Major selected to attend Army leadership course

  • Published
  • By Senior Airman Marissa Tucker
  • 39th Air Base Wing Public Affairs
INCIRLIK AIR BASE, Turkey --  A squadron commander here will attend an Army professional development course designed to help officers adjust to working in joint and multinational environments this summer.

Maj. Kimberly Arnold, 39th Contracting Squadron commander, was recently selected to attend the Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

The school's mission is to prepare Army and sister-service officers to operate in interagency and multinational environments as field-grade commanders and staff officers, according to the mission statement.

"The curriculum teaches you to be a better leader and have a better breadth, depth and insight on how to approach today's challenges on an operational, tactical and strategic level," Arnold said.

The college is designed for Army majors, but benefits officers from each branch of the armed forces because students learn operational aspects of each service. From learning about the Army chain of command to becoming familiar with their jargon, majors learn how to better function with the Army, and, in turn, share their service-specific functions.

"I will learn the Army way of life, verbiage, acronyms and an organizational structure that is unfamiliar to me; so when I do interact with my Army brethren, I will have a better understanding of how they do things," Arnold said. "I can enlighten them to our mission and vision, how we approach today's challenges and give them a better understanding of how we do things."

Learning the functions of sister services is vital to the cohesion of Airmen in joint-service environments. In recent years, Airmen were increasingly tasked to deploy with Army, Navy and Marine units as individual augmentees to mitigate manning shortfalls. Although it is a fairly new idea for Airmen in several career fields, as a contractor, Arnold constantly prepares to work with different services and nations both at home station and deployed due to the complexity of her career field.

"We're more engaged with the Army right now. It would behoove me to better understand the Army," Arnold said.

Until recently, the Air Force was the only service with contracting as its own career specialty. Because there were not many contracting specialists in other services, Airmen received more than 90 percent of the deployment taskings for the career field within the Department of Defense, said Arnold.

With three deployments under her belt, including an assignment as the theater head of contracting in Kosovo working with NATO allies, Arnold has experience with working in multinational environments and hopes to bring her experience and insight to the course.

At Incirlik, Arnold commands the 39th CONS, which is responsible for maintaining base contracts worth more than $550 million. From the dining facility to the child development center, contracting has a hand in the daily lives of everyone on base.

As a steward of taxpayer's money, Arnold is committed to the proper use of government funds and hopes to spread awareness and knowledge of the contracting field to her peers and counterparts while attending the ACGSC, she said. She will relinquish command of the 39th CONS in early June to begin the course, and is scheduled to graduate in July 2013.