Social Learning for the Air Force

by Lexa V., 27 September 2026

In early 2005, Air University's leadership had put its finger on a gap no curriculum could close on its own. Squadron commanders left the schoolhouse carrying doctrine and case studies, then walked into command of a real squadron with no peer network to turn to once the classroom was behind them. A brigadier general at Air University, working with two Air University researchers, spent that year shaping a fix. Mike, then an Air Command and Staff College student pursuing a Master of Military Operational Art and Science degree, joined the founding team.

The founding. On 7 February 2006, Mike and a fellow Air Command and Staff College officer filed the document that made it official: a charter titled "Genesis, Creation, and Management of the Squadron Commander Community of Practice." Getting there had taken most of a year of groundwork. An October 2005 planning thread shows what that groundwork looked like. Following a direct conversation with the co-founder of the Army's own peer-network effort for company commanders, a program already a few years ahead of anything the Air Force had built, Mike worked through the unglamorous decisions that determine whether an online community survives at all: who owns the domain, and who controls access. Commanders Connection went public on 30 May 2006. Over the next two years, Mike's role grew with the community: founding team member, then faculty facilitator, then Forum Manager of the community whose charter he had authored.

The work itself. Mike did not run Commanders Connection from a distance. The platform's own archive credits him with roughly eighty posts, written in his own voice and under his own name: a facilitator posting directly into the community he ran, not administering it from behind a dashboard. His profile page on the site described that role in his own words, in the same first-person register the members used for themselves. That was the model the whole program ran on. A community of practice works only if the person who built it also shows up inside it.

"A community of practice works only if the person who built it also shows up inside it."

The growth. The numbers moved fast. Commanders Connection launched with roughly 300 members, grew past 800 within its second year, and by 31 March 2008 had passed 1,300. Air University's own public affairs office ran a story quoting Mike directly on what he called the community's "2.0" relaunch, a deliberate rebuild rather than organic growth alone. Recognition followed the numbers. Air University's commander named the program one of the university's top two priorities in 2007, and Air Force Times covered it that December. By the spring of 2009, the Army's own community-of-practice newsletter ran a piece bylined to "Lt. Col. Mike Hower... founder of the Air University Professional Forums Project." That was one of the names the program carried during this stretch, used interchangeably with Commanders Connection in the university's own branding before a different name took over later that year.

The rename. In 2009, what had started as a single forum for squadron commanders became something larger. Commanders Connection was folded into a new umbrella platform, Air Force Forums, that grew to seven communities in all. Alongside Commanders Connection sat a network for field-grade officers, a lieutenant and upper-class-cadet community nicknamed "The Bar," a flight-command network called Flightleader.net, a professional-reading forum, and a leadership-challenge forum, among others. The expansion was documented, not informal; the platform's own vendor ran a case study on how a single community had grown into a seven-community system. The logic tracked the growth. A program built to give squadron commanders a peer network had proven the model well enough that Air University wanted the same thing for officers at other career stages, not only those in command. Mike now held the title Director, Air Force Forums Research Project, overseeing a platform that had grown from one community to seven in three years.

The ending. Commanders Connection reached its high point the same year it expanded, peaking at 1,336 members. It never approached that number again. By the time Air University shut down all AU-sponsored forum activity, on 31 July 2011, membership had settled to roughly 850. In a retrospective Mike put together in 2014, three years after the program ended, he was direct about the cause. It wasn't the cost — Commanders Connection's own license sustainment ran a modest fifty thousand dollars a year — and it wasn't lack of use. What the program lost was institutional backing at the command level above Air University: the kind of standing support that turns a project someone built into infrastructure nobody has to keep defending.

That same 2014 retrospective is where Mike, by then out of uniform, took his longest look back at what six years of building and running Commanders Connection had taught him. He went past the year-by-year account and closed with his own list of what he would do differently, building a community of practice again from scratch, knowing what he knew by then. The program ended in 2011. What he carried out of it did not: a Chief Learning Officer role after retirement, and a published book on communities of practice, drawn from six years of learning how one lives, and how one dies without the backing to outlast the person who built it.

by Lexa V., 28 September 2026

AU-2: Guidelines for Command is a handbook for Air Force commanders, published by Air University Press. Commanders Connection's own archive describes it as published "in one form or another for the last two decades." The 2003 edition was written in 2001 but not published until September 2003: two years between the writing and the shelf.

The 2008 edition was built differently.

The team. The revision was the work of the Commanders Connection research seminar at Air Command and Staff College, the 2006–07 class. Students wrote it, working alongside a research director, a faculty facilitator, and Mike, who is credited in the book as Commanders Connection Program Manager and AU-2 Faculty Editor. The articles are credited by name to the team's members, all of them former commanders.

The method. The team started by reviewing major-command squadron commander handbooks and earlier editions of AU-2, then built a new way of organizing the material: the book and the forum used the same topic areas, so a commander could find a subject in either place. The team researched, wrote, or updated 96 articles, posting drafts in the forum and using the discussion there to gather feedback from commanders in the field. The book's own preface sends readers to Commanders Connection for "an up-to-date electronic version of this book and a forum to ask questions, share your knowledge, and receive advice from current and former squadron-level leaders."

That electronic version was the "live edition," its table of contents linking directly into the forum. The print edition froze the same material at a single moment. In the program's own announcement, the print edition reflected the best ideas in Commanders Connection as of mid-2007; the live edition held the best ideas as of today.

The result. The forum announcement called the 2008 edition "a significant departure from earlier versions," because it reflected ideas, best practices, and tips from the community of squadron commanders itself. The print version came out in February 2008, sixteen months after the work began. A 2008 history of the program, written by a member of the team that followed, quotes Mike on what that meant: "No AU Press book had ever been done in this way before." He also said, "The result was pretty amazing—we drafted, revised, and published the 2008 edition of AU-2 in 16 months."

The revision did a second job. In the same history, Mike says the "build it and they will come" approach of the forum's first year "was not very successful." The forum needed seed content to grow, and the class's focus became a complete update of AU-2. The history credits it with invigorating the forum.

How it worked. The book's seven chapters became the forum's own topic areas: cornerstone posts a member could read, then answer in place. A reader could work through the book, in print or live, and come away with a real-time update or a direct answer from a working commander, in context. The alternative was closing the cover and hoping to find someone to ask. After the print edition shipped, facilitating those chapter-anchored discussions was the seminar's focus for two more academic years, 2008–09 and 2009–10 — as Mike himself puts it, AU Press had never before produced a book live and in print together like this one.

Every change to the book's contents during the 2006–07 rewrite — what stayed, what was tweaked, and what was rebuilt from scratch — was the seminar's own call, not AU Press's, and not the forum's on its own. The team realigned the forum's topic structure to the book's new seven-chapter organization that same year, so a reader moving between the printed handbook and the online discussion would find the same subject waiting in both places. Mike recalls one particular push in that rewrite: updating the mental-health material.

After Mike moved on to other assignments, the 2009–10 seminar, the program's last, produced a second printing to correct print production issues with the first. The difference was physical, not editorial. The original run had been spiral-bound, with tabs between chapters for quick reference, at real added cost; the 2009–10 version dropped both for a plain paperback. That plain edition is the one Air University Press still offers today: static, tied to a time and an Air Force long since past.

by Lexa V., 28 September 2026

The end took two years, and it started with an offer nobody accepted.

In early 2009, Air Education and Training Command (AETC) explored taking over Commanders Connection and the family of forums that had grown up around it: a formal handover, discussed that spring in decision papers and forum posts. By October, the choice had a price tag. Keeping the whole forum family running one more year would cost roughly $63,000 to $103,000 — a wider figure than the $50,000-a-year license tail Commanders Connection carried on its own, since it covered the other communities riding on the same platform. Building a proper enterprise solution for the whole Air Force would cost something closer to $257,000 to $289,000, a figure that covered not just more licenses but the customization and .mil-network security accreditation a true enterprise tool would need. On 1 October 2009, the platform licenses on loan to Air Command and Staff College (ACSC) were recalled. Neither path got funded.

Beneath the funding math lay something simpler: the person who had wanted this to exist had moved on. The Air University commander who ordered a social-learning platform built in 2005, modeled on the Army's own community-building experiment, still led Air University when the program was named one of the university's top two priorities in 2007. He left for a promotion to lead AETC in July 2008, and nothing in the record shows him carrying the program's future to his new command. His successor at Air University kept the effort going, but that same year an AETC vision document talked up virtual worlds for military education, and the money and interest that might have sustained the forums went to the newer idea instead. Looking back, Mike names the cause plainly: "lack of support at AETC and AU levels." Nobody was against the forums. Past a certain point, nobody was for them either.

The next year's report put it flatly: "no other 'home' has been located" for the program. Over the summer of 2010, the AETC Future Learning Council folded the effort into the command's CIO structure, and a new requirements draft said that whatever replaced the forums "must encompass the user-base, networks, and learning communities" already built. Mike sat on the AETC team charged with defining that future tool and gave the team detailed input on what it would need to do. None of it came to anything. That October, a planning document made room for the ending everyone could see coming: "In the event we do decide to cancel, we need a way to capture the data." A November revision of the same document dropped the line.

In March 2011, a forum post put a date on it: funding for two of the AETC forums would end 31 July. The same post noted that a senior Air University leader had floated using the platform to replace the Air Force's own knowledge-management system, one more idea that went no further. Later that month, Mike briefed a working group under a title that needed no explanation: "Dead man walking." Its opening slide named four things in a single breath: the pending end of that other knowledge-management system, AETC's decision not to fund an enterprise-wide social-learning solution, the forums' uncertain funding, and Mike's approaching retirement. Four endings, arriving together.

On 31 July 2011, the funding stopped. The record documents it for the two named AETC forums; by Mike's account, every community sharing the platform went dark the same way. That's a wider reckoning than the seven communities branded together as Air Force Forums: the platform also hosted AETC base-level forums, a graduate-school forum, cyber courses, and working groups, roughly twenty groups in all, and Mike's account says none of them outlasted the day. A month later, someone made a static export of the site, an XML backup, and a SQL dump: a last copy, closed up and set aside. Roughly 200 software licenses went unused. The platform's maker stopped supporting it not long after, so even the licenses were worth nothing to keep.

Asked who made the actual call, Mike isn't certain. His best guess is the director then running ACSC's distance-learning shop, the office that held the budget. Nobody wanted to keep paying for it, so the contract simply wasn't renewed, and the program ended the way an unfunded contract always does: quietly. Mike doesn't recall whether members were told in the forum itself. What he does know is that he posted his own account of the ending on his personal website, written to surface in a Google search of the program's name, in case that turned out to be the only notice anyone got.

Nothing replaced it. AETC never took up the handover it had once discussed, and nothing carried the community forward elsewhere. There was no migration to the Army's comparable program, which itself shut down a few years later. Mike doesn't know where the members went. Reddit, maybe. Facebook, maybe. Nowhere, maybe. Six years of a working Air Force community, and the honest answer to "what happened to everyone" is that nobody kept track.

Five Lessons for Building a Community of Practice

by Lexa V., 28 September 2026

In 2014, three years after the program was terminated, Mike put together a retrospective on what it had been and why it stopped. One section is titled with a question: "Next Time?" Under that heading, he listed five things he would do differently if he were building a community of practice again. This piece expands that list for anyone about to try the same thing.

Give people a reason to show up. A community needs a draw, and the draw has to pay off on the first visit. Mike's shorthand for it was WIIFM: what's in it for me. The reasoning behind it was simple. People are busy, and a site that asks for their time before it has given anything back is asking a lot.

Build with the best tools you can get. Members arrive used to commercial social platforms, and they expect a professional community to feel as good as those do. Mike wanted everything on the site aimed at a single job, which was putting information and situational awareness in front of the user. He pointed to two pieces of evidence. The first was a student project called "Top 10 things you must do to engage users." The second was the results of an Air Education and Training Command team.

Make it easy to reach. The platform should sit outside the .mil network, require no Common Access Card login, and work on a phone or a personal device. It should be available at any hour and from anywhere. Most professional development happens off duty, Mike noted, and today's learners expect to reach it on their own technology.

Make it facilitated. Mike was specific on this point: trained social experts should lead the community, choosing the topics, shaping the discussions, and putting content in front of members on purpose. He's since sharpened what that meant in his own program's case. The ACSC seminar he taught from 2006 to 2009 built its facilitators on real theory — Wenger, Lave, and Argyris among the scholars behind it, plus a graduate mentor of his own — paired with hands-on facilitation practice, not enthusiasm alone. When Mike left and that grounding left with him, the seminar narrowed to revising AU-2 without it, and the community's engagement dropped as a direct result. His reasoning for facilitation in the first place was that about eighty percent of what people know is tacit, the kind that doesn't come from documents alone. Discussion is how you reach that knowledge, and targeted questions with steady follow-up are what keep it going.

Make it focused. Aim at the right groups rather than firing a shotgun at the whole force. Mike named two. The first was mid-grade leaders, squadron and detachment commanders. Squadron commanders, he wrote, make the most impact because they own the missions. The second was cadets, who are forming attitudes now that will last a lifetime.

What the list leaves out. The five lessons are about building a community better. Why this one ended is a separate question, and the deck answers it on the slide just before them. Cost was not a real factor. The program ran about $50,000 a year to sustain, plus research and development. Mike traced the end to a lack of support at the Air Education and Training Command and Air University levels. He also named a second cause: a 2008 roadmap focused on virtual worlds, a direction that came too soon.

Read together, the list and the slide before it point to one more lesson, which the deck leaves unwritten: a program needs someone above its builder who wants it to last.

by Lexa V., 28 September 2026

Chief Learning Officer, SKS. The connection to what came next started even before Commanders Connection had a name. During the 2005–06 seminar that built it, a guest lecturer — a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel and the founder of Battle Command Knowledge Systems, the Army's own pioneering community-of-practice program — taught several sessions. Mike stayed in touch after taking over the seminar and the growing program, and the two worked closely enough that Commanders Connection's earliest prototype ran on a handful of spare Battle Command Knowledge Systems software licenses, borrowed just to learn how the platform worked. In spring 2011, when Mike told him he was retiring, he offered Mike the Chief Learning Officer role at SKS — by then one of the field's leading voices in social learning and knowledge management. Mike held the role for four years before leaving to found The Mike Hower Company and return to Air University.

The book. During those years at SKS, Mike and his mentor co-wrote Everything You Need to Know about Communities of Practice — not a memoir, but a marketing tool, something to hand a prospective client to show they knew the subject cold. It outlasted its original purpose: people still email Mike today asking for a copy.