Q&A: General Stephen R. Lorenz
Written by Christian Sheehy
EDUCATION VISIONARY:
Providing Airmen the Lift They Need
to Reach New Academic Heights
Interview with
General Stephen R. Lorenz
Commander
USAF Air Education and Training Command
Randolph AFB
General Stephen R. Lorenz is Commander, Air Education and Training Command, Randolph Air Force Base, Texas. Prior to his current assignment, General Lorenz was Commander, Air University, Maxwell AFB, Ala. Providing a full spectrum of Air Force Education, Air University graduates more than 50,000 resident and 120,000 non-resident officers, enlisted and civilian personnel each year from pre-commissioning to the highest levels of professional military education, including degree-granting and professional continuing education. While AU commander, Lorenz was responsible for officer commissioning through Officer Training School and the Reserve Officer Training Corps.
The general entered the Air Force in 1973 following graduation from the U.S. Air Force Academy and attended undergraduate pilot training at Craig Air Force Base, Ala. He is a command pilot with 3,400 hours in eight aircraft. He has commanded an air refueling squadron, a geographically separated operations group, an air refueling wing that won the 1994 Riverside Trophy for Best Wing in the 15th Air Force, and an air mobility wing that won the 1995 Armstrong Trophy for Best Wing in the 21st Air Force. He also commanded the training wing at the academy where he served as the Commandant of Cadets.
Prior to his current assignment, the general was deputy assistant secretary for budget, Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Financial Management and comptroller, Headquarters U.S. Air Force, Washington, D.C.
General Lorenz was interviewed by MAE Editor Christian Sheehy.
Q: What is the mission of the Air Force Air Education Training Command?
A: In a nutshell, AETC’s mission is to develop America’s airmen today for tomorrow. The AETC vision is to deliver unrivaled airspace and cyberspace education and training. AETC is one of the oldest and second largest commands within the Air Force. All told, AETC comprises around 80,000 people, active duty, guard, reserve, civilian and contractors. At 1,750 aircraft, the AETC would rank as the fifth largest in the world. The AETC comprises four major entities: 19th Air Force, Randolph AFB, San Antonio, Texas (flying training), AF Recruiting Service (recruiting), 2nd Air Force (technical training), Air University, Maxwell AFB, Montgomery, Ala. (intellectual and leadership center). Different from the other services, AU is responsible for all education from enlisted to office to civilian [Air Force Academy is separate officer education]. Prior to the early 90s, AU was a command and AU Training was a command. In the early 1990s, a realignment created AETC from these two and is now headquartered at Randolph AFB, San Antonio.
Q: How is AETC supporting distance learning opportunities provided by Air Force University and the Community College of the Air Force [CCAF] in meeting the changing needs of deployed airmen?
A: AETC is unique to the other services education programs in that it is responsible for the education of airmen, NCO, junior officer, mid-grade officer, and senior officer education [to two-star general]. We’ve always done distance learning through seminars and correspondence. How about distance learning using the Web? One of the many initiatives we started here at AU is the AUAssociate- Baccalaureate Program.
The Community College of the Air Force was formed in 1972. In 1972, the associate degree program made our airmen and NCOs quite professional. Everything airmen learn in their training experiences throughout the Air Force is accredited and certified toward an associate degree. How do we build a bachelor’s degree? We decided we needed to cultivate some business development relationships with all the colleges in the country and those specialists that know distance learning. We made an agreement with these folks that if they would accept all of the credits from the AU associate degree program, we will partner with you and guide people to your schools.
The program we developed out of this agreement is called “Twelve Clicks to Become a Junior”. Any accredited college or university can sign up for the program. Any airman with any associate degree can go to the program’s Web portal, click on the AUABC option, and ask for their AFSC [Air Force School Code] code. As an example, an airman decides they want to pursue a Bachelor of Science degree in financial management. From a list of AFSC accredited schools, they select, as an example, Excelsior College. From there, the airman is directed to Excelsior’s Website and walked through the admission paperwork and sign-up process for the coursework required to attain that particular degree. At the end of the sign-up process, the airman is asked if they want their transcripts sent from AU and if they want tuition assistance. Once these questions are answered, the airman is effectively a college junior at that institution.
Since we started this in July 2007, almost 4,000 NCOs have signed up for more than 10,000 online courses through the AUABC program. In the long run, I think it will save taxpayer dollars because it will enable people to get full credit for the courses that they take, spend more time with family, and take less time away from their jobs.
In the latest report out of Air Force Times, a matrix indicated of the over 39,000 degreed servicemembers, the Army has 1,611 associate degree holders, the Navy has 2,522, the Marine Corps has 647, and the Air Force has 20, 851. Add to that 4,042 bachelor’s degreed airmen and 1,289 master’s degreed airmen, you have almost 26,000 of the 39,000 degreed servicemembers across the DoD in the Air Force. From this, the answer is that the Air Force takes education and training most seriously and that a better educated airman, especially in a smaller Air Force, serves better for the joint commander and the Air Force.
Q: Confronted by the reality of growing tuition rates even at “military-friendly” institutions, how is AETC tapping existing resources in providing enhanced educational opportunities to the servicemember?
A: When I was commissioned in the Air Force in 1973, there was literally one can of Coke with a church key that you opened the can of Coke with. Today, there are probably 15 different types of Coke. The younger people of today are faced with tantalizing choices that leave them not with the decision to get a Coke or not, but which one to get. Applying this idea to education, we have found that those individual airmen provided with greater choice in getting into areas that they may have an interest in are likely to do better than those with fewer choices. Having said this, we primarily want them to get into course areas that are in the best interest of the nation, joint force commander and the Air Force. To this end, we offer many formats for this education from distance learning programs to expanded in-residence training and education programs to our programs here at AU.
We produce three things at AU: students, faculty and ideas. The way we do that is through education, research and outreach. We currently have 10 colleges that produce about 50,000 students in residence in one-week, two-week, and nine-month courses with about 125,000 students in distance learning mode. We have completely reorganized AU to where one officer is responsible for all enlisted education from airmen to chief master sergeant. The commandant of the Air War College is dual hatted in the fact that they are overseers of officer education from lieutenants at the air and space basic course, captains at the squadron officers school, majors at the Air Command and Staff College, SAFC and the Air War College. We brought doctrine and education together under the LeMay Center, which predicates itself on a building block approach to educating our future airmen.
Q: What are some trends in military higher education that you see as potential shapers of Air Force collegiate instruction in the future? How are these trends being addressed?
A: With the accreditation of all AFSC Air Force schools in the last decade, any airman or Air Force officer desiring a degree can achieve one at these institutions. Recently, all AFSC schools have become Joint Professional Military Education [JPME] qualified. We are now completely accredited in both the academic and joint arenas. AU is as good as any university today, especially in our niche industry of air space and cyberspace. AU concentrates in its area of air space and cyberspace just as I’d expect Carlisle to be discussing land-centric ideas, Newport to be discussing navalcentric ideas and Quantico to be discussing marine-centric ideas. We at AU are to teach how knowledge of principles in air space and cyberspace provide support to the joint force commander and the joint fight. Here at AU, over the last 60 years, over 11,000 NCOs, officers and civilians from around the world have become graduates of our schools. Of that number, over 400 officers have risen to become chiefs of staff or chiefs of defense staffs. Currently, there are 176 international officers at AU from 74 different countries.
Q: What are AETC’s primary goals in advancing the cause of a college education for all airmen, past or present?
A: My father told me that in his squadron in 1950, there were 100 officers. Of the 100 officers, 94 did not have college degrees. Then I ran into Chief Airey, the first chief master sergeant of the Air Force, and he said, “Lorenz, the NCOs of today are the officers of yesterday.”
What we need to do over time is to build a process for determining the future requirements, especially for enlisted education. If the associate degree is our minimal requirement today, how many of our enlisted folks need bachelor’s degrees? Right now, 5.6 percent of our NCOs, mostly senior, have bachelor’s degrees. We need to establish a process and program to get them from the associate degree level to the bachelor’s level and, to a much smaller extent, those required to have master’s degrees to that level.
Currently, we do not have the authority to grant bachelor’s degrees and cannot and should not compete with other colleges and universities in core areas such as math, English and science. We should, however, and do compete with these institutions in our niche area of airspace and cyberspace. We’re building a program that does that.
Not only have we built a distance learning program through AU-ABC, we’ve also built a new distance learning program through Air Command and Staff College [ACSC] where if you receive a master’s degree from ACSC, you are automatically JPME qualified. We began this program in June 2007 and we had 812 students register for the March class that graduated in April. We just opened the program up to 150 Air Force civilians. Some of the areas we are offering symposiums in are culture and language, counterinsurgency, space education and a celebration of women in the Air Force.
At the Air Force Institute of Technology, we conduct science and engineering research in the future growth area of cyberspace. Along with AU-ABC, we have a program called Blue Darts which has each AU and CCAF student post writing submissions to the Military Officers Association of America for excellence in writing commendations. We started a new web-based journal called the Strategic Studies Quarterly in September 2007. Air and Space Power Journal, around for quite some time, has been in English, Portuguese, Spanish and French, [and] as of this past year, can now be read in Arabic and Chinese. On the Web in the past year, there were over 15 million hits to Air and Space Power Journal. About 18 months ago, we started another web-based journal called the AU Right Stuff which now has about 30,000 subscribers on the Web.
Right now, we are working with Congress to try and get more degree granting and we’d like to start a Ph.D. in strategic studies program at AU where, if you go to ACSC, you graduate with a master’s degree and go to SAF, of which around 43 would be chosen to attend a year. If they graduate with a 3.75 GPA and do all their language and institutional research courses, they go out in the field as commanders and come back to senior service schools as fellows, write their dissertations and graduate with Ph.D.s in strategic studies.
Q: What do you find to be the major challenges facing the future of military education and how is AETC addressing these issues?
A: It’s a dynamic time, we’re at war. We are a much smaller Air Force than in the past. Many of the students that come to our schools have had experience in different phases of the war, especially in support of the joint force commander. It is very exciting educating these folks because they are bringing experience from the field last month into the classroom this month. As an example, last summer we set up a community of practice for squadron commanders. We have a seminar at the ACSC comprising 14 students and two faculty that deals with managing a Website addressing issues for those that have either been squadron commanders or will be in the future. We have about 1,250 people involved with this project that can talk over the Web internationally about issues they have faced or may face as squadron commanders. We in the Air Force believe innovative technology and forward-thinking education will be driving forces in meeting the current and future strategic needs of the joint force commander. ♦
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