MANSFIELD, Ohio (01/26/18) — When you’re short-staffed at work, every task can be a challenge and your abilities as a leader tested. With half his team deployed in 2017, maintaining the status quo would have been the easy option for Maj. Thomas Butler, 179th Airlift Wing Communication Flight commander.
However, Butler was able to rally his team to be innovative and work together to achieve excellence. The reward for leaning forward is his unit recently earning the Air Force Lt. Gen. Harold W. Grant award for best communication flight in the entire Air National Guard.
This national award is to honor small information dominance/cyberspace units for sustained superior performance and professional excellence, while managing core information dominance and/or cyberspace functions, and for contributions that most improved Air Force and/or Department of Defense operations and missions.
Constantly changing and adapting, the 179th AW CF members have evolved with the technology and threats to maintain cyber dominance and provide excellent customer service.
“I think what sets us apart from other units is the diversity of our team, not just from a cultural perspective, but also from the breadth of experience our Airmen have,” Butler said.
Five years ago, every member of the team made a commitment to become trained and certified ethical hackers, regardless of their military job. The training and knowledge gained in the process has also benefited the traditional guard members in their civilian jobs while gaining experience that instills the cyber warrior ethos and a culture of compliance in all the Airmen.
As more of people’s everyday jobs rely on computers and new technologies, this team is at the forefront of employing innovative thinking, even when it comes to the office layout.
“We have an unending desire to tear down barriers where they exist, not only logically, but physically as well,” Butler said. “You can see it in the open floor plan of our security operations center, where serendipitous interactions between individuals force the human friction that is the spark of creativity.”
Butler explained the environment of openness allows the team to open new doors and excel. His senior noncommissioned officers have initiated an Airman exchange program within the shops. This program allows Airmen to work different jobs within the communications flight to really drill down on the breadth of experience and gain a holistic sense of what each team member brings to the table.
“This helps them to seize moments of synergy and solve the really tough problems,” Butler said.
A testament to this is how well the team scores through the Assured Compliance Assessment System (ACAS), a self-reporting system that allows the team to track vulnerabilities and how well they mitigate those risks. The bench mark score is at 2.5 and the lower the number the better. The 179th AW excels with a low score of 0.84.
“The real trick is patching the systems and not impacting the user’s experience,” Butler said. “We try to keep the security high and the convenience level high, as oftentimes security will come at the cost of convenience.”
Continuing with sustained superior performance, while the whole team was still in garrison, they were the first in the ANG with only in-house labor to upgrade about 900 computers to Windows 10, at a cost savings of $114,000.
The team strives to remain in the top five Air Force Network enclaves through these efforts.
Butler’s team also contributed to the DoD and Air Force with their efforts by supporting seven expeditionary air communication squadrons, enabling the joint surveillance target attack radar system global intelligence upgrade, pioneering U.S. Air Forces Central Command’s (AFCENT) cyber capabilities by writing the initial operating instructions, concept of operations, tactics, techniques and procedures, and along with 20 mission products for the first and only mission defense team in the Area of Responsibility.
The unit’s lean-forward mentality allowed deployed members working in a pathfinder unit to provide cyber defense for the radar system that the battlespace command and control center used in AFCENT, which covers operations in a 944,000-square mile hostile airspace.
With cyberattacks becoming more prevalent, the Air Force is continuing to shift its concentration from operating and maintaining traditional information technology services to stronger offensive and defensive cyber capabilities.
Butler recently applied to become a pathfinder unit to look at the cyber terrain and identify weaknesses and vulnerabilities.
“A pathfinder unit develops the methods/guidelines/operating procedures, analysis, and results completely out of hide,” said 2nd Lt. Angel Marrero Rivera, director of operations for the 179th AW Communications Flight. “These results are then used as the cornerstone for other units to mirror. In other words, a pathfinder unit paves the way for all other Air Force units.”
The team’s mantra is to keep moving forward and employ innovative thinking to what they do every day. It is exactly this mindset that has made the 179th AW Communications Flight a nationwide leader in the Air National Guard.
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