Empowering All Our Airmen

  • Published
  • By Maj. Oscar Delgado
  • 35th Communications Squadron
I've always believed that the Air Force leads the military in empowering our younger Airmen in making the right calls and acting accordingly based on those decisions. No matter if a person's rank is Airman Basic; we have counted on these young men and women to be thinkers and leaders vice just followers. This past exercise reaffirmed my belief in this. 

I sat in the Command Post this past exercise and saw first hand as the right calls were made by our wing's leadership concerning the safety of our base personnel. However, more importantly, I saw the right calls being made by our front line workers out in the elements as the weather declined and the risk of safety became a factor in our operations. Our young Airmen took the charge given to them by our wing leadership and made the calls to stop operations based on the deteriorating conditions. The information that came into the Command Post was not requests to stop operations, but information that our personnel had already made the call to stop the operation.
 
Our young Airmen made decisions concerning safety, knowing that they would not get push back from leadership to meet chalk times or other exercise requirements. Thanks to the right calls made by all we were able to exercise our wing's capabilities without risking the injury or safety of any of our team members. The exercise is truly a testament that our people understand that the words of empowerment made by our leadership is not just rhetoric, but truly are words to live and work by. 

Empowerment of our young Airmen is more crucial in today's Air Force, especially with the cuts we have faced in our manpower and budgets. We have always had a philosophy of getting the mission done no matter what obstacles we face. In these difficult times of cuts, the leadership of our Airmen will continue to make our Air Force the best in the world. We need them to make the hard decisions as we press to meet the mission, but to also let us know when they see something that doesn't seem right. I've seen this leadership from our young Airmen since I arrived here at Misawa and this past exercise just demonstrated another example of the high caliber of Airmen we have here.