ARLINGTON, Va. — The Air Force is looking for 100 enlisted volunteers to be trained by the Army as interrogators and interrogator support staff this summer, and then deploy to Iraq at the end of the year to help the Army get useful information from prisoners.
Airmen have until Friday, March 25, to ask for the assignment.
Volunteers must have a current top-secret security clearance; an outstanding record of performance and conduct; and certification by their commander that they have the “necessary maturity and judgment to assume these responsibilities,” according to spokeswoman Jean Schaefer.
If too few people volunteer by the end of the week, the Air Force will choose “non-volunteers,” Schaefer said.
The reason the volunteer window is so short, she said, is because the Air Force has scheduled May training slots at the Army’s interrogator school at Ft. Huachuca, Ariz.
“If we have to give [the spots] to non-volunteers, we want to give them as much time as we can [to take care of personal business] before we send them to school,” and then to Iraq, Schaefer said.
After completing the six-month training, the newly minted interrogators are scheduled to report later this fall to Task Force 134, Multi-National Force-Iraq, to work in detainee operations at undisclosed locations, Schaefer said.
Airmen who are picked to be interrogators will take both the initial interrogator course and the enhanced analyst and interrogator training courses at Ft. Huachuca, and then be deployed to Iraq for a full year.
Other airmen will be chosen to act as analysts and for “command and control” duties, so they will take only selected parts of the interrogator courses, and then serve 179-day deployments, Schaefer said.
Air Force officials expect to need another 100 volunteers next year for interrogator training, Schaefer said.
Until now, prisoner interrogation has traditionally an Army responsibility in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The Air Force does not even have an Air Force Specialty Code, or official job description, for interrogators.
“It is not a normal Air Force mission,” Schaefer said. “This is an effort to relieve strain on the Army.”
The interrogation mission may be new, but this is not the first time the Air Force has taken on non-traditional duties in Iraq: about 2,000 airmen also are helping the Army with convoy duties in that country.
For more information, or to volunteer, contact your Air Force Personnel Flight, or go to www.afpc.randolph.af.mil/enlisted and click on “Special Duty Iraq.”
