Air Force Officer Career Opportunities
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Air Force Officer Career Opportunities Cognitive Lesson Objectives: • Know the basic history and understanding of Air Force officership as a profession. • Know the variety of career fields available to AFROTC cadets under the Air Force Specialty Code (AFSC) system. Cognitive Samples of Behavior: • State common traits of historically recognized professions to include military officers. • Identify primary officer AFSC categories and potential jobs offered to graduates in each category. Affective Lesson Objective: • Value the importance of the academic choices you make in relation to your future Air Force career choices. Affective Sample of Behavior: • Actively participate in classroom discussion leading to the formulation of a personal degree plan. Air Force Officer Career Opportunities 105 Service as an Air Force officer is much more than a job. Officers are professionals whose duties are of great importance for the government and people of the United States. If they accept their calling as professionals, the nation will be served. In this chapter, we will review the significance of being in one of the historically recognized professions, the profession of arms, and then examine the various career fields in which Air Force officers can serve. THE AIR FORCE OFFICER: A PROFESSIONAL Major William Brigman Just what does the term profession mean? One way to define profession is to examine the professions that have historically been viewed as learned professions. There are several ways to identify the traditional learned professions: theology, the law, the various academic disciplines, and medicine. To one degree or another, the learned professions govern themselves. In the United States, the clergy is almost totally self-regulating; university- level teachers, physicians, and attorneys all have their own rules, guidelines, and ethics developed and enforced internally by their professional community. The professions also can be thought of as service organizations: the clergy to serve individuals’ and society’s spiritual needs, teachers to help individuals develop their intellectual potential, attorneys to help ensure justice for individuals and for society as a whole, and physicians to cure physical injuries and disease. Professions are also defined by a specialized expertise: the clergy by theology, attorneys by the law, teaching by various academic disciplines, and physicians by medicine. Along with specialized expertise comes the requirement for continuing education in the profession. Physicians must stay abreast of current research and advances in medicine; lawyers must pursue continuing legal education; and teachers must continue research in their academic areas. The degree of self-regulation—controlling admissions to the profession, defining professional expertise, and maintaining professional ethics—gives each of the learned professions a sense of corporate identity. As these postulates are true for other professions, they are true for the profession of arms. The Profession of Arms Although serving as an officer was generally a prerogative of Europe’s aristocracy during the Old Regime, the officer corps was not really “professionalized” until the Napoleonic Wars, when the requirements of mass armies, logistics, and artillery demanded professional expertise in addition to leadership. Only then did soldiering become one of the learned professions—joining theology, the law, teaching, and medicine. The officer corps is fairly self-regulating internally, but it has significant external controls and governmental oversight. After all, the armed forces of many states are a major threat to liberty and government by law. The armed forces of the United States have been constituted to serve the state; they exist for no other purpose. Regulation of the 106 armed forces, the corporate nature of the institution, and its overriding mission are well understood and need not be belabored here. The expertise of the officer corps, however, is somewhat confusing and does require explanation. An officer is a professional in two senses: individual and collective. In the individual sense, the officer like the lawyer, clergyman, or medical doctor is a specialist, an individual practitioner, employed because of his unique learning, experience, and expertise, to perform a necessary service of value to society. In the collective sense, the officer is a member of a profession, part of a self-conscious group of practitioners, pursuing a common calling and practicing under a collective compact with the nation and each other.* *Information in this paragraph was taken from The Armed Forces Officer, US Department of Defense. Dulles, Virginia: Potomac Books, Inc., 2007. Military Expertise Air Force officers serve in two roles. One is as a technical specialist, and the other is as a military professional. Most young officers understand their roles as technical specialists— as pilots, engineers, maintenance, logistics, or personnel officers, for example. Perhaps their academic majors have some connections with their Air Force specialties. Certainly, each officer’s initial training is directly related to his or her first job in the Air Force. Some officers identify with their specialties exclusively, never coming to understand that they are first and primarily Air Force professionals, and only then specialists. This is rather difficult to understand, because most, if not all, of the duty time of junior officers is devoted to their specialties. Many officers complete their careers as specialists, never having served as generalists. But even this does not change the fact that all Air Force officers are professionals first and specialists second. Why? The armed forces exist to serve the United States by providing the military wherewithal to deter war and, should that fail, to fight and conclude war to the advantage of the United States. The armed forces do not exist for themselves, as a source of employment, as a market for American industry, nor do they exist as an internal police agent. Planning, equipping, and training to employ military force—what has been called managing violence—is an extremely complicated and demanding task. Unlike the other learned professions, the officer corps requires a very broad spectrum of specialties. Each one of these specialties exists not independently in its own right, but to contribute to the armed forces’ war-fighting capabilities. This professional role demands that each Air Force officer understand the purpose of war, the capabilities of air and space power, the role of air forces in warfare, and how the officer’s specialty contributes to unit mission accomplishment. By having an understanding of the ultimate objectives of armed force and how organizations and functional specialties interact, all units, specialties, and officers can maximize their contributions to mission accomplishment. It is the duty of each Air Force officer to acquire and maintain professional expertise. Developmental education aids in achieving this responsibility, but because the breadth and depth of professional military expertise is so great, no officer can depend on developmental education alone. Career-long self-study is required to attain real professionalism.** Air Force Officer Career Opportunities 107 **Much of the information in the preceding sections was taken from The Air Force Officer’s Guide, 31st Edition, Colonel (USAF Ret) Jeffrey C. Benton. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1996. Air Force Officer Career Field Specialties Your entire Air Force ROTC experience is the beginning of your developmental education, and your academic major will likely play a big part in determining your Air Force specialty. Just what are the Air Force officer specialties? As was noted in the previous section, unlike the other learned professions, the Air Force officer corps requires a very broad spectrum of career field specialties to come together to fulfill the military mission of the United States Air Force. When most people conjure up images of Air Force officers, they usually see flight suits, supersonic aircraft, and individuals performing feats of courage not seen in other professional fields outside the military. While these are accurate images, they do not reflect the diversity of the Air Force officer corps. In fact, fewer than 20 percent of active-duty officers are pilots, which means that over 80 percent of all officers work in other specialties contributing to the mission of the Air Force. To understand how these specialties weave together to support the air and space mission of the United States Air Force, you need to become familiar with the officer classification system composed of Air Force Specialty Codes. The Air Force Officer Classification Directory (AFOCD), Attachment 2, depicts the officer classification structure chart (See Figure 1 at the end of this reading). In it you will find 9 broad career areas, with 28 different utilization field titles, and about 150 specific specialty areas (Air Force Specialty Titles). That document provides a brief synopsis of the incredible diversity of career fields in which officers serve the Air Force. All are officers of equal status who pursue career-long developmental education in conjunction with their professional specialty talents to better serve the United States Air Force. I’m sure you are saying, “This is all very interesting, BUT…it still doesn’t tell me what my degree will qualify me to do in the Air Force!” Well, after a quick review of Figure 1, it should become obvious that—in addition