For the last five months, Maxwell Air Force Base’s Air University refocused the Squadron Officer School curriculum to address current Department of Defense priorities and debuted the new and improved courses on July 31.
The redesign meets the vice chief of staff of the Air Force’s intent of ensuring officers are prepared to succeed in a joint force within a contested environment, the new courses emphasizing increasing warfighter ethos, knowledge of the Air Force Planning Process, the new deployable combat wing construct and more.
“Since its inception 75 years ago, Squadron Officer School has been dedicated to our captains,” said Col. Steven Ayre, SOS commandant. “This enhanced curriculum is a first-rate program engineered and tailored to fit the needs of the Air Force. We are committed to offering our captains the best product available and will continue to enhance this program to stay relevant and ahead of the changes around us.”
The Air Force is moving to a construct that is organized in garrison the same way it will deploy, said Ayre. The new curriculum is aligned to the Air Force Force Generation, or AFFORGEN, deployment model with tasks derived directly from deployable combat wing mission essential tasks, better preparing captains for what they will see both deployed and at home.
The legacy course focused on individual performance and was heavy on classroom instruction with less practical application, Ayre said. The new curriculum places a focus on experiential education that is student-led but instructor-facilitated. Classroom time was cut from 53 hours to 24 hours, and the experiential hours spent getting actual repetitions was more than doubled from 39 hours to 86 hours.
“The biggest difference will be the connective tissue that runs throughout the course, starting at day one and all the way through day 25,” said Lt. Col Ryan McGuire, 33rd Student Squadron commander. “Everything they will experience here is tied to something else in the curriculum. Our last course had physical events, but this [curriculum rewrite] almost doubles the expectation of what they can experience while here, physical-training-wise.”
The curriculum rewrite focuses on warfighting, A-Staff integration and the AFPP preparing mid-level officers to meet the operational demands facing the Air Force in today’s threat environment, providing captains with repetitions for their Air Force Specialty Code-specific A-Staff functions and preparing them for when they return to their units.
“SOS has always been an excellent leadership course, and with this redesign, we are not changing the leadership aspect but are adding additional content focus areas to improve captain’s skills,” said Maj. George Pieros, 30th Student Squadron flight commander and instructor.
Each academic year, the SOS faculty experiences approximately 70 percent turnover with varied arrival times, said Pieros. With faculty coming from a wide range of backgrounds and SOS being a fast-paced course, instructors will need to manage training timelines efficiently.
“The benefit of having a school like this where we could leverage the expertise and the strengths of our faculty members, who are hard-working professionals and experts in their domains, proved itself in this curriculum rewrite,” said McGuire. “They are motivated and believe in what we do here; we couldn’t have done this in such a short time without all the hard work and dedication our faculty put in.”
