Air Force officers who have volunteered their own free time to make life in the service safer for those on active duty and less daunting for families during and after deployments say they are watching years of work be wiped away by the current crackdown on diversity initiatives.
At one of the Air Force’s largest bases, an annual Family Readiness Summit scheduled for Feb. 20 was canceled, according to emails obtained by Task & Purpose, even though it was funded, like the one held in February 2024, by the Air & Space Forces Association, an independent non-profit that receives donations from its members. Discussions about addiction at the 2024 Summit led the Air Force to begin selling Narcan, which can reverse an opioid overdose within minutes, at base exchanges.
In another case, an on-base group of volunteers focused on on-the-job issues for women was disbanded, despite a track record that included pushing changes to flight gear and policies affecting pilots around the Air Force every day.
Several Air Force officers told Task & Purpose they’ve seen volunteer groups axed that were focused on military families, service members returning from deployment, recruiting efforts, and airmen safety, all in the name of new Pentagon edicts to end “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” or DEI, programs.
“Our motto is ‘People first, mission always’ — what a load of crap. None of the actions that are happening right now are in line with anything and definitely not for Air Force core values,” said one active duty Air Force officer who, like several officers quoted in this story, feared the impact on their careers if they were identified. “It’s just completely damaging unit cohesion.”
Three active duty Air Force officers said that the uncertainty over DEI directives has been met with frustrating silence from their leadership as new policies have arrived in their inboxes. With all of the new instructions coming out of the Pentagon, they said there’s been little direction given to officers on how to address the changes to the hundreds of airmen they lead.
“What we’re asking for is, just lead and just talk to us. Release a message saying ‘you are valued, you are important,’ that the mission matters,” the officer said.
Family events focused on employment and readiness shelved
A Family Readiness Summit scheduled for Feb. 20 at Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Virginia was canceled, according to emails obtained by Task & Purpose. The inaugural event was launched in February 2024 and funded by the Air & Space Forces Association.
Officials with the association did not respond to requests for comment.
While the Air & Space Forces Association is not officially linked to the Department of Defense, the event was canceled by Air Force officials in the wake of the military’s DEI crackdown which also shut down a volunteer group behind the event, Air Combat Command’s Sword Athena. Summit planners aimed to make resources for spouse employment, mental health, education, and housing for military families more accessible.
“The intent of it was just to get resources from off base on base,” an officer involved in the event planning said.
National organizations like the Wounded Warrior Project and the USO as well as on-base offices like TRICARE, Family Advocacy Program, and the Exceptional Family Member Program for children with special medical needs, had already committed to attending the 2025 event.
At Sword Athena’s 2024 summit, healthcare discussions about a lack of access to Narcan prompted the Army and Air Force Exchange Service — which oversees base exchanges — to begin carrying it online and in stores.
“None of that is DEI. That’s family readiness,” the officer said. “That’s literally mission readiness.”
Air Combat Command officials said the event was canceled because it was sponsored by Sword Athena. When asked about why the service’s volunteer groups were shut down, Air Force officials pointed to the memo that disbanded the service’s Barrier Analysis Working groups which offers no explanation beyond that it is in compliance with President Donald Trump’s executive order on DEI.
“Basically any group that is highlighting the uniqueness of that group seems to be swept up in DEI,” an Air Force major and medical officer said.
The executive order called for the end of DEI programs under the explanation that they “demonstrated immense public waste,” but an officer involved in Sword Athena noted that their volunteer efforts were “done under the premise of avoiding waste” and that “none of this was funded.”
“All of those hard-fought victories were eviscerated overnight and they were labeled as wasteful,” another Air Force officer said. “I don’t think people appreciate the leadership qualities, the love for mission, the love for our country and our fellow airmen that you need to lead an initiative as a volunteer. It’s thankless.”
Disbanded groups aimed at deployment and recruiting
One of the Sword Athena efforts underway before it was shut down, was to standardize the way airmen connect to financial assistance, mental health, and family re-integration resources after coming home from deployments. While there are regulations about how to turn in equipment and gear post-deployment, resources for personal issues that airmen face are available on an “ad-hoc basis” and sometimes limited by base, a medical officer involved in the effort said.
“There can be kind of a sense of loneliness,” the officer said. “Some people can go and have a community when they’re deployed for however many months and then they come back and maybe they don’t have family here or they are not particularly close to anyone in their unit so also just checking in on basically how are they reinvolving themselves back into the community.”
Another group that was put on the chopping block was the Women’s Initiative Team, set up in 2008, way before any of the Air Force’s DEI initiatives. Former WIT lead Alea Nadeem, a prior active duty officer and current Air Force reservist for over 20 years said they advocated for change on workplace issues like getting female pilots their own bladder relief system while flying and adjusting women’s hair policies. Previously, the Air Force’s hair regulations limited women to wearing buns which didn’t fit into helmets and caused traction alopecia because of the tightness.
“We didn’t change it to look cute. We changed it to be more operationally ready and to wear our equipment appropriately,” Nadeem said. “It was like one of the easiest things in the world to change. It increased morale for women and made us more lethal.”
Another Air Force issue that WIT worked on was recruiting. Research by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies said the Air Force was short 2,000 pilots, describing it as “too small and poorly structured” to sustain a combat force able to “prevail in a peer conflict” and meet U.S. national security needs. The WIT volunteers compiled experts together to study anthropometric standards (measurements and proportions of the human body) to expand the number of eligible pilots who didn’t fit height and weight requirements from a 1960s survey that used only white men. The work led to changes in a formal Air Force policy manual, DAFI 63-101, Integrated Life Cycle Management.
“We’re not meeting recruiting goals because there’s a lot of self-imposed barriers that we didn’t intend to,” said retired Lt. Col. Jessica Ruttenber who led the WIT anthropometric team. “They just kind of kept getting baked into our regulations.”
“Every single initiative has someone who really suffered behind it,” said a mid-career Air Force officer, “someone who decided to stay and make the Air Force better instead of just leaving it for the next person to deal with.”