Major Rolando Perez graduated from UNL in 2005. He commissioned as an Air Battle Manager in the USAF, and has served on several platforms utilizing the geographic knowledge he obtained at UNL. He has over 2,200 flight hours aboard the E-8C Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS) aircraft serving as an Air Weapons Officer (AWO), Sensor Management Officer (SMO) and Senior Director (SD). As a SMO, Maj Perez utilizes the remote sensing/GIS/cartographic skills he learned in UNL's Geography Department in the application of a Moving Target Indicator/Synthetic Aperture Radar. Those same skills were applied managing/piloting the ScanEagle UAS in combat operations.
As a Senior Director and Wing Plans Officer, he actively applied skills obtained through physical, cultural and urban geography classes.
Maj Perez has nine deployments in support of OPERATIONS IRAQI FREEDOM, ENDURING FREEDOM, NEW DAWN and INHERENT RESOLVE.
His history as a secondary educator through UNL enabled him to become an Air Force flight instructor and evaluator in minimum time. Those skills enabled him to graduate the United States Marine Corps Weapons and Tactics Instructor Course, where he has served as a joint augment instructor.
Maj Perez currently serves as the chief of Air Battle Manager training at the 129th Combat Training Squadron at Robins AFB, GA. In these duties, he instructs and evaluates over 100 student AWOs, SMOs, and SDs annually as a full-time member of the Georgia Air National Guard.
