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  • Four seconds

    It takes four seconds to look around and take note of your surroundings. Four seconds to stop, consciously think and be aware of what is going on.It takes me four seconds walking up the driveway after a day of work to notice a yellow lab laying in the neighbor’s front yard. In the same amount of

  • Quiet Professionals: Our Ethos or our Mantra?

    Air Commandos are familiar with the term “Quiet Professional.” We see it referenced in briefings, on documents, and refer to ourselves as such. Personally, I use the term routinely and consider the men and women with the 15th Special Operations Squadron to be the very embodiment of “Quiet

  • Meet every challenge

    The 1st Special Operations Logistics Readiness Squadron proudly displays “Meet Every Challenge” on our squadron patch. We firmly believe in our ability to meet every challenge any time, any place. But if we can’t meet every demand does that mean we failed? The answer is no.The first lesson in

  • Stalk the enemy

    It’s after midnight and four, highly specialized intelligence analysts sit on a dimly-lit operations floor. The full-motion video analyst diligently stares at his computer screen for hours, monitoring a compound located thousands of miles away for any activity associated with the target. A second

  • Caring for your own

    “Because of the structure and the mandatory demands of military life, it is sometimes impossible for either the service member or family members to reduce demands (Saltzman, Pynoos, Lester, Layne & Beardslee, 2013)”The military has a motto: “We take care of our own” A motto that not only pertains to

  • Mentoring 101

    What is Mentoring? You can ask several people what mentoring means to them and you will get different answers. Basically, mentoring is the passing on of skills, knowledge and wisdom from one person to another. A good mentoring relationship allows both mentor and mentee to develop new talents and

  • Followership

    As I think about leadership and what it means to be a good servant leader, I am convinced that to be a good leader you must also be a good follower. Being a good follower, or followership, is a very effective way to set high standards and lead your formation by example.One of my first Air Force

  • All about attitude: Turning negative into positive

    I was a second lieutenant and assistant officer in charge of a fighter maintenance unit. I struggled daily to turn negative into positive. Admittedly, I had no prior service experience under my belt, and I had only a limited amount of maintenance experience at the time. A regular part of my job

  • Connecting the dots

    Growing up, you probably did a “connect-the-dots” exercise at school, where you started with a piece of paper comprised of numbered dots. Only after you connected all of the dots with lines could you see the complete picture and how each line, or step of the process, contributed to the image as a

  • Air Commandos: Born in combat

    There you were, at the bottom of a valley in Afghanistan, surrounded by Taliban fighters, running out of ammo and options. You radio in to the AC-130 gunship, flying two miles above your head, for help. Under cover, you wait for the aircraft to shoot unguided bullets filled with explosives through