AF reservist leads with core values

When Maj. William Barnes left the active-duty Air Force to revitalize a languishing civilian company, he used the Air Force core values as the framework for success.

Barnes, who is an Individual Mobilization Augmentee at Hanscom Air Force Base, Massachusetts, left full-time military service in 2012 to transform FES Installations, Inc., where his starting compensation as president was paid in stock options, into what he says is one of New York’s premier technological security integrators.

“It’s not surprising we were successful. When you shoot your customers straight, they’ll come back to you,” he said of rebuilding the business on those core values.

The leadership skills he learned in the Air Force also had direct application and he found new tools he didn’t have as an officer. The ability to freely build and shape his team – hiring and firing employees based on performance and needs of the company – was a big one.

“It’s where everything I learned about leadership clicked,” he said of the company his family started but is now employee-owned.

While he was shifting his primary focus to the civilian sector, Barnes wasn’t ready to leave his Air Force life behind. That’s why he went straight from the active duty to the Individual Reserve. The major, who served as a developmental and flight test engineer while on active duty, transitioned to the role of information assurance engineer at Hanscom’s Air Force Life Cycle Management Center.

There, Barnes supports the system program office for the Air Operations Center, a weapon system that integrates air tasking orders, weather data and a variety of other information that is vital to warfighters. His office tracks requirements and certifications for all of the AOCs around the world.

One recent contribution the IMA has made to his Air Force team, was writing a computer program that saves more than 500 man hours each year. His program automates the process of evaluating new and updated security requirements sent quarterly by the Defense Information Systems Agency. This is no small task when done by hand, since it means manually comparing the 700 or more requirements in the new release with those in the previous release. 

“It reduces the work to mere mouse clicks,” said Barnes.

The IMA program is something Barnes calls too good of a deal not to be involved in, citing the flexibility and ability to keep a foot in both civilian and military worlds as factors in his decision to continue serving. And, as someone who is intimately familiar with the ins and outs of providing insurance for civilian employees, the ability to use TRICARE is a huge plus. He says he also takes a lot of pride in wearing his uniform. 

Keeping a foot in both worlds has also expanded his perspective on work and what it means to be successful. As an IMA, as a civilian, you have to be successful outside the military; its sink or swim. You can’t get that on active duty, he said. 

IMAs are part of the Individual Reserve, which also includes Participating Individual Ready Reservists. There are more than 2,500 enlisted and 4,500 officers in the IR. They support more than 50 headquarters, major commands, combatant commands, and government agencies around the globe.

Unlike a traditional reservist, serving one weekend a month and two weeks in the summer, an IR works with the active-component unit to which they are assigned to create a training schedule based on the annual needs of that unit. An IR will often complete all of their annual training at once.

The Individual Reserve is managed by the Headquarters Individual Reservist Readiness and Integration Organization, located at Buckley Air Force Base, Colorado, and its seven geographically-separated detachments and eight operating locations. 

To learn more about the Individual Reserve or HQ RIO, visit www.arpc.afrc.af.mil/HQRIO.aspx.