A year and a half after the Air Force completed its 2015 Total Force Climate Survey, measuring airmen's job satisfaction and other morale factors, the service still has not released the results.
When the Air Force originally launched the survey in March 2015 -- it wrapped it up a little more than a month later -- the service said the results would likely be available after that June.
Air Force Times has repeatedly requested the results of the climate survey since April this year, so far unsuccessfully.
When asked about the climate survey results after an Air Force Association breakfast Wednesday, Air Force personnel chief Lt. Gen. Gina Grosso said, "To be frank, that got lost in the shuffle. There's nothing controversial in it. It just got lost in all the things that we're doing."
Grosso said the survey results are now being sent to Air Force Sec. Deborah Lee James and Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein, who have not previously seen it. She said it would likely be publicly released by the end of the year.
The climate survey was launched a few months after the Air Force completed a wide-ranging drawdown that cut more than 19,000 airmen in 2014. Around the same time, many airmen were concerned about the high operations tempo they had to work under with the war against the Islamic State, the ongoing war in Afghanistan, and other global flare-ups requiring the Air Force's attention.
When asked if the survey showed a decline in morale, Grosso said she hadn't seen the information since November 2015.
Grosso also said that the Air Force is taking a look at whether its airmen are being "over-surveyed," with all units being required to conduct the Defense Equal Opportunity Climate Survey each year, as well as other surveys on issues such as sexual assault and how its civilian workforce is doing. As a result, the Air Force is reconsidering whether the Total Force Climate Survey is necessary.
"It's not because we don't like what it says, that's not it at all," Grosso said. "I think it's overlapping with so many other efforts. How do they all sync together?"
The last time the Air Force conducted a survey was in May 2012. Those results were released in February 2013, nine months later. Most of the more than 163,000 airmen who took that survey reported high levels of satisfaction working for the Air Force, although many reported increasing workloads and higher levels of stress due to deployments, as well as ongoing concern that they didn't have enough resources.
The Air Force used to conduct these surveys every two years -- in 2008, 2010, and 2012 -- but three years elapsed before it conducted the last one. And participation was declining as the years progressed, dropping from nearly 250,000 respondents in 2008, to 172,000 in 2010 and then 163,000 in 2012.
When the Air Force announced the 2015 survey, it said unit leaders would have access to their units' results to help them figure out how to improve their organization and better accomplish their mission. The survey covered topics such as job satisfaction, available resources and unit performance, as well as deployments and how they affect home stations, and the fitness of leadership from front-line commanders to top-ranking brass.
The survey also asked questions about mental health and suicide prevention, as well as a series of questions that were specific to each airman's major command.
Stephen Losey is the air warfare reporter for Defense News. He previously covered leadership and personnel issues at Air Force Times, and the Pentagon, special operations and air warfare at Military.com. He has traveled to the Middle East to cover U.S. Air Force operations.
