USAF Air University: Squadron Officer College

SOC’s vision for the future is to become the USAF’s premier leadership-development institution. SOC will achieve this vision by creating and maintaining a team dedicated to:

Coaching and mentoring air, space and cyberspace leaders today, preparing the senior leaders of tomorrow.
Recruiting the right people in the right numbers to develop the most respected military faculty in Professional Military Education.
Developing and wielding current, agile and engaging curriculum based on a defensible core that is focused on the specific needs of SOC’s customers.
Delivering unparalleled educational opportunities through robust academic partnerships and state-of-the-art learning environments.
Identifying, obtaining and leveraging financial, manpower, physical and technological resources to ensure mission success.

It is my distinct pleasure to welcome you to Squadron Officer College (SOC). Located at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, SOC is the Air Force’s center for company grade officer professional development. The College fulfills this role by educating and mentoring its students during the most crucial period of their development; their early, formative years as current and future air, space and cyberspace leaders.

SOC's mission is to develop Company Grade Officers as leaders of integrity
ready to fly, fight and win in air, space and cyberspace.

SOC houses two resident-education programs specifically targeted at the developmental needs of junior officers. The Air and Space Basic Course (ASBC), established in 1998, offers basic developmental education for second lieutenants and instructs its students on the nature and skills sets required of expeditionary warfare in the twenty-first century.

Squadron Officer School (SOS), established in 1950, delivers primary developmental education for captains and their Department-of-the-Air-Force civilian equivalents. In SOS students identify and reflect on their personal leadership styles as they are exposed to educational and experiential opportunities that challenge them to become more effective leaders for our Air Force.

Although SOC has a long and prestigious history, we are not resting on our laurels. On the contrary, we are in the process of fundamentally transforming the College. We are partnering with leading institutions in the US to ensure our curriculum reflects the latest advancements in leadership studies. We are also adding intensive, experiential activities in our resident programs to inject realism and provide opportunities for students to apply the lessons we are teaching.

SOS students will recognize the changes instantly. Gone are the day-long lectures and unending decks of PowerPoint slides. Gone too are the activities that had become divorced from the College’s leadership focus. Instead, students are treated to a graduate-level executive leadership seminar that helps them to identify their leadership strengths and weaknesses, provides them tools for improvement, and empowers them with opportunities to apply what they have learned.

Being new to the Air Force, students may not perceive the transformation of ASBC; however, it has changed as dramatically as SOS. Two simulated deployment sites provide learning laboratories in which students can grasp the challenges and apply the lessons the Air Force has learned regarding expeditionary operations. A combined-operations learning session with senior noncommissioned officers offers unique opportunities for candid discussions and mentoring. Lastly, we are refocusing the curriculum presented in the classrooms to better address the specific needs of junior officers and helping them better understand what it really means to be an “Airman” in today’s Air Force. Combined, these changes are recreating ASBC as an intense, transformational learning experience that fundamentally enhances our graduates’ value and effectiveness in the broader Air Force.

In addition to these improvements, we at SOC are reaching beyond the walls of our facilities to transform our distance-learning educational opportunities. In this effort, we are leveraging technology to provide state-of–the-art, on-line curriculum to company grade officers and their civilian counterparts across our Air Force. The SOS distance-learning course was the first target of our efforts. Introduced in spring 2009, it featured multi-media materials, avatar-based instructional items, and a completely renovated curriculum targeted specifically at leadership development. We are introducing the Leadership Development Program, consisting of four self-paced courses specifically designed to address company-grade officers’ developmental needs. Lastly, we are offering courses that will comprise the leadership concentration of the AU online master’s degree program. Combined, these initiatives mark a fundamental expansion of SOC’s developmental mission all with the aim of enhancing company-grade officer development across the Air Force.

SOC is transforming itself to be more relevant to today’s complex security environment and to be more responsive to the challenges that our junior leaders face as they lead our expeditionary Air Force to mission success. If you haven’t seen SOC lately, then you don’t know SOC. We are well on our way to realizing our vision of becoming our Air Force’s premier leadership-development institution.

Colonel Steve Tanous
Commandant