Airmen can now wear “morale” T-shirts on Fridays and rock nametags with their callsigns on daily flight duty, according to a new dress policy released this week.
The Friday fun day uniform rules are among the first policy changes announced by newly-confirmed Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, who was sworn in as the Air Force’s top officer on Nov. 3.
Now, look, we get that a four-star general announcing that everyone gets to wear a fun shirt once a week isn’t typically newsworthy, but the U.S. military is one of the only professional organizations where grown adults will scream at each other over the type of undershirt they’re wearing and whether or not their facial hair is a quarter of an inch too long. So, when an entire branch decides to loosen up, it’s a bit of an outlier.
And for its part, the Air Force has a wishy-washy history with allowing, and then banning, morale t-shirts and nametags. In 2014, the service issued an update to “welcome back” colored T-shirts, and then OK’d both T-shirts and callsign tags again in 2023, before banning them service-wide in February of this year.
Airmen are now allowed to wear their callsign nametags on flight duty and desert flight duty, according to the memo. Officers’ nametags can have their callsign or first name, followed by their last name, and enlisted airmen can have their rank, followed by the callsign and last name.
“Our uniform reflects years of Airmen bound by a proud heritage and united in shared purpose. It connects us to those who came before and signals professionalism, discipline, and continued unity in today’s force,” Wilsbach wrote in a service-wide memo.
Callsigns among flyers are a tradition as old as the service, but pilots and aviators do not choose their own callsigns. Rather, airmen are usually assigned a nickname by peers early in their flying career based on an eccentric point of their personality or a particularly memorable screw up on the job. Some present as abbreviations, like PITA (“Pain in the Ass”), VIGIT (“Village Idiot”) or MOTO (“Master Of The Obvious”), military aviators told Task & Purpose.
The memo also authorizes airmen to wear a colored “morale” T-shirt at work on Fridays under utility uniforms. The T-shirt color must “reflect the authorized heraldry and heritage colors” of their unit and can’t be worn by airmen while deployed, participating in an exercise or assigned to a joint or Space Force unit.
Are you taking advantage of the new policy? Send us a photo of your workplace under the new rules, and we’ll put the best ones up.
