Retiring general makes final tour

Air Force chief Schwartz, wife visit base that launched him

Gen. Norton Schwartz, Air Force chief of staff, talks about his impending retirement last week at Little Rock Air Force Base, where he served in the early 1980s. President George W. Bush appointed him to the Joint Chiefs panel in 2008.
Gen. Norton Schwartz, Air Force chief of staff, talks about his impending retirement last week at Little Rock Air Force Base, where he served in the early 1980s. President George W. Bush appointed him to the Joint Chiefs panel in 2008.

— Gen. Norton Schwartz, chief of staff of the Air Force, returned home to Little Rock Air Force Base last week for his farewell tour of the base that was the foundation on which both his career and his personal life were built.

Schwartz, 60, retires from the Air Force in October and will hand the reins of the service over to incoming Chief of Staff Gen. Mark A. Welsh III later this summer.

Sitting in comfortable cream-colored chairs at the base’s flight operations building, Schwartz and his wife, Suzie, fell into a familiar and relaxed repartee far from the Washington Beltway and its budget battles. The base provided a comfortable retreat for the man, who leads the U.S. Air Force, and his spunky Arkansan wife, who has rallied spouses and pushed for family support in recent years as the “five-star general” of the Schwartz household.

Suzie Ptak of Jacksonville married then-Capt. Schwartz 31 years ago in the Little Rock base’s unassuming chapel. Schwartz had flown C-130 missions in the evacuation of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War by that time and was completing his first stint at the Pentagon.

“He was everything I wasn’t,” Suzie Schwartz said last week. “He was stable and secure and very focused. [Friends who set them up] just thought we’d be the perfect fit.”

That stability and focus fueled Schwartz’s career.

He took over an Air Force in crisis in 2008, shortly after President George W. Bush fired Gen. Michael “Buzz” Moseley as chief of staff in the aftermath of a nuclear weapons scandal and conflicts with the other service chiefs. Since then, Schwartz has worked to increase discipline in the ranks with a stricter dress code and has faced the biggest budget cuts in Air Force history.

The Budget Control Act passed last year calls for a $487 billion budget reduction in military spending, resulting in major shifts and deep cuts proposed across the force. The Arkansas Air National Guard is lined up for two cuts in the 2013 military budget proposal moving through Congress.

If approved as submitted, the 188th Fighter Wing will trade its A-10 Warthog close air support jets for a mission piloting remote-controlled drones flying in locations around the world. The current budget also cuts the C-130 AMP avionics upgrade at the 189th Airlift Wing.

“Our choice was simply to get smaller in order to maintain quality,” Schwartz said. “We think that’s the right strategy; that manifested itself in many ways, like the 188th. But the bottom line is we think it is a better approach, given the resource constraints we have, to get smaller to remain the best and highest-quality Air Force on the planet.”

To congressional leaders who have repeatedly asked him to reinstate some programs set to be cut to meet the budget decreases, Schwartz has calmly said they should show him the money to fund them. He warned that spreading the limited funds too far would create a hollow force unable to operate effectively.

“We’ve always been about change,” he said, as his wife nodded, reflecting on her three decades as an Air Force spouse.

“This is what we have to adapt to,” the general said. “It is clearly a requirement for inspired leadership at every level. It’s a requirement for us to explain the rationale for what we’re doing and why it makes sense for the longer term. We have to do our best to deal with the human issue that results from it. That is square in the middle of our radar screen. But status quo will not work.”

Suzie Schwartz said she wishes people realized how hard those decisions were for the Joint Chiefs to make.

“It does hurt my heart that after 10 years of unbelievable stress on the force, that the budget crisis comes at a time when we have asked so much and [airmen] have done so much willingly, and suddenly we are turning on a dime,” she said. “I wish it would have been a little more gradual for them.”

The decisions were not easy, the general admitted, but streamlining the force based on the “facts and best analysis we could come by” was the best move for long-term sustainability, “so we dealt with it as straightforward as we could.”

He has managed his entire career with the same directness and focused, analytical approach. “Norty” Schwartz doesn’t mince words, even at home.

He proposed to Suzie over the phone from the Pentagon.She said it remains the worst proposal in history. She has told the story at countless parties, and no one can top it.

Schwartz smiled broadly and faintly chuckled as he glanced at his wife.

“He called me at my parents’ house and said, ‘I bought a stone, you have to pick out a setting,’” she said. “That was it, that was the proposal.”

They picked out a setting and walked down the aisle of the Little Rock Air Force Base chapel in 1981. Over the years, they have quietly returned to Arkansas to visit Suzie’s family, but they won’t be retiring here. They’ve found a home to rent in Washington for now, until they can find the right house “with a garden for Ms. Suzie,” Schwartz said.

And after some time off to distance themselves from their recent service and allow Walsh to settle into his role, the Schwartz duo will find new ways to get involved.

Reflecting on their lives always takes them back to the C-130 Hercules and Little Rock Air Force Base. And that experience all happened by accident. Schwartz had asked to fly F-4 fighters when he graduated from the Air Force Academy.

The Air Force gave him the C-130, and he quickly fell in love with the crew mentality and “the bare-knuckles and dirty-fingernails approach to the mission.”

Schwartz said the lessons he learned about teamwork in the Hercules community helped form his leadership philosophy.

“Both the responsibility of accomplishing missions, the autonomy that this mission affords aircrews and aircraft commanders, and the requirement for managing risk,” he said. “When things are important enough to extend oneself and one’s crew and when things aren’t. All of that fed into my ability to operate as an airman and ultimately as a joint officer.”

In a C-130, officers and enlisted airmen work together as a team during missions, and they bond, like family. A loadmaster Schwartz flew with in1976 will be at his retirement ceremony.

Now a retired senior master sergeant, he taught Schwartz as a young pilot what effect his actions have on a crew.

“I used to chew gum,” he said. “And I was chewing gum on a hot mike [an open microphone in the plane communication system].”

The loadmaster came up to him and put a large hand heavily on his shoulder as he flew and said, “We don’t chew gum on hot mike.”

Schwartz has received a Christmas card from him every year since.

“It’s about a crew all coming together to make the mission happen, a mix of all kinds of personalities.” Schwartz paused with a smile that extended to his eyes. “It was family business.”

Arkansas, Pages 7 on 06/25/2012

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