Forum: Air Force Life

http://news.yahoo.com/obama-nominates-a ... 32339.html

(Reuters) - President Barack Obama has nominated Air Force Lieutenant General Janet Wolfenbarger to become the service's first woman four-star general, military officials said on Monday.

Wolfenbarger, who has served in the Air Force for more than 30 years, currently handles equipment and weapons acquisitions for the service, the Air Force said.

In that role she oversees research and development, testing, production and modernization of programs worth more than $40 billion a year.

The U.S. Senate will have to confirm Wolfenbarger's promotion.

Army General Ann Dunwoody in 2008 became the first female four-star general in the U.S. military.

Wolfenbarger would be the first woman four-star general in the Air Force, said Andrea Knudson, a spokeswoman for the Secretary of the Air Force.

Wolfenbarger is a 1980 graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado.

Prior to her current assignment, she was the vice commander, Air Force Material Command, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, according to her biography on a military website.

(Reporting By Alex Dobuzinskis; Editing by Tim Gaynor)

F-16.net Sponsor

Congrats General!

Interesting...not a single Ops tour...

http://www.af.mil/information/bios/bio.asp?bioID=8209

PC and gender quota? Rolling Eyes

Not a single assignment outside CONUS?

Still more military time than the commander in chief ...
Smile

fisk

Code3 wrote:

Interesting...not a single Ops tour...

http://www.af.mil/information/bios/bio.asp?bioID=8209

Not sure why that's an issue. There are many general's without an Ops tour. While in general (pardon the pun) I agree that our most senior leaders should be operators, there's no reason that EVERY leader needs to be one. There are many assignments that require skills other than driving jets...

Roscoe wrote:

Code3 wrote:

Interesting...not a single Ops tour...

http://www.af.mil/information/bios/bio.asp?bioID=8209

Not sure why that's an issue. There are many general's without an Ops tour. While in general (pardon the pun) I agree that our most senior leaders should be operators, there's no reason that EVERY leader needs to be one. There are many assignments that require skills other than driving jets...

For a 1 or 2 star, you may have an argument (although I would still disagree), however for a 4 star general, YGBSM. She's going to be making decisions affecting operators without any experience in the operational world. The Air Force is the only service that gets away with this sort of thing, and it's a big reason why the rest of the DoD looks down their noses at the AF.

Quite frankly, the only assignment she's likely to get is AFMC/CC...and in my direct experience that position has less to do about operators than it does managing the acquisition, laboratory, and test communities. In that job you want someone with acquisition experience, not pulling Gs.

@ Roscoe

I agree the general is most likely to take over acquisistion or something very similar, not PACAF/USAFE/ACC, etc. I also conceed having a strong acquisition background is more important than "pulling Gs" in such a carreer field. However, I would like to see at least one operational tour (doesn't have to be flying either, there are plenty of other oportunities). The reason being, even acquisition decisions should be made with "operations" in mind, and it's difficult to appreciate the needs and desires of operators if you've never served in that capacity before.

I suspect Gen W. will do well in this position. Most of the women I worked with were easily as capable and in most instances harder working than the bros.

However, comma. AFMC is starved for operators. We have career acquisition personnel who haven't a clue about what the field really wants. Aviators are not the most articulate bunch - you go through a few Cockpit Review Teams and hear a lot of good ideas that get tossed over the fence to the engineers who are often unaware of the operational impact of the candidate. The acquistion pros deliver the product on time/on budget. Then it takes a couple of OPF cycles to fix the candidate.

You don't necessarily need an aviator at the helm, but the death spiral of aviator undermanning the SPOs, and even ACC for Christ's sake, has got us into a hell of a pickle. Sooo, time for a reorg right - that'll cut a couple of General Officers out of the pack. Like Tinker will give a rat's about Hill or WR.

And don't get me talking about contracting - Darleen Druyun should have been shot rather than a couple of months in a Florida Hilton. Now we're overstaffed with timid and lazy contracting officers - if you don't do anything you can't be wrong.

The good General has her plate full - Hoffman's mandate was to clean up the Nuke stuff. We'll see what her early priorities will be. Stopping the reorg would be a good start, although shooting half of ESC would make her my personal hero.

@Buffalo,
And it's going to get worse at the OFP end. LM is unloading lots of senior codehammers to trim big salaries from the budget. These were the folks who "grew up" with the F-16 program and understood what OFPs were supposed to do. To replace them, LM is hiring brand new grads (cheaper) who will have to cut their teeth on the new projects.
fisk

I wish to see one day Elizabeth Kreft the former TBs officer as an Air For$ general.. she's damn pretty instead of that one!

According to her official Air Force bio at http://www.af.mil/information/bios/bio.asp?bioID=8209 she's now in her 32nd year of active duty with no overseas assignments or operational deployments.

For 24 consecutive years (1988-2012) she's bounced back and forth between assignments at Wright Patterson and Washington DC... that's after spending the preceding four years (1984-1988) assigned at Andrews which is located just 15 miles southeast of Washington. That totals 28 consecutive years assigned to only two stateside locales.

She has no wartime or contingency command experience.

In June 2009 she was promoted to major general and then promoted to lieutenant general just six months later in December.

Her official 2-star and 3-star photos clearly show glue residue from a missing oak leaf cluster on her longevity award ribbon.

Even after serving over three decades she has less awards and decorations than the average E-5 with eight years of service and certainly less than the average 3-star.

Assignment stagnation, lack of career field diversity and an official photo with missing ribbon devices would be a guaranteed shootdown for an E-8 promotion to E-9. Why is the same standard not applied for an O-9 promotion to O-10?

Forum: Air Force Life

USAF to have 1st Female 4star General