The U.S. Air Force is undertaking what leaders describe as its most significant overhaul of basic military training in more than seven decades. Maj. Gen. Davidson told Military.com that the effort is designed to fundamentally change how new Airmen think about their role in war. At the center of that transformation is a concept Davidson calls “airmindedness.” A mindset shift, he believes, is essential for the future fight.
We had been wrestling with this identity problem for years, Davidson told Military.com.
For decades, Air Force Basic Military Training (BMT) at Lackland Air Force Base, TX, has succeeded at producing disciplined recruits and technically capable Airmen. But Davidson said it has not consistently defined what the Air Force is trying to create at the most fundamental level. When he took command of 2nd Air Force, he started with a basic question: What are the objectives of training? “What I found is we didn’t have clear objectives to define what it was,” he said. “In the absence of that, we just kind of wandered our way through basic training based on where we were in the time and place.” That realization led to a more deliberate effort to define the end state of basic training: what kind of Airman the service is trying to produce.
