Reposted from DVIDS

Story by Staff Sgt. Alex Montes, 70th Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Wing  

Airmen from the 373rd Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Group hosted a ribbon cutting for their new language center for the Alaska Mission Operations Center (AMOC) at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska on November 1, 2018.

The new center will offer 373rd IRSG Airmen to focus on maintaining their proficiency in language skills. Also, giving Airmen a chance to train in an unclassified space as well. 

“The AMOC has very limited classroom spaces, and this has limited the number of courses we could offer,” said Master Sgt. Joshua J. Kauffman, 373rd ISRG deputy of education and training. “The Alaska Learning Center came about as a way to resolve that issue by tripling our classroom space and allowing us to hire a larger instructor cadre. The training will all be offered under the auspices of the National Cryptologic School and will be locally overseen by the AMOC NCS Chief, Mr. Chad Griffith.” 

With the new center up and running, Kaufmann mentioned that the center will give Airmen the chance to step out of their normal routine, by allowing them to solely focus and sharpen their skillsets to maintain mission readiness. 

“Right now, if an Airman attends a course ‘inside the wire,’ they are often pulled out of their class to attend to mission needs,” Kaufmann said. “With the courses being moved off-site the students are able to focus more on the course and not have to worry about being pulled out of the class.”

Having the new learning center off-site will allow Airmen who are awaiting for their clearances, to attend unclassified classes, maintaining knowledge based readiness. This will help reform the DoD’s best practices to maintain greater performance and affordability.