The AO Program: Teaching STRATCOM's New Staff the Job, and Writing Down What Mike Never Got

by Lexa V., 27 September 2026

Mike arrived at STRATCOM headquarters in June 2002 as a brand-new action officer, and no one handed him a map. There was no current reference for how the building worked, who owned what, or how a piece of staff work was supposed to travel from an action officer's desk to a general's signature. What existed instead was a course and a handbook built for a different command, years before the world they described had changed twice over.

What it was before. STRATCOM had run a formal, multi-session Action Officer Course since at least the mid-1990s, anchored by a written reference, the "USSTRATCOM AO Handbook," that covered the command's mission, its organization, its building layout, and its senior leadership. By the time Mike needed it, the material showed its age. The handbook's leadership bios still named a commander-in-chief, a title the Pentagon retired in October 2002. Its author field credited no one at all, just "A Valued Microsoft Customer," the default nobody had bothered to clear, filed under a shared training-office path. The course and the handbook were not wrong so much as frozen: built for one command, inherited by a very different one, and never rebuilt to match.

What Mike did. Mike rebuilt both halves, in his role as Command Secretariat. On 20 August 2003, six days after the "Lanes in the Road" review was chartered, he put the fix on a slide. A Command Secretariat orientation briefing, bylined to him, previewed what it called "THE AO Guide" under a slide titled "FUTURE AO TRAINING." That preview became the Action Officer Deskbook. It grew out of the Secretariat's own orientation-briefing work, not the Lanes in the Road review; the two ran at the same time on separate tracks, and the review was an organizational one, with nothing to do with staff training.

The rebuilt course itself ran as a single day. On 15 October 2003, STRATCOM held its Action Officer Orientation Course in the STRATCOM Theater. The agenda covered a Welcome and Introduction, an overview of STRATCOM staffing, the responsibilities of an action officer, a coordination-process session the course's own materials elsewhere call "the 901/915 Dilemma," command standard formats, writing for flag officers, sessions on protocol and on working with contractors, and a command tasking-and-tracking system called iSTARS. Mike briefed two of the day's sessions solo, "Introduction to STRATCOM Staffing" and "Introduction to iSTARS," and co-led the opening overview with his boss, the USSTRATCOM Deputy Chief of Staff. His own slide deck for the staffing session lists "The Action Officer Deskbook" as a taught topic in its own right. That is the clearest direct link between the course and the website: the course was where new action officers learned the Deskbook existed, and how to use it.

The Deskbook. The website Mike built to back the course was not a document but a living reference, and he was plain about where the idea came from: "the original idea was blatantly stolen from the Air Combat Command Electronic AO Handbook," as the site's own credits page put it. The borrowed idea was reshaped around direct feedback from the action officers who would actually use it. The site carried staff templates for letterhead, position papers, trip reports, and briefing cards; command organization charts; a decoration-citation generator; conference-room scheduling tools; a phone and roster directory; "tips" pages on writing for the front office and working with contractors; and a full orientation tutorial track for staff new to the building.

It got used. In its first three logged months, the Deskbook's home page drew 516 hits (203 in September, 251 in October, and 62 in November), and the site as a whole logged more than twenty-six hundred hits across the same span. The staff template library drew more traffic than almost anything else on the site, the tutorials included. That was the real measure of it: not a page new action officers read once and left behind, but a tool they reached for to get the work done.

The impact. The course and the website were one continuous effort aimed at one continuous problem: how does a new action officer learn a job nobody explains, and where does that officer turn after forgetting what was just taught? Mike built the answer to both, more than a year after he had needed it himself and found nowhere to look.