The colonel in charge of the 515th Air Mobility Operations Wing at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii, was quietly fired in February after nearly two years on the job, Air Force Times has learned.
Air Force Expeditionary Center boss Maj. Gen. Mark Camerer relieved Col. Jason Terry of command on Feb. 25 because of a “loss of confidence in his ability to lead,” service spokesperson 1st Lt. Denise Guiao-Corpuz said in an email Wednesday.
“Loss of confidence” is the Air Force’s boilerplate term used in lieu of providing specifics about why an airman was relieved. Guiao-Corpuz did not immediately answer what Terry is doing now or whether he is under investigation.
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His departure set off a leadership shuffle in which the wing saw three commanders in five months.
Col. Dan Cooley, the wing’s vice commander, temporarily took over as its interim boss Feb. 25 before turning the reins over to the new commander, Col. Kyle Benwitz, on June 28.
Before arriving at the 515th in June 2020, Terry ran the 435th Contingency Response Group out of Ramstein Air Base, Germany; completed a national security fellowship at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution; commanded the 52nd Airlift Squadron at the former Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado, and served as deputy commander of the 455th Expeditionary Operations Group in Afghanistan.
He graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1996 and went on to become a master navigator trained on the C-130 cargo plane, EC-130H electronic attack plane and MC-12W special operations intelligence aircraft.
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Terry’s replacement, Col. Benwitz, previously ran the 621st Contingency Response Wing at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, New Jersey. He is a C-17 Globemaster III pilot and former electronic warfare officer on the B-52H Stratofortress bomber.
The 515th AMOW oversees military airlift units across U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, spanning Hawaii, Alaska, Guam, Japan and South Korea. It falls under the Expeditionary Center, an organization that trains mobility crews to work faster and more flexibly in the field.
The wing manages around 1,600 people and an annual budget of more than $50 million.
Rachel Cohen is the editor of Air Force Times. She joined the publication as its senior reporter in March 2021. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Frederick News-Post (Md.), Air and Space Forces Magazine, Inside Defense, Inside Health Policy and elsewhere.
