Col. Jim Rossi — James is OK, but Jim is just fine, he said in his simple office at the CRTC base headquarters on Friday — wants to start his new role by listening to the 200 people who bring life to the largest airspace this side of the Mississippi River.

“I want to help,” Rossi said. “I want to help the guy in the air traffic control tower. I want to help the guy in transportation that’s got more vehicles than he knows what to do with that he’s responsible for maintaining. I want to unleash the struggles and the challenges that they have and get those out of their way so they can just focus on their job. That’s my job.”

The News spoke to Rossi two weeks after he officially took over the reigns from former base commander Col. John Miner, who moved on to a job at the Guard headquarters in Lansing.

Now the man in charge of an entire military installation, Rossi enlisted in the National Guard as a 17-year-old kid — for the GI Bill benefits, yes, but also to be a part of something bigger than himself.

News Photo by Julie Riddle Col. Jim Rossi looks through online notes in his new office as commander of the Alpena Combat Readiness Training Center on Friday.

He intended to stay six years, and then head off to law school. His youthful experience in the military changed his plans.

A stint working as a guardsman customer service rep, working behind a counter helping frustrated military people three times his age get their overdue paychecks, gave him a passion for treating everyone he encountered — from bosses to strangers — as a customer to be taken care of.

Trading a future in law for one in uniform, Rossi moved from customer service rep to C-130 navigator to air field manager to pilot, the years enriched by flights to countries around the world and anchored by falling in love and starting a family.

Now, as the new guy in charge in Alpena, Rossi is spending his first days doing a lot of listening.

In sit-down meetings and on-the-fly chats, he asks the people he meets on base, from uniformed officers to civilians: “Tell me about your job. Tell me what you do. Tell me your challenges, the things that are going well.”

News Photo by Julie Riddle Col. Jim Rossi, newly installed commander at the Alpena Combat Readiness Training Center, points out a runway on a map of the CRTC’s campus near the Alpena Regional Airport.

Every time he walks away from those conversations, Rossi said, he thinks, “Wow. Those guys are really sharp. The future’s really bright there.”

As a former group commander at the Selfridge Air National Guard Base near Detroit, Rossi knows how things ought to be done at a military institution. At the CRTC, he said, the level of ownership, patriotism, professionalism, and competence he’s encountered so far is “really off the charts.”

Anticipating arriving to find a mountain of problems piled on his desk, Rossi discovered, instead, organization and preparation — workers at every level aggressively diving in to fix their problems and moving forward to get their work done.

“The community is getting their money’s worth out of the men and women in uniform and the men and women that are supporting all those officers in uniform,” the new commander said. “Inside the fence here, these people are knocking it out of the ballpark.”

In addition to helping people in every part of the base do their work, Rossi will serve as the base’s ambassador to the community, communicating the mission of the CRTC and helping the public realize the importance of each one of the 200 people who work there.

A flowchart on a whiteboard outside Rossi’s office gives a glimpse of the intricacies of running a training center designed to prepare the nation’s military for war.

Information protection officer. Supplies coordinator. Anti-terrorism specialist.

People in charge of putting gas in airplanes. Maintaining scads of vehicles. Preparing 1,000 rooms for people coming to train to get better at dropping bombs and shooting guns.

Workers in the air traffic control tower. People to store munitions safely. Specialists to make it look, to a trainee in an airplane, like a threat is coming their way.

“It takes a lot of effort to get the mission done,” Rossi said.

The mission of the base, he delineated, is simple, for all the work it takes to bring it to fruition: to provide training opportunities for visiting units and organizations so they can get better at what they’re doing.

This spring, much of northern lower Michigan — including the CRTC — was designated the National All Domain Warfighting Center. The new name is a recognition and definition of what the CRTC provides to the safety of the entire country, Rossi said.

Northern Michigan, with its waters and woods, its limestone quarries and available airspace, provides examples of every potential type of conflict a military person might encounter in battle, Rossi said — air, land, sea, cyber, and space.

“If we end up in a conflict with a near-peer adversary, you can bet they’re going to throw every kind of domain at us,” Rossi said, pointing to training as a deterrent for people contemplating attacking the U.S. “We are preventing wars by being good at what we do.”

Rossi — who speaks without military jargon, gives friendly elbow-bumps when handshakes aren’t allowed because of the coronavirus pandemic, and gushes about the newfound computer program replacing the beloved paper-and-pen organizer he lost for a few days in the excitement of getting settled in at the base — is eager to connect with Alpena.

He met recently with community leaders and briefed them on what’s new at the base, but that’s just the start, Rossi said.

Asked what comes next, the new commander wasn’t rattled.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But it’s going to start with conversation.”

Julie Riddle can be reached at 989-358-5693, jriddle@thealpenanews.com or on Twitter @jriddleX.

CORRECTION: This story has been updated to reflect that Jim Rossi was a group commander at Selfridge. That information was incorrect in an earlier version of this story.