It’s been ten weeks since retirement and I’ve had some time to reflect on the things I miss and the things I don’t.  At the top of the “don’t miss” list is the dreaded ORI.  For those of you who aren’t, or haven’t been, in the military, an ORI, or Operational Readiness Inspection, is a process devised to determine if an organization is capable of executing its war time mission.  It sounds pretty simple in theory but somehow they can never seem to get the process quite right.

When I started out in SAC (Strategic Air Command) it was all pretty straight forward.  During the Cold War our mission was to nuke whoever decided to attack us back to the stone age.  We had to be able to accomplish this at a moment’s notice with no opportunity to spool up prior to employment.  Launch within minutes, fly for a very long time, and drop/launch a bomb bay full of crowd pleasers.  Pretty straight forward.  And that’s the way the ORI happened.  The inspection team would arrive with no advance notification and we would generate all of the aircraft on base and fly them all on a mission simulating the end of the world as we know it.  You either dropped the bombs on target or you didn’t.  Pass or fail, it was pretty clear-cut. That was then. Now things are a little more complicated.

The world changed and the ORI process tried to change with it but it became mired down in everything but evaluating the primary mission of a flying wing.  It became more about operating in the, never seen but much feared, chemical warfare environment and bureaucratic minutiae than in the reality of how we’ve operated during the last three wars.  It hasn’t really kept up with that paradigm shift. There have been some efforts to fix the process but little success.  The best example, in my experience, was back in 1999.

I had just arrived at Youngstown as the new Ops Officer of the 773rd Airlift Squadron.  It was my dream job.  I had always loved being in the thick of things and the Ops Officer gets to run the day to day operations of a flying squadron.  There were new challenges, new problems, new taskings every day.  It never stops and that’s what I loved about it. Several months after I arrived on base, the senior leadership attended an Air Force Reserve Command Senior Leaders Conference down in Georgia.  It’s a weekend of briefings, networking and getting to know your counterparts around the command.  One of the briefings was from the newly appointed IG (Inspector General) at Headquarters Air Mobility Command (AMC).  He stood up and boldly described his vision for the new ORI process. His new construct would be centered around mission execution.  There would be a small chemical warfare exercise in the middle of the three days but after several simulated attacks over a 8-12 hour period we would pack up the gas masks and move on to other, more timely, scenarios. The crowd was thrilled.  Finally someone with half a brain and some common sense was in charge of the process.  My wing commander stood up and volunteered the 910th to be the canary in the mine.  We were ready and willing to try out the new improved process and maybe even having a say in working out the bugs.

We prepared for months.  We practiced with our partners, the active duty guys out of Little Rock, and when the day of deployment arrived, we were more than ready.  But that’s when things started going terribly awry.  As soon as we arrived at the inspection site, the scenario put us into a potential chemical warfare environment. It was a little odd since you would usually have 12 hours or so to build bunkers, unload cargo, and set up operations before having to suit up in chem gear but I concluded that they were just going to get the chemical exercise out of the way early.  That concept worked for me.  I couldn’t have been more mistaken.

For the next three days we did little else but dive into bunkers, put on our gas masks and trudge around the base like space aliens.  At one point we had the masks on for nearly 8 hours straight and as we were packing up to redeploy we were still in chem gear.  We even had to react to a chemical attack while we were in the passenger holding area waiting to get on an airplane to go home.  I wasn’t happy.  I took some time to cool down, but the next week I wrote an after action report which I upchanneled through 22nd Air Force to AFRC.  As you all know, I’ve never been one to hover long over send.

A month later we flew to HQ AMC at Scott AFB for a face to face sit down with the IG to discuss our thoughts on how the new system worked.  When it was my turn to speak I simply passed out my report and said to the O-6: “What you told us at the AFRC Senior Leaders Conference was the exact opposite of what actually happened.  I can come to only two conclusions.  Either you lied to the faces of 300 people or you are incapable of managing your staff and are incompetent.  Neither speaks well of you or the United States Air Force.”  I sat down and the meeting continued.  Maybe not the smartest thing to say to an O-6 as an O-5 in front of your O-7 boss.  I guess I needed more time to cool down.

Years later I was talking to one of the ancient civilian, former military staffers in the IG office, a guy that had been there for decades, and in a moment of accidental honesty, he told me that; “We get these new bosses all of the time who come here with new ideas.  They try to rock the boat and change things but we know if we just slow roll it they’ll be gone in two years and we can just keep doing things the way we know how”. And that’s it.  That’s the problem with all bureaucracies. The inertia of “the way we’ve always done it” prevents real change and real efficiency.  What was the last problem a government bureaucracy solved?  What’s the motivation for any bureaucracy to fix a problem?  Altruism?  You know better than that!  We’ve spent trillions to eliminate poverty but the poverty rate is unchanged.  We just make staying in poverty more comfortable.  Throw more money at a problem, you just get more of the problem.

One more thing on ORIs.  I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon in the Air Force.  Some people seem to get stuck with ORIs more than others.  I know an O-6 who, in over 30 years in the air force, has never been through an ORI.  He has either transferred from a unit just prior to one or to a unit right after they had one.  On the other hand, some of us get just the opposite.  In the first case it could just be that all of his bosses were wise enough to hide him!