MAXWELL AIR FORCE BASE, Ala. -- Culture-packed, pocket-sized, and free to the public, the Air Force Culture and Language Center at Air University continues to expand its Expeditionary Culture Field Guides inventory. This year, three Central American countries have been added to the repertoire: El Salvador, Belize and Guatemala.
“We reach out to the different Air components and develop our field guides based on their requests and needs,” said Mary Newbern, who manages distribution of the guides, “from year to year those needs change and we change accordingly”.
A staple in field readiness and training for the military since 2009, AFCLC adds to its ECFG catalog based on Air Force’s growing requirement. The AFCLC’s expeditionary guides take the traditional military field guides and puts culture and language tips in your pocket. Along with the pocket-sized books, experts at the AFCLC have developed an app for the guides that is free and available to anyone with an iPhone or Android. To date, more than 10,000 service members around the world have downloaded the app and are taking advantage of the new technology. The Wall Street Journal recently described this technology as a “must have” app for travelers.
“It was designed to work without WiFi,” said Mr. Howard Ward, the Air Force Culture and Language Center’s Director, “just search ‘AFCLC’ in the app store and it will download the field guides to your phone. They are uniquely tailored to bring any branch’s men and women into culture while they are immersed in it.”
The guides now cover 27 African, nine Pacific, six Europe, three Middle East (Central Command) and four South American locations, totaling in 49 countries with more countries in queue. Users with the app can select what field guides they want to download and save them to their phone.
Deploying commands, training units, and simply interested individuals from around the Department of Defense can make requests to the Center’s afclc.region@us.af.mil organizational box to place orders for hard copies of the guides.