LACKLAND AIR FORCE BASE, Texas –
Second Air Force Commander Maj. Gen. Alfred Flowers visited Lackland last week and said he was incredibly impressed with the installation.
"Everything I've seen here is impressive," he said. "There's no place else in the Air Force that does what is done here at Lackland. The thing that I'm most impressed with is the attitude of all the people, including the basic trainees, the folks that are training them and the support staff.
"It's as good as I've seen any place, and I'm extremely proud of [Brig.] Gen. [Len] Patrick and his team, especially the 737th Training Group and Col. [Edward] Westermann and his team."
Looking toward the future, General Flowers said the one thing he'd like to improve upon is the facilities at Lackland.
"There's a lot of old infrastructure here at Lackland," he said. "I know that General Patrick and the team are working it hard. We want to do everything that we can to fix what can be fixed, where it works economically to do so. Where we can't, we want to see them get out of it and move on to more state-of-the-art facilities and better technology."
General Flowers also addressed the two-week extension to basic military training, saying it provides much needed additional training for trainees.
"The two weeks being added to BMT is going to primarily focus on more warrior ethos, teaching the basic trainees what they will actually experience once they deploy.
"Many of these BMT graduates will deploy within a few months after graduation," he said. "The thing that we want to focus on, and the Air Force wants to focus on, is to make sure that they have the training, the skills and the knowledge to deploy, to protect themselves in a deployed environment and maybe in direct combat. [We hope] that [none] of them ever gets captured, but we want to make sure they know what to do should that occur."
According to General Flowers, the most important program for Lackland is training.
"[The training] is good now, but we want to do everything we can to make it better," he said. "Our No. 1 focus is to produce the world's best trained Airmen that we can deliver to our Air Force."