Scary CPI

“A single drop of this will kill you within minutes…”

Hearing this in a training class is some scary stuff. And not at all what I expected to be doing when I joined the Air Force as an “Air Weapons Controller.”? My recruiter told me I’d be on the AWACS Radar Plane, looking cool in a flight suit while drinking coffee and sitting behind a radar scope and telling the good guys where the bad guys were.

Instead, I found myself in a Forward Air Control Post (FACP), a ground-based radar unit. Our mission was to deploy near the front lines with the Army and provide radar coverage. We wore Army camouflage uniforms, drove around in Army 2? ton trucks, slept in ?Army pup tents, carried M-16 rifles, and ate MREs (those delicious plastic encased meals). My main job was still to sit behind a radar scope, but, like everyone else, I was also given an “additional duty.” Mine was Disaster Preparedness Officer (DPO).

As the DPO it was my job to get the unit ready to face Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical (NBC) warfare threats. Most DPOs would have just taken the program from whomever had it before them…but I was in a special situation. My unit was brand new…we were starting things from scratch. And our Commander told us to question everything, to think outside the box, and to create the best FACP possible.

Having a blank slate and a boss supporting innovation…I look back and realize this was my first experience in “process improvement” before I’d ever heard the term. And it turned out I was addressing a problem that nobody had realized.

As we stood the unit up, we’d been visiting other FACPs throughout the Air Force (basically benchmarking). Other new DPOs might have simply taken the program from other units to use…but I was being told to question everything, and I had a big question. If we dressed like the? Army, used Army equipment, and operated alongside the Army…shouldn’t we look at the Army’s procedures?

So, with my innovative Commander’s blessing, I became the first Air Force Officer to attend the two-week Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Warfare Defense Program at Ft. Eustis, just up the road from us. There I learn scary shit like how a single drop of nerve agent can lead to a particularly gruesome death, as well as how to protect against such a death. But I also learned something else that completely changed the way FACPs operated. Please stay with me for a bit as I walk through the military aspects…

The NBC doctrine at the time was that Air Bases, large military targets, that were 100 to 200 miles from the front lines, would be hit with persistent chemical weapons. Various nasty chemicals that were difficult to get rid of. So even if they didn’t kill people, it would make launching and recovering airplanes difficult. So, the Air Force countermeasures were to have a lot of equipment and personnel dedicated to decontamination efforts. Big power washers, lots of detergents and disinfectants, and lots of people to scrub stuff down.

By contrast, it was expected that the front-line areas would be hit with short-lived chemical agents. These weapons were designed to dissipate or evaporate after a few hours. Then, as the enemy attacked after the chemicals they wouldn’t be at risk.

The FACPs, as part of the Air Force, followed the Air Force Doctrine. Lots of equipment and lots of people. But FACPs were more Army and should have followed the Army doctrine; less equipment and be prepared to wait things out for a few hours.

I explained all this to my Commander, and he signed off on it. I then basically “borrowed” the Army manuals and used their processes for the unit. And, because we were new, with lots of people coming into the unit, I created a new training program. This was before Computer Based Training, so I created binders with pertinent information, and pictures taken during our benchmarking visits to show the right, and wrong, ways to do things. Then there was a short-written test.

At the two-year mark, we underwent our “Operational Readiness Inspection.” An assessment to determine if the unit was to be declared fully operational and ready to go. It was a grueling week that had us mobilize and deploy to a nearby Marine base. There we underwent attacks by Navy SEAL teams, simulated artillery barrages, and, of course, simulated chemical attacks. At the end of the week, we gathered in a theater on base to hear the results.

The inspection results had ratings of unsatisfactory, marginal, satisfactory, excellent, and outstanding. But the inspectors also had a super-secret “code word” they would use. If something was labelled “Best seen to Date” that meant it was the best the inspectors had seen (okay, so maybe not so secret). It was a superlative that bumped up “outstanding” finding to a really spectacular finding. The Disaster Preparedness Program received TWO “Best seen to Dates.” One for the Chemical Warfare Defense, and another for the Training program.

The inspectors went a step further with my Chem War Defense program. They annotated that it should be adopted by all FACPs in the Air Force! For months I was fielding calls from other units asking about my program.

While lots of this stuff was scary (and depressing) overall, this was my best military assignment, in fact, my best job of any job, in my life, and was fortunate it happened when I was younger. It taught me so much…think outside the box, constantly strive to be better, support your team, do not re-invent the wheel, gather voice of the customer/business, and so much more. And that was not so scary….

#quality #lean #leansixsigma #operationalexcellence #processimprovement #totalqualitymanagement #storytelling innovation? #lean #leantraining? #leanthinking?