Photo By Master Sgt. Amber Williams | U.S. Air Force leaders within the combat communications community and Georgia Air...... read more read more
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SAVANNAH, Ga. - The Combat Readiness Training Center, located at the Savannah Air National Guard Base held a ribbon cutting ceremony for the new Combat Communications Field Training Unit on Nov. 28, 2017.
“We initially started in 2007 for the Air National Guard as the Combat Communications school. The active duty liked it and then we fell under Air Education and Training Command,” said Senior Master Sgt. Judd Martins, the project officer for the FTU. “It didn’t meet the needs of a flexible Comm unit because combat comm changes so quickly with new equipment and practices.”
“We met twice this year with a training planning team, as a community, with subject matter experts from across combat comm and developed a job qualification standard in each of those disciplines,” said Martins.
“The course is four weeks long total. The first three weeks of training consists of classroom training,” said Martins. “Then the fourth week they apply everything that they have learned in an exercise where they pull live services over a satellite - just like they would in a deployed environment.”
Students that come through the FTU after technical school will leave Savannah with a skills identifier that identifies them as able to serve in a combat communications unit. In addition to that, students will leave the course with almost sixty percent of their upgrade training done before they get to their first duty station.
“We just recently as a career field went through a huge modernization - modernizing our equipment every eighteen to twenty-four months,” said Col. Jeremiah Boenisch.
“Information technology changes so quickly and with that we have to change our training curriculum rapidly in order to facilitate the needs of our community and the combatant commands.”
The new program allows the curriculum to change as quickly as two weeks, whereas before it would take several months. With that, the new FTU is expected to train roughly 3,800 Airmen from the U.S. Air Force, Air National Guard and the Air Force Reserve.
“Between this and major upgrades within the career field, this might have been one of the biggest things we've done for combat communications,” said Boenisch.
| Date Taken: | 12.01.2017 |
| Date Posted: | 12.01.2017 09:23 |
| Story ID: | 257032 |
| Location: | SAVANNAH, GA, US |
| Web Views: | 493 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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