Air Force Gives Families Unprovoked Slap With Bizarre Memo
Under false guise of lethality, service stirs a hornet's nest
“There came into Egypt a Pharaoh who did not know.”
Exodus 1:8 introduces the story of a new ruler oblivious to the historical legacy of Joseph and the Israelites having saved Egypt from famine. Aloof and incurious, the Pharaoh persecutes the very people most deserving of his gratitude.
It turns out the big man upstairs has a soft spot for the oppressed. He liberates the Israelites, who are so alienated they’d rather wander in the wilderness for forty years than stay. The Egypt they leave behind is soon ravaged by plague, famine, and war.
It’s a timeless plot, proliferating across the ages, albeit the aspects of deliverance and just deserts are elusive in real life. It’s also, if I’m not mistaken, the original source of the folksy idiom “always dance with the one who brung ya.”
It seems acting Secretary of the Air Force Gary Ashworth has been dancing with the devil in the pale moonlight. He’s signing memos brimming with humor dark enough to make The Joker himself proud.
I’ve shared below Ashworth’s most recent missive, which has reduced his popularity among Air Force spouses and families from that of a common garden slug to that of a common garden slug’s step-child.
One more memo and we’ll find out what a red-headed slug looks like.
This is mainly a word salad comprised of wilted and soggy lettuce. But the core message comes through clear: the Air Force will no longer protect or sponsor family days at institutional level because long weekends make us less lethal.
Now, I’m sure Ashworth is a good bureaucrat, and maybe even a good man, though the two seldom cohabit a common corpus.
He served two decades on active duty, mainly in the sexy world of acquisitions, where officers monitor program elements while networking for second careers selling weapons to the military. He’s since spent another 15 years in various locations within various human filing cabinets, a faceless functionary squeezing drops of lubricant into the gears of the military-industrial complex.
But based on this memo, it’s obvious Ashworth wouldn’t know lethality if it smacked him on the ass and called him Sally.
There is nothing about downtime that reduces lethality or readiness. Indeed, sufficient recovery time is key to physical and mental resiliency. Everyone who has ever managed human beings, or been a managed human being, understands this.
The memo feels like it’s written for an under-worked Air Force. Which if it ever existed is a vestige of times past imaginable only by chair-dwelling staff denizens whose main concern during the war years was timing the slug line to get home for supper.
But for all it lacks in basic sensibility or any discernible reason to exist, the memo doesn’t fail to entertain. It proves that if you live long enough, you get to see everything.
For most of a quarter century, the Air Force has claimed to love families while taking actions suggesting the opposite.
First, there was the firing tens of thousands of people to get more money for acquisition programs.
Then, a few years later, there was the firing of tens of thousands of people to get more money for acquisition programs. This second instance fired more people faster than the law required.
And wedged neatly between the two was ‘09, which blue-suit propagandists labelled Year of the Air Force Family. It was a year of astute “we care” messaging contrasted with merciless “we don’t give a shit” reality.
The service shelled out for a large-scale survey of families that year, the recommendations of which were published by in a RAND study before being promptly round-filed. All except expanding privatized housing, which hucksters sold as a benefit but has proven to be a bushel of poison apples.
The study omitted the most important recommendation anyway, which would have been to stop cutting airmen while increasing demands placed on the service. Under-staffing stretches everyone on the rack, some beyond their personal and/or family breaking point.
Child care, spousal employment, and community activities are important family issues. But the key concern is stable expectations, a deployment tempo that is reasonable and predictable, and home station workloads that allow families to recover between separations.
None of that was promised or delivered in the war years. “More with less” displaced Aim High as the service motto.
Remarkably, things have finally changed.
We now find ourselves in an Air Force which openly and notoriously doesn’t claim or pretend to give half a toss about families. It’s a more honest position, which allows airmen to make informed career decisions with clarity of the value placed upon family support by their employer.
“Recruit the individual, retain the family” was once a genuine rallying cry recognizing the Air Force’s dependence on career service by individuals whose best-on-planet skills flowed from years of experience interspersed with technical training and professional development.
It became a dissonance-catalyzing punchline. Generals grew fond of telling airmen if they didn’t like something, they could quit and someone would take their place. Quality of life and operational tempo were given the primacy and resources of a Baja goat farm. The lived experience of service achieved joy parity with running the bone saw in an abattoir.
It takes really shitty leadership to break the addiction military pilots have to their craft, which is by default the coolest job in the world. The Air Force delivered that shitty leadership, triggering a pilot shortage that it still believes is about money but is really about excessive tempo, pissed off families, and too much self-support. All wrapped in a toxic tortilla and served by over-promoted careerists who have more stars than vertebrae.
So maybe it’s good that we’re finally getting past fake bumper stickers and virtue signaling. Maybe Ashworth should be heralded for his bold candor.
Paraphrasing the late, great R. Lee Ermey, “Joker is silly and he’s ignorant, but he’s got guts … and guts is enough.”
Now, let my climb out of my tree for a stanza or two. Because it’s important to say what this memo doesn’t do.
It doesn’t actually restrict commanders from establishing family days and four-day weekends within their units. This is latitude commanders should have. They will know how to tailor downtime to fatigue, work/rest cycles, and readiness challenges better than cubicle monkeys who have never been tired enough to know what tired is, much less how it matters.
So in that respect, the memo’s likely impact is a good thing. Indeed, commanders have already begun to act on it, establishing family day schedules reaffirming their intent to give slack where slack can be given.
But this is my sole compliment, which means this shit sandwich must be served open-faced.
It’s not just that I’ve had 35 years to watch the Air Force’s bureaucracy ritualistically taunt its fielded operations.
Or that this grimy episode revives rueful recollections of times past, where twin penchants for management-by-memo and tone deafness have conspired to piss off everyone, starting with those just trying earnestly to hack the mission.
Nor the fact that the service has cynically tried, under various labels and artifices, to use the families themselves to plug holes in their own support with unpaid volunteerism.
It’s that I question the mindset of a leadership team who believe this is the best use of their focus, example, and authority. This memo appears as the Air Force tightens into an institutional death spiral which risks nothing less than the nation’s defense.
More than 2,000 pilots short.
Pilot training hours cut in half.
Culture and airmanship noticeably decaying.
Maintenance units burned out and undermanned.
62% mission capable rate.
Oldest and smallest fleet ever.
Oldest and smallest force ever.
And after three decades on war footing, what the current stooge gaggle have come up with is parade practice, sacking anyone vaguely suspected of harboring disfavored ideas, and removing top cover for family days.
And amid it all, the actual four-star-wearing “leader” of the service is lurking in stealth mode.
When someone first shared Gary’s memo, I asked myself the standard questions.
How insulated from ordinary Air Force experience do you have to be to misapprehend the link between downtime and readiness?
How out of touch must one be to misjudge the sentiment of Air Force families badly enough to think the perception of killing family days won’t piss them off?
How spineless must a front office staff be to let a principal sign such a regrettable, uncrumpled spitwad?
When it comes to stewed prunes, is three enough? Is four too many?
But this is the wrong way to think. It accepts at face value something that isn’t about what it says on the tin.
What this memo really delivers is a statement of decrepitude implying time resting and recovering with family is somehow weak. Or worse, a written performance with no actual intent other than currying political favor by showing willingness to be toxic and stupid.
I don’t know what’s worse; that this is what Ashworth thinks his benefactors want to see, or that he’s willing to show it to them.
Meanwhile, the families themselves are not amused.
“If I want to feel worthless, I’ll spend more time with my in-laws. Or my personal trainer.”
“We’re on our eighth deployment in twelve years. But yeah, making my husband work the Friday before Labor Day will fix everything.”
“The wet paper bag called. It says you’ll have to try harder to lead your way out of it.”
“At least the Scarecrow wanted to have a brain.”
“Tell me you’re a clueless office weenie without telling me.”
This is a tiny sample of the sentiments I’ve seen from Air Force spouses, all of them long-tenured and wise beyond Ashworth’s years. They don’t accept even the vaguely symbolic implication that their existence is an impediment to anything, certainly not lethality or readiness.
If the corporate Air Force yearns for a high-aspect tussle, it should pick a fight with a different adversary. Any other. Because this one can make readiness a distant daydream by removing its moral support. If the spouses quit, everyone does.
Every wise defense leader knows you can throw your elbows with active duty and civil servants all you want, but if you go near the families you’ll soon wish yourself dead.
Which brings us full-circle to the word that got this party started.
“Lethality.”
It’s actually the right objective for our military services. But when weaponized as it is here, it becomes a codeword for idiocy. The more this happens, the closer it creeps toward pure meme fodder.
People who choose a life of 3-topping Thursday pretzel giveaways and and TPS reports shouldn’t use big words they don’t understand.
The plebes on the business end of this memo have been deploying and grinding it out for years. Developing and exercising lethality. While memo-writers have been agonizing over the removal of mattress tags or what color of icing should adorn next month’s affinity cupcakes. All the while fattening themselves via tick-like latchment to the taxpayer teat.
Constantly mainlining syringes packed with banality, boredom, and burglarized authority, headquarters goblins churn out memos to look busy, to flex, and to signal their unthinking political fealty. Because despite being drenched in perfume, their noses still detect the irresistibly baconesque budget treats jostling the pockets of their political masters.
Slobber follows. First, in driblets descending chins and ending up on the floor of the E-ring, frequently buffed to obscure a perpetual maze of budgetary slime trails. Then, in memo form, foisted upon a hapless audience officially prohibited from registering their contempt.
Memos don’t have to be this bad. Messages don’t have to make eyes roll.
In this case, a better memo would have been much shorter and to the point.
“Hi everyone. We’re not standardizing family days at service level anymore. Commanders have authority to do what’s right for their teams. We value families and understand our lethality depends on their support.”
There was just no need for this memo to make families feel devalued.
The fact it delivered a gratuitous chop-rattling smack to the contrary — that families are not valued or recognized — is just the latest evidence that bureaucrats should refrain from papering a half million people with every stray synaptic misfire unfolding between their ears.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t close on two salient points.
First, with its mangled message, this directive buries its main positive. Which is that the devolution of authority closer to where the job gets done is a good thing.
Ops never stops, and unfolds in its own unscheduled randomness. Which means aircrews, ground crews, security professionals, aerial port “dawgs”, air traffic controllers, and countless other airmen end up working on sanctioned down days. Anyone deployed can only dream of being back in position to contemplate a long weekend. Giving commanders the ability to tailor downtime to these realities will reduce the inequity powering many a gripe session and ease the tensions between various clans. We need to see a lot more of this.
Second, this memo does nothing to address the absurdity of civil servants being ineligible for passes on down days, which means every instance presents them with a choice between burning their leave or going to work in an empty office to accomplish nothing. In a department genuinely concerned about efficiency, bizarre bullshit is actively hunted and killed. Giving civilians down days would reduce unproductive idle time and create a more rested and effective civil service.
But lets get back to Biblical prophecies.
Ingratitude triggers exodus. Mr. Ashworth has been present and presumably coherent throughout a period more taxing for Air Force families than any other in history. He knows all families have given some and some families have given all. He therefore knows, or should know, that positioning families and family time as a drag on readiness is a false narrative, and a dishonor.
A dishonor that could move the service further from its traditional values. Further from the earnest and habitual cherishing of what makes elite airpower possible. Further from its best self.
Aim higher, corporate Air Force. Read the room. I talk to a lot of airmen and family members. You’ve made an unforced error here and spooked the herd.
If you’re not careful, you’ll lose them for good.
In which case we all lose.
Tony is a retired US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, founder of the original John Q. Public blog, and an independent voice on national defense and airpower. The views expressed herein are his own.
This is a fucking masterpiece! Bruh, please tell me before you train your sites on me! I come in peace!
"It proves that if you live long enough, you get to see everything." Thank you for saying what needs to be said, just in case anyone is confused....Another brilliant post!