AFCWI

From USAFA Folklore

AFCWIs are Air Force Cadet Wing Instructions, a volume of regulations that govern all aspects of cadet life. They include standards of conduct, uniform and appearance standards, the schedule of calls, inspection procedures, and just about everything else. The AFCWIs, which replaced the Air Force Cadet Wing Regulations (AFCWRs), began as a few documents in a single binder, then grew steadily over the years as cadets found and exploited loopholes which the PTB subsequently closed. Ironically, as any smart cadet knows, you can't close one loophole in the regs without opening up two more.

At their height around 2003, the AFCWIs had grown to thousands of pages and could not be maintained in paper form, so they were kept on the K: Drive and referenced using computers. By this time they were filled with hundreds of extraneous and useless regulations such as "cadets will sleep in their beds" and "cadets will not skip steps when walking up the stairs." As a result, in 2004 the regs were reorganized into the Cadet Sight Picture, and condensed to fit a single 1-inch binder which was issued to each cadet. While significantly clarifying many of the regulations and eliminating needless, extraneous text, the Sight Picture reopened many of the old loopholes that the AFCWIs had attempted to close. Almost immediately, the PTB began to issue new pages and write-in changes, once again beginning the slow but certain process of bureaucratic bloating.