE WITH LESS culture that has made it impossible for NCOs/SNCOs to live up to all of our professional responsibilities. How can we focus on the basics when everything keeps changing/merging and all of our time has been taken away from us? Add in AF-wide changes like an overzealous PT program that takes many, many productive available manhours away, no more Squadron orderly rooms, and limited MPFs/Finance support. The AF in general used to be an organization of customer service, but now the AF is an organization of do-it-yourself-service. This is the culture of today's LRS (and AF).

Now, add to this dynamic, the creation of the 2D Airman, and you are creating way too broad of an Area of Responsibility from a leadership and management perspective at the flight level. The 2T NCOs &SNCOs that are already overtasked and don't have enough time to manage their own functions with utmost excellence in all areas, will be forced into a conglomerate flight. These same 2T NCOs & SNCOs that are spending hours daily answering the mail for the 2S squadron leadership will now become clueless themselves within their own new 2T0/2T1/2S flight, instantly dumbed down, and become as ineffective as leaders/managers at the flight level as the LRS 2S officers & civilians are on TRANS issues at the squadron level.

This do more with less organizational and functional culture has produced an era in which we DO need a "back to basics" campaign, because the sight picture has become too blurred. When you continually inject organizational/functional chaos and blur the focus of your NCOs & SNCOs, you have an environment of watered down leadership & lack of oversight because your key NCOs/SNCOs are just too bogged down or ignorant in certain areas.

But, what are the basics in LRS, with all the different functions? I found it both funny and sad at the same time when General McCoy sent out his LRS Back to Basics Campaign memo. His memo proved that LRS is too broad of an organization when he said that in order to provide a strategic vector to get us all on the same page he was going to get a group of experts together to decide on what the basics are and then everyone will track these basics with metrics. This is great. In LRS our basics are so diverse and spread out that we need to put together a tiger team to make a laundry list of basics and then we'll push this list of basics out to the field so the troops have a checklist of basics to focus on. WTF??

Guess what? When you had separate SUPPLY squadrons and separate TRANS squadrons you had organizations with identities, and leadership, and time to focus on their inherent fundamental basics.

So, bottom line, LRS did not equal innovation, it equaled unmanageable cluster****.

And by the way, if the 2S AFSC would have kept Pickup & Delivery as a 2S warehousing function, instead of transferring this workload to the 2T1s (to do with less than half the manpower Supply was doing it with), there would be no common ground whatsoever to include the 2T1 AFSC in the 2D concept to begin with. Anyone with a state drivers license can drive a delivery van, and just because there is a little bit of driving involved in the task doesn't mean it should become the workload of another AFSC. 90% of Pickup & Delivery is accountability and having Supply AFSC knowledge and using Supply AFSC automated systems. When 2S transferred P&D to 2T1, it forced an entire 2T1 AFSC to learn that 90% of a function that the 2S was already proficient at and only had to accomplish the 10% of throwing the property in a van and delivering it. Manpower and vehicles were deleted at every base and a cost savings was put on a PowerPoint slide and HQ personnel were promoted...but was this an effective initiative??? Or did it just open the door to never ending meddling and org changes that cluttered 2T1 core competencies and organizational identity and job satisfaction??

I would like for someone to produce some metrics that show any improvement in delivery time, efficiency, effectiveness, customer satisfaction, or any other metric that shows transferring P&D from 2S to 2T1 was a successful initiative. From a warehouse stance, all this did was fragment the chain of command and remove the ability of unity of command within the warehouse functional 2S leadership.

Despite what you and anyone else from HQ says, at the end of the day, all of these initiatives were spawned from years of decreased budgets that forced changes that would show some sort of cost savings on a PowerPoint slide. HQ is notorious for putting together small scale, limited tests, and then implementing sweeping changes and then saying, "look, we tested this at Base X and proved it could work." But does HQ ever go back 2 or 3 years later after the fact and compare the benchmarked performance indicators to validate those sweeping changes? No. The answer is no. Manpower was cut/saved and that was all that mattered up front. But what about organizational health?

There is more to an organization than performance indicators. There is espirit de corps and pride from unit identity within the functional organization. When you reorganize based on "processes", you remove functional identity and strip away functional pride, and the feeling of self esteem that the pride of being an expert used to bring. These have been and will continue to be the by-products of LRS conglomerate org structure and AFSC reengineering. Just because FEDEX may run their business a certain way, doesn't mean you can benchmark their model and inject it into the AF and make it work. The AF has too many dynamics, and unit pride, morale, cohesion, and functional identity are all important aspects that have been ignored with all of these organizational & functional changes.

I had hoped that with the firing of General Moseley and his nonsensical vision of reducing 250+ AFSC down to 100, that HQ LRS would have stopped, regrouped, and said, "OK guys, Buzz Moseley is gone, so now we don't have to jam all these AFSCs together and cut manpower billets and make everyone do a whole lot more with less." But unfortunately, you guys at HQ have too much pride of ownership on this project and you will see it through to the demise of the AFSCs and 2Ts jumping ship via special duty and retiring at 20--because the organization and the AFSCs have become too cluttered/overwhelming/inefficient/ and an utterly miserable situation to continue to gripe about.

When all the wheels fall off of the wagon I envision a day when the AF will realize that it must go full circle and return to specialized SUPS & TRANS functional squadrons with plused up manning in each.

Either that or "Full Circle" means we'll end up with Orville and Wilbur Wright designing, building, repairing, fueling, loading, and unloading their own dang planes.

Of course there will still be a full Flight of Managers with a Commander for those two plus a Team of ATSEV Inspectors to watch and critique them. Orville and Wilbur will be asked to take on menial taskings like Equipment Custodian, HazMat monitors, VCO duty, and one of them will have to be tasked as the Trainer. They also have to decide who'd be the TO monitor and one of them would have to be a Pallet and Net monitor to send reports up to the MAJCOM so everyone knows what they got laying around for assets. Since neither ORville or Wilbur can keep up with all the computer based training and certification on silly things that don't really pertain to much of anything they would have to be counciled until they accomplished their taskings.

In the Full Circle Theory even Orville and Wilbur Wright would quit and fly/ work for somebody else.

The US Air Force actually has people in it right now making people's lives hell with a tire pressure gauge. They have bodies that are going around putting the gauge on vehicles that just had their tires aired up 3 days ago and writing up Flights for their tire pressure being 5 pounds too low. Then this NCO runs around and tells the Commander that flight is not airing up tires to what the vehicle is marked for. Then the Commander calls the flight commander with a WTF? Then the flight commander rolls down on the NCO's and the NCO's are like "we just watched the god damned airmen do that sheit 3 days ago wtf?"

Then somebody actually pulls out the MAJCOM AFI saying Tire Pressure will be +/- 20% of marked max psi. Captain runs AFI up to CO. CO takes AFI to NCO in ATSEV. ATSEV NCO runs around in circles with finger up butt signing la la la la la I don't know nothin bout no AFI's.....my word is Law in this Air Force.

Ever have management actually email a MAJCOM asking HOW to sign your name on an AF 1800? Seen it.

So full of stupid, micro managment, and so top heavy the little ****s doing the work are getting sick of being ran by retards with no middle men in there anymore to control the stupid.

Like this guy in the Pentagon wanting to merge a Vehicle Ops bus driver with a Packing and Cracking TMO operation. Holy crap. They're adding more stupid to the fire.

I would pay good money to watch a bus driver be given a hammer and skill saw to box up a F-22 Canopy to be shipped out. Or take that TMO worker that's usually just handing out travel tickets and make them drive a tractor and trailer loaded with 40,000 pounds of oversized outbound to DRMO.

Holy crap. They want to "streamline commodities onto the installation under 1 AFSC".

I hereby call this new AFSC the Jesus Crew.

I don't care if you believe in him or not, there's going to be alot of people screaming his name.