Air Force Chief of Staff Mark Welsh said there are three keys to strengthening the Air Force team: common sense, communications, and caring. “We’ve got to make sure common sense is the first standard we apply,” he said in his address to AFA’s 2013 Air and Space Conference on Tuesday in National Harbor, Md. Welsh said the service has “hundreds and hundreds” of Air Force instructions, “many of which haven’t been rewritten in a long time.” The world changes “real quickly in this business,” he said. He acknowledged that the Air Force possesses many “frustrated” people operating on the front end, not understanding why they are asked to do what doesn’t make sense to them. “If it doesn’t make common sense, if it doesn’t make the mission better . . . don’t do it,” he said. As for communications, specifically “corporate communications,” Welsh said he was not doing a “good-enough job” getting information out to airmen. It gets “stuck in stovepipes” or in publications not being viewed. Welsh emphasized the need to fix this issue because airmen “want answers.” Finally, he said, “we have to care more” about fellow airmen. “The people we work beside are the greatest people on Earth,” he said.
The six-week government shutdown did not affect the hours flown by Air Force pilots, a service spokesperson told Air & Space Forces Magazine—avoiding what could have been a major blow at a time when flying hours are already lower than they have been in decades.
