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  • Good order and discipline -- boiling down the facts

    All military people abide by good order and discipline, right? What I don't know is how disciplined we are with the smaller things in life that become big things if we let them. Managing money is one of those things. If you let small over expenditures accumulate, the resulting debt can wreak havoc with good order and discipline. When we

  • Staying fit to fight critical

    Experiencing weightlessness is one of the great things about living on the International Space Station and flying on the Space Shuttle. Such is not the case back on Earth. Here, gravity and Air Force fitness standards remind us that pounds count.Because staying fit to fight is critical in our expeditionary Air Force we all have to stay in shape. I

  • What type of leader are you?

    What type of leader are you? I've been encouraged at several points throughout my career to "cast my net widely" and actively pursue a professional reading repertoire. It was in a reading club where we read a book called "The Tipping Point" by Malcom Gladwell (Little, Brown and Com-pany, 2002) and learned about three distinct types of people who

  • Honor our heroes...

    With Sunday's tragic news that seven U.S. servicemembers were killed in Iraq Saturday, Memorial Day took on a more somber and personal meaning to the friends and families of those young American heroes. Those seven are among the almost 3,500 American troops who have died in the Iraq War and the nearly 1 million men and women who have given their

  • Keeping faith on Memorial Day

    My earliest memories go back to the mid-1930s when while shopping downtown with my mother, I would see men in store entrances holding out canisters to accept coins and affix paper flowers to the shopper's collars.I later learned from my mom that these men were World War I veterans collecting money for their disabled brethren by selling red poppies.

  • Reserved for the best

    Who says lightning doesn't strike twice in the same place? With Staff Sgt. Clinton Petit's selection as Air Force Reserve Command's Airman Individual Mobility Augmentee of the Year, our wing has two Airmen competing as finalists for a spot as one of our Air Force's 12 Outstanding Airmen of the Year! Sergeant Petit is a reservist assigned to our

  • You can't cheat the Core Values

    Recently, 15 Air Force Academy cadets were expelled due to a cheating scandal. The cadets used private computer messages to share answers for a required test of general knowledge about the Air Force. This scandal really drives home how critical it is for Airmen to cling to our values. We owe it to ourselves, each other and the nation we serve to

  • Energy conservation matters

    The question of who pays for utilities used by one of our mission partners came up last week. Someone volunteered that we - the 45th Space Wing - did not pay these costs because they are reimbursable. Therefore, it really does not matter how much electricity they use. Wrong answer! These days energy conservation greatly matters as our "blue" Air

  • My top 10 greatest points on leadership

    For the last two years, I have been blessed and honored to serve as your 45th Mission Support Squadron commander. What a ride! We have accomplished much, kept things simple, and even coined the phrase "You just can't make this up." I made many mistakes in my leadership journey, which led me to number 10 on my list of "The Greatest points on

  • Taking pause before going forward

    The past several months have been extremely busy. The wing successfully launched a Delta II and Atlas V. We hosted several distinguished visitors including a Congressman, the Secretary of the Air Force and Air Force Space Command Commander. We also baselined several wing processes in support of AFSO-21. Last but not least, we prepped hard, and
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