QUANTICO, Va. -- In the months before assuming command, I began to think about our command, the Air Force, and our national security situation and the direction in which we needed to move. We are truly at a challenging and amazing time in our nation’s history – and once again, AFOSI finds itself at a point of needing to evolve to best protect and support our Air Force, our Department of Defense, and our Nation.
I captured my thoughts in a paper titled “The AFOSI We Need”. And I shared that paper with our senior leaders for their input – and their response was amazing in both details and vision.
And our work with the Air Force senior leadership on the ideas in that paper over the past five months has been successful. They have committed to over 500 manpower billets with the promise of more (covering a myriad of backgrounds and types) over the next 3-5 years to help realize our vision. Attached is a shorter, updated version of that paper which shows “The AFOSI We Need” as a command with the vision:
Reinvigorating and Evolving the Counterintelligence Mission:
1) Protecting Our Critical Technology through Spartan Citadel: AFOSI will project over 100 agents, analysts, and support personnel into contracting facilities and labs to help protect our Air Force’s and nation’s most critical technologies. We are losing our game-changing technologies to our adversaries – and AFOSI has been called on to stop it.
2) Regional Counterintelligence Posturing and Employment: To counter the peer competitors and rogue nations in their regions and globally, AFOSI is being given over 70 billets to grow and increase our presence and better team with our partner nations to rebuild the coalition of the free across the globe.
Growing Cyber Threat Pursuit / AFOSI Cyber:
The Air Force has noted our challenges of scale and has committed resources to allow us to continue to mature our counterintelligence work in this vital domain for our country. And in parallel with that, we will continue to push to mature our DoD and interagency relationships to ensure we grow in line with the national effort and in a way that complements the nation’s pursuits in the cyber domain.
Evolving and Innovating Criminal and Fraud Missions:
1) AFOSI / S2I Partnering: AFOSI will look to a new, innovative way of partnering with S2I beyond just mere case types and beyond AFOSI maintaining responsibility / oversight of the cases we work together. This will be an evolution to more of a joint investigations team model – one founded in policy establishing clear, shared expectations for joint mission execution, removing rotating personalities from the equation, while retaining an appropriate level of flexibility to adjust / employ teams responsive to respective, local contexts.
2) CIIS Roll Out: Over the next three years, AFOSI will employ our Criminal Indexing and Investigations Specialists at over 60 of our busiest offices to maximize the attention to detail needed in criminal history reporting, remove lead responsibility from Agents and Support personnel for the weapons, e-funds, and evidence programs, and help bridge gaps with support to the various Wing agencies on both the criminal indexing and insider threat fronts.
3) The USAF Criminal Justice Information Cell (AF-CJIC): AFOSI and A4S/SF will get the AF-CJIC to IOC in early 2020, which will centralize oversight of criminal indexing and information retention for the USAF.
4) AFOSI New Case Management System: We will have a new case management system, with a host of capabilities, to replace I2MS. at IOC in 18 months.
5) AFOSI’s New Weapon and the Weapon For Life Program: AFOSI will have an answer to the replacement of the M-11 weapon system and make every effort to employ that in a Weapon for Life program.
AFOSI Insider Threat Capability – A Growing Requirement and Expectation:
1) Insider Threat Manning / Field Integration: As various network monitoring comes on line and the Air Force population becomes more aware of the indicators of insider threats, we know that our workload will increase exponentially. Therefore, we have focused heavily on forecasting and competing for new manning / positions. The Air Force has seen this and is reacting to our requests for more manning.
2) New Initiatives: With a building capability, AFOSI is working on a CONOPs specific to an AFOSI Threat Management Unit/Pathway to Violence Unit. As we seek to build this capability, we hope to engage with a number of other agencies to see what is already being done at the DoD level to ensure we are integrating rather than just developing our own program in a vacuum.
Strategic Engagement – Better Organizing and Partnering for Future Operations:
Historically, strategic engagement and liaison capabilities and enablers were held in a number of different places throughout HQs. Moving forward, strategic engagement and its various components will be better aligned and manned within HQs to allow for a better grasp of where we are overall as a command, at any given time, to allow for increased capacity (opening up domestic/interagency engagement while continuing to engage on the foreign partner level in the NCR, and better marry HQs actions/intentions to region actions/intentions), and tie strategic relations to operational outcomes.
Protective Service Details – Advancing the Mission Set:
AFOSI has long worked the tough mission set of protective service details without proper resourcing for the task at hand. We are now working to better consolidate our NCR details and pooing resources in order to cover all requirements and keep our CSAF, SECAF, and Foreign Dignitary details well manned and well rested and securing manning to right-size in end strength and composition (OSI to SF) the PSDs responsible for protection of designated COCOMs.
There are many other things happening within the command with an eye toward our future. But we wanted to give you the best snapshot possible of the main efforts occurring right now. Over the next few weeks and months you will hear and see updates on these efforts as well as see highlights of the actions in play via all of our communication platforms when appropriate.
As we move forward on making these changes, we know there will be challenges – both anticipated and unforeseen. But we know these initiatives/changes are critical for the future – The AFOSI We Need. And your senior leadership team is very excited about working this with you and making our mark on our agency’s history – and the history of our Air Force and our nation.