The top wing commander in the Wyoming Air National Guard and a senior group commander were fired from their positions July 17 by the unit’s commanding general, state officials said.
Col. Brian Diehl was relieved as the commander of the 153rd Airlift Wing, the state’s only flying wing. Col. Lawrence Sullivan was fired at the same time from command of the 153rd Operations Group, which directly oversees the daily flight operations for the Wyoming Air National Guard.
As is typical in relief announcements across the U.S. military, state officials released a brief statement attributing the firing to a “loss of confidence and trust in their ability to effectively lead and command” with no other details.
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Diehl, according to an online resume, spent much of his flying career as an airlift pilot in the Wyoming Air Guard. The wing flies C-130Hs on a wide range of missions, from strategic airlift to firefighting missions in western U.S. states to Antarctic resupply flights. Diehl also had a string of mid-career assignments with Air Force special operations units, including command of an MQ-9A drone squadron, before returning to the Wyoming wing in 2023.
Sullivan took a notably different path to the Cheyenne-based airlift wing. According to a de-listed biography available on an internet archive, Sullivan enlisted in the Army in 1988 and commissioned in 1991 as a helicopter pilot. He transferred to the Air Force in 1998, where he spent close to two decades flying Air Force search and rescue helicopters in the New York Air National Guard. He joined the 153rd in 2024.
The Wyoming Air Guard’s senior officer, Brig. Gen. Barry Deibert, did not specify why the two commanders were relieved, but included a statement that “Air National Guard leaders are held to the highest standards of professional conduct, responsibility and reliability. When those standards are not met and that trust is broken, we must take appropriate action to uphold our core values, ensure command integrity, and restore the high standards of professionalism and accountability that our Airmen, our state and our nation expect of us.”
Senior commanders are frequently relieved of command in every military service and the relief of more than one leader in a chain of command is not particularly unusual. Command reliefs occur for a wide range of reasons that can include on-the-job performance, personal misconduct, or particularly notable failings or mishaps among subordinates.
The 153rd Wing’s primary flying unit is the 187th Airlift Squadron, which flies C-130Hs, and was in both Diehl and Sullivan’s purview in their roles. As the operations group commander, Sullivan also oversaw a flight support squadron, an associated aeromedical evacuation squadron and an air traffic control squadron.
As wing commander, Diehl was the top commander over Sullivan’s ops group and the wing’s maintenance, logistics, security and medical units.
The reliefs were first reported by the Wyoming Tribune Eagle.
