A team to fill two hats

  • Published
  • By Airman 1st Class John Day
  • 14th Flying Training Wing Public Affairs
COLUMBUS AIR FORCE BASE,Miss. --  The 14th Flying Training Wing executes its mission to Produce Pilots, Advance Airmen and Feed the Fight every day.

To ensure this continues to happen, the base and its Airmen need to be sure they are prepared for anything that comes their way. For the inspector generals’ office, this meant restructuring to accommodate new requirements.

“Before this restructuring, all we handled were complaints,” said Lt. Col. Gerrod McClellan, 14th Flying Training Wing Inspector General. “At the Air Force level, they decided that it made sense for inspections to fall under the inspector general. So the office grew to encompass all the billets required to get the new job done.”

Recently, the Inspector General office has grown from a one-man-show to a team of seven individuals trained to handle any task they come across. They have upsized to fill the roles of both the “black hat” and the “white hat.”

The black hat involves inspections, evaluations and exercises, while the white hat focuses on IG complaints and resolving those complaints.

On the black hat side, the Wing Inspection Team members play a huge part during wing inspections.

“Essentially, we have the IG staff assigned here, and because we don’t know everything about every job, we employ the WIT to augment our numbers,” McClellan said. “They are subject matter experts from other career fields who are not permanently assigned to the IG office.”

They are shifting the focus of inspections and exercises from fixing everything that was broken the week before the inspection to incorporating fixes into everyday work patterns.

“No longer are we just ‘painting the grass’ before an inspection,” McClellan said. “No more last-minute fixes. Instead, we are implementing a continuous process that constantly maintains these inspection items every day. Now we are sowing the grass instead of painting it, so to speak.”

By contrast the white hat side exists to address complaints of Airmen. It is the right of everyone to speak with the IG or members of Congress. They exist to find the objective, honest truth.

“Many people are confused as to just what the IG does regarding complaints,” McClellan said. “Yes, we will listen to any complaint, but we encourage you to try to solve the problem at the lowest level; give your chain, supervisors, shirts and commanders the chance to fix the problem before you come to us.”

With any complaint, IGs follow a flow starting with contact and analysis of the problem, which leads to the actual tasking. From there the five routes available to them are to assist, dismiss, investigate, refer or transfer.

“Everything we do is checked against itself,” McClellan said. “A lot of what we do has built-in checks and balances so both the complainant, you as an Airman, and the Air Force as a whole get an equal and objective perspective. The IG is an advocate for the truth and the Air Force.”

At the end of the day, the IG is a resource for Airmen to enhance readiness through evaluation and exercises, and to resolve complaints of injustice, danger to safety, and fraud, waste and abuse.