Alaska Airman Builds Partnerships, Expands Leadership Perspective Through Indo-Pacific Forum

JOINT BASE PEARL HARBOR-HICKAM, Hawaii — Staff Sgt. Eva Dennison arrived at the Inter-Pacific Junior Enlisted Leadership Forum expecting a professional military education opportunity. She left with a broader understanding of leadership, new relationships with international partners and a renewed interest in supporting future State Partnership Program engagements.

Dennison, a financial operations technician serving in the 168th Wing Comptroller Flight, Alaska Air National Guard, participated in IPJELF 26-1, July 21-27, at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii.

The seven-day forum brought together 18 junior enlisted leaders from the United States and 11 allied and partner nations, including Australia, Canada, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Japan, Thailand, the United Kingdom and Taiwan. The cohort also included members of the Alaska and Hawaii Air National Guards, active-duty military, U.S. Space Force and the Mongolian Air Force Component through the State Partnership Program.

IPJELF is designed to strengthen leadership competence, broaden regional perspectives, enhance strategic awareness and foster international partnerships for national and regional security.

For Dennison, the course description immediately caught her attention.

“I read the course description and thought it sounded right up my alley,” Dennison said. “My degree is in cross-cultural communication, and the summary sounded just like what I like to nerd out about. It absolutely was. It sounded like exactly what I studied.”

On the first day, in the first minute, participants were placed in a practical search-and-rescue scenario. Sitting in an auditorium receiving a mission briefing, the students had to organize themselves into teams and work together despite differences in language, culture, and experience.

“Apart from a little chatting in the halls, none of us knew each other,” Dennison said. “English skills were their second or third language for some of them. We had some barriers.”

Those initial challenges became part of the learning experience. Throughout the week, participants returned to lessons from the exercise while discussing leadership, resilience, mission intent, command and control and multinational operations.

Dennison said one of her biggest takeaways was learning how to apply mission intent and command and control at the junior NCO level.

“It’s stepping back and taking a look at the bigger picture and figuring out what the intent is and how I can help execute that intent amongst my peer-level cohort,” she said.

The course also provided an opportunity to examine leadership during crisis situations. Participants visited Pearl Harbor and worked in breakout groups on a capstone project focused on resilience and leadership. The course culminated in an analysis of how different cultures, economies and militaries could combine their strengths and weaknesses to successfully execute a multinational exercise.

While the classroom instruction provided valuable lessons, Dennison said the relationships formed throughout the week were equally important.

“The people just made the course,” she said. “We were all on the same wavelength professionally and personally. It was nice to connect with peers from a different culture and have so many similarities rather than differences.” Those similarities extended to military humor, family life and the challenges of working with people.

“It was incredibly surprising to me that we all had the same jokes or the same perspectives on a peculiar situation,” Dennison said. “Having that military camaraderie and military humor, it felt the same as banter with an American counterpart.”

Dennison said the experience challenged some of her assumptions about cultural differences.

“You hear about more cultures being more reserved or that sort of thing. No, they were cutting it up,” she said. While language differences can sometimes create challenges during multinational engagements, Dennison said the group quickly found common ground through shared experiences.

“That wasn’t necessarily the case here,” Dennison said. “We bonded a lot over how to navigate difficult people or coworkers. Someone would say, ‘I do it like this,’ and I’d be like, ‘No, no, no — you’ve got to be like that.”

Despite long days in the classroom and limited free time, Dennison also found opportunities to share her familiarity with Oahu culture with members of the cohort. Having visited the island several times, she drove fellow participants to local restaurants, shopping areas and beaches away from the typical tourist destinations.

“It was fun to show them local culture,” Dennison said, adding that the informal experiences helped strengthen the relationships developed in the classroom.

For Dennison, the experience also reinforced the value of her background in cross-cultural communication.

“When you study a specific topic like cross-cultural, it makes you more aware of your own situational awareness,” she said. “My degree helps me to be more mindful in that aspect. It helps me generate ideas on how to approach people with respect.”

That awareness can be especially important when working with international partners, she said. Understanding that different cultures may have different customs, communication styles and expectations can help leaders establish trust.

“When you don’t necessarily know, just learning a quick phrase or gesture can really go a long way when you are working with a team other than yours,” Dennison said

The experience also strengthened Dennison’s connection to the Alaska National Guard’s partnership with Mongolia.

The Alaska National Guard’s State Partnership Program provides opportunities for Alaska and Mongolian military members to develop professional relationships and exchange knowledge through engagements and training. Dennison said she initially did not realize IPJELF was connected to SPP.

“At first, I didn’t realize it was part of SPP,” she said. “I thought it was a cool PME, TDY and some knowledge learning. Getting involved with SPP has been really fun.”

The Alaska-Mongolia State Partnership Program, established in 2003, connects the Alaska National Guard with Mongolia’s armed forces through military-to-military engagements, professional development and training opportunities designed to strengthen relationships, interoperability and regional security.

Working alongside Mongolian military members in a classroom setting offered a different type of engagement than a traditional exercise.

“This is a wonderful way to engage with our state partner equivalents and to get to know them and their military a little bit better for future engagements with our state partner,” Dennison said.

The participants also discovered a shared connection through their environments. Mongolia’s cold, dry climate gave Dennison an opportunity to compare experiences with people who understood what it was like to operate in an Arctic environment.

“A lot of people can’t relate to having such a dry climate that’s so cold,” she said. “I was like, ‘Finally, someone gets it.’”

Dennison hopes to build on those relationships during future engagements and potentially bring some of the leadership concepts from IPJELF to Alaska-Mongolia partnership activities.

“Work toward bringing this course material to SPP engagements in Mongolia would be my end goal,” she said. “It would be incredible to do.”

She also plans to bring the lessons back to the 168th Wing.

“I can talk about experiences working with other partners, whether it is mission command and control or mission intent, and take back some of those scenarios and disseminate that in my job and in my office,” she said. “I can supplement with different topics and new topics.”

For Dennison, the value of IPJELF extended beyond learning how to become a better leader. It demonstrated how relationships, cultural understanding and shared experiences can help build the trust necessary for multinational teams to accomplish a common mission.

“When you don’t necessarily know, just learning a quick phrase or gesture can really go a long way when you are working with a team other than yours,” Dennison said.

After eight years of service in the Alaska Air National Guard, Dennison returned to Alaska with a new perspective on her role as an NCO and a desire to continue building the partnerships that help strengthen security across the Indo-Pacific.

For her, the forum was just the beginning.

“It was great,” Dennison said. “This was just a little scratch of the surface of the State Partnership Program.”

For the Alaska Air National Guard, those relationships are more than professional connections. They are part of building the trust and shared understanding necessary to operate alongside allies and partners in an increasingly interconnected Indo-Pacific.

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