This was less the case in the past fifteen years, where USAF personnel in certain career fields were often pressed into Army roles. Particularly in convoy and military police operations, the Army had overextended itself and needed the other branches to fill in the gaps of trained personnel.
For most airmen, it can be years before you're even considered for deployment. Less than a year into my enlistment as a Security Forces airman, I was sent to be a prison guard ("detainee operations") at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq. There were Army and Navy personnel, but most of their guards were troops put into a role outside of their usual training...a couple years prior such non-police "augmentee" soldiers without proper use-of-force training were involved in the torture incident in the prison at Abu Ghraib.
During Desert Storm, one of my computer programmer co-workers got yanked to a nearby base where he received a two week crash-course on being an airforce cop, so that the actual airforce cops could deploy to Saudi Arabia.
An 'airforce cop' is basically the same thing as a civilian cop. They drive around on base in police-looking cars, hand out speeding tickets and handle the occasional drunk and disorderly.
He had some pretty funny stories about how many strange situations he found himself in, given his abject lack of directly relevant training.
Fortunately, the goings on in nearly all USAF bases are exceedingly lawful, so his situations were always funny and WTF instead of dangerous.
> Fortunately, the goings on in nearly all USAF bases are exceedingly lawful, so his situations were always funny and WTF instead of dangerous.
That was my experience doing state-side law enforcement at a Space Command base - night shift was especially fun for the weird calls, like complainants worried about "satellites orbiting San Bernardino County" and the "glowing red airship" suspiciously near some antenna arrays with the usual air collision beacons. The usual response was to refer them to public affairs as our office was strictly limited to a terrestrial jurisdiction.
Definitely more lighthearted than being downrange.
This was less the case in the past fifteen years, where USAF personnel in certain career fields were often pressed into Army roles. Particularly in convoy and military police operations, the Army had overextended itself and needed the other branches to fill in the gaps of trained personnel.
For most airmen, it can be years before you're even considered for deployment. Less than a year into my enlistment as a Security Forces airman, I was sent to be a prison guard ("detainee operations") at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq. There were Army and Navy personnel, but most of their guards were troops put into a role outside of their usual training...a couple years prior such non-police "augmentee" soldiers without proper use-of-force training were involved in the torture incident in the prison at Abu Ghraib.