Reservists drill down on feedback for next Super UTA

  • Published
  • By Dan Neely
  • 919th Special Operations Wing Public Affairs
DUKE FIELD, Fla. --  Following the 919th Special Operations Wing's first-ever four-day Super Unit Training Assembly April 1-4, leaders here already are taking advantage of their reservists' feedback from the event.

The Super UTA format added two weekdays - Friday and Monday -- to the usual weekend Reserve drill to afford wing-wide mass training and individual unit training opportunities at respective commanders' discretion.

Two monthly training periods were combined to address annual training requirements - much of it deployment focused -- as well as concentrate on the routine training traditional reservists must accomplish monthly.

While the wing's senior leadership rated the groundbreaking event an overall success, they are now focused on process improvement in areas where members' feedback was either positive or negative.

"Most of the feedback I received from the wing was very positive," said Lt. Col. Raymond Porrata, 919th SOW Process Manager, who served as the Super UTA's lead planning officer. "People got a lot of their ancillary training done - not just the briefings and the classes, but all the classes that we need to take (via computer-based training). So the fact that we set aside time for that without the distractions of meetings, unit ceremonies and so forth really paid off in terms of meeting training requirements."

The scheduled mass training included wartime readiness classes such as chemical warfare defense, Law of Armed Conflict and self-aid and buddy care. Ancillary training featured supervisor safety training, sexual assault prevention and equal opportunity program courses.

The four-day Super UTA format, in which two dates were borrowed from a future UTA, allowed the wing to reschedule the one originally scheduled for June.
"People really like that because they don't have to worry about drill," Colonel Porrata said. "They have a whole month to do family things and so many other quality of life activities."

Another favorite amongst the Duke Field reservists, the colonel noted, was that those who routinely commute for training found the Super UTA helps them defray some of the costs associated with monthly UTA commutes.
"We did have some lessons learned, so going forward now it's a matter of tweaking things," Colonel Porrata said.

The most immediate drawback Airmen voiced in feedback concerned unusually long traffic backups they encountered as they attempted to enter the base by their mandatory sign-in times. The problem was exacerbated on Friday and Monday of the Super UTA by already heavy commuter traffic at the intersection of State Road 85 and McWhorter Drive, Duke Field's primary access road.

"In hindsight some better planning could have offset that," Colonel Porrata admitted, "but there are some countermeasures we are going to implement will offset that in the future."  Chief among them, he said, is establishment of preliminary contra flow plan to shift gate traffic flow to inbound- or outbound-only use during peak times.

Some other issues and suggestions noted in feedback were:

- The need to schedule more transit time between the various mass training classes and briefings.

- Individual unit requests to hold unit-specific training on the first day, with wing-wide mass training during the second. "Several commanders said they would prefer to have their staff come in, see them, talk to them, give them their marching orders and then send them off the next day," Colonel Porrata said. "We lost a little bit of that continuity because we started with mass training from the beginning."

- The preference for a Thursday to Sunday format so reservists have only one civilian employment work week impacted versus two. This plan will be adopted for the next Super UTA slated for April 2012. Non-training events, such as retirements and commanders' calls, will be set aside for Saturday and Sunday, reserving training for the first two days.

- Interest in limiting Super UTAs to one per year. In view of what Colonel Porrata described as "the massive logistical efforts" required to conduct two Super UTAs annually, senior leadership has instead opted for one, while rescheduling the subsequent June UTA.

- An ID card swiping system to quickly and electronically capture members' attendance versus manually entering this into a personnel training data base.
With the wing's next operational readiness inspection set for October 2012, Colonel Porrata said plans now call for devoting next year's Super UTA to prepare.

"We're already in the initial planning stages for the ORI, so therefore the entire focus will be on training in areas such as mobility processing lines and other deployment-centered activities."