The AGM-86 Air Launched Cruise Missile is the United State’s only nuclear cruise missile and since 1982 it has been a key component of the nuclear triad providing the nation with strategic capabilities that ensure America’s allies and deters adversaries.
Although the missile was initially designed with a 10 year lifespan, it has been in use for the past 35 years due to the sustainment program managed by the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center Missile Sustainment Division at Tinker Air Force Base.
While it is hoped that the ALCM never has to be used, it can also never be doubted. That’s where the Missile Sustainment Division comes into play, and with a mission so important they’re working to sustain the future of Missile Sustainment Center team through a summer study program.
This is the first time for the ALCM Summer Training Program to take place with the idea for the program coming into existence and being executed in six weeks.
“This is an opportunity for high school aged kids of people who work here to come and get a true experience of what it’s like to work in a program office,” Missile Sustainment Division Chief Ed Rua said. “They’re being exposed to a lot of tools in the program office we use to schedule, to figure out risk and to brief via PowerPoint.”
On day one of the week-long program, the students were split into groups of five and immersed into a problem resulting in them having to brief out how they’re going to put their team together, what they’re charter is and how they’re going to work on it, as well as discussing their risks.
“Somebody has to volunteer to be the program manager, the financial person, contract officer, logistician and engineer,” Program Integration Chief Gene Sorrell said. “We had a failure of a functional ground test at the climatic lab at Eglin AFB, so the question was, what are you going to do now that it failed? How are we going to find out what’s wrong with it?”
At the end of the week, all of this information is briefed by the students to Rua as well as other branch chiefs.
“We run kids through the scenarios of some of the real issues we’ve had related to ground test and allow them to come up with things to think about and move ahead, and how they would go about solving that process and brief senior leader team to get approval to move forward and solve these problems,” Rua said. “These are the real things we do inside of the program office.”
The ALCM Summer Training Program had 19 students enrolled this summer and it’s hoped to continue next summer.
“You don’t really know how high school kids are going to react. I’ve always thought — and still believe —that this is our future,” Rua said. “If we can get high school students interested, not necessarily working here in this office, but finding something that they can build from and be really excited and interested to work in here at Tinker, that’s good for the Air Force, the Department of Defense and for the nation as a whole.”