Those of you who are familiar with how our business works might
wonder what didn’t get into the story we did last weekend that was based
on an interview with Gen. Mark Welsh III, the Air Force’s chief of
staff.
Well, a lot didn’t get in. He talked more than 39 minutes about the
sexual misconduct scandal at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland and the
larger issue of assaults throughout the military.
What he said helped advance our understanding of what has transpired
in the 19 months since the San Antonio Express-News broke the first
story on basic training instructor abuses at Lackland, and I’m going to
share what he said in this space over the coming days – unfiltered, in a
straight-up transcript.
A little about Welsh. He was born in San Antonio and calls Austin
home. His mom, Peg, 83, still lives there. And he has a fine sense of
humor. As our interview began he said, “I was born in (the old) Brooke
Army Medical Center. I’m sure the plaque is still there. I’m surprised
you haven’t seen it.”
I wish there had been more laughs in that interview, but this issue
is as heavy as they get and our series of blogs starts, by the way, as
another military training instructor trial begins later this morning at
Lackland. Here is the first 6 minutes, 52 seconds, with more to come
tomorrow and the rest of the week.
Q: Overall, what has been your reaction to the revelations of sexual misconduct among people in the Air Force?
“It’s not a new problem to the Air Force. We’ve had this problem
along with everybody else in the country for a long time and as a
commander I’ve seen it before, I’ve tried to work hard to help prevent
it and take care of victims and do those things before. I’ve been
surprised lately by the cases that have become public just because it’s
surprising that people who are doing some of the things, like the guy
working in our sexual assault response case (Lt. Col. Jeff Krusinski).
We’ll see what that trial turns out, but the guy – he worked here on the
Air Staff – he was the branch chief of a four-person branch that worked
the policy stuff related to this.
“There was a little bit of a characterization that he ran sexual
assault programs for the Air Force. I think that’s a bit of a
stretch. That’s my job and our four-star major command commanders’ jobs
and our command chiefs’ jobs and our squadron commanders and group
commanders and wing commanders and wing commanders and every
supervisor’s job, but having anybody associated directly with the
hands-on policy or execution of this program who would do something like
that is stunning, quite frankly, to me and to everybody else. So every
time an allegation like that surfaces anywhere, it kind of stops you in
your tracks.”
Sexual assault is ‘horrible, it’s completely unacceptable’
“Look, you and I both know the crime is horrible, it’s completely
unacceptable. It’s not something that any of us can afford to tolerate
and nor in my view, the characterizations that the military has
tolerated this is just an improper characterization. It’s just not true.
Horrible cases have occurred, the crime is horrible every time it
occurs, wherever it occurs, and we certainly haven’t stopped the
problem, which is our fault, and we have to fix this. And we’re doing
everything we can to do that, but it’s not for lack of effort and it’s
not because every commander in the Air Force is trying to somehow sweep
the problem under the rug, which is one of the ways this has been
characterized. That’s ridiculous. It’s not because that our commanders
and our legal teams don’t work well together, because they do. The
commander-(Judge Advocate General) team is fundamental to the way we
operate as a service and it works very, very well together. They’re not
great distances apart almost ever, and I think we have the statistics to
prove that, and so some of the things that are most concerning to me
are some of the most general characterizations that just aren’t helpful
as we try and figure out how to solve the problem.
“What we’re trying to do is identify those game-changers in every
area of concern related to sexual assault. And it starts with things
like sexual harassment and lack of respect for people and inclusion and
diversity and those things that make people conscious of treating each
other with respect from the day they walk into the door to our Air
Force, and why it’s so important, and why everyone is critically
important and deserves to be treated that way. And it goes on to how do
you prevent the crime from ever occurring? How do you deter people who
are prone to do this? How do you ensure you create climates of respect
where other people will not allow it to occur or allow behavior that
could lead to it to occur? And then in those terrible situations where
it does happen, how do you make sure you do the investigation properly?
How do you make sure you care for the victim properly, which also helps
the investigation and the prosecution? How do you prosecute cases in a
most effective way so that perpetrators are punished in my view to the
maximum extent of the law, and then how do you ensure that no
perpetrator slips through this dragnet and is allowed to do it more than
once? All that takes an awful lot of effort and then you start with the
follow-up care to the victim, the victim’s family, etc., because the
care doesn’t end when the trial’s over. And so those are the kinds of
things that we’re trying to focus on and we’re working it pretty hard.”
Read more here: http://blog.mysanantonio.com/military/2013/06/air-force-chief-sex-assault-is-completely-unacceptable/