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Updates, Stories & Training Highlights from the Overwatch Project

Before They Lead, They Learn to Save a Life: Project Overwatch Trains 350+ Future Air Force Officers at Embry-Riddle

The nation’s largest university-based Air Force ROTC program just received a new kind of training. One that doesn’t involve flight simulators or field exercises. It centers on a single question that could save a life.

A room of 350 cadets at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, the school that commissions more Air Force officers than any university in America, goes quiet. Not because someone ordered them to be. Because they’re listening.

Standing in front of them is Zachary Salazar, a Marine veteran and Peer Intervention Trainer with the Overwatch Project. He’s not talking about tactics or flight hours. He’s talking about the hardest conversation most of these future officers will ever have, and why learning to have it now, before they pin on rank, could mean the difference between burying a friend and saving one.

Why Embry-Riddle. Why Now.

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University is no ordinary campus. Founded in 1925, it is the world’s largest accredited university specializing in aviation and aerospace. Its Air Force ROTC Detachment 157 on the Daytona Beach campus fields 477 cadets, making it one of the largest detachments in the country. Together with its Prescott, Arizona counterpart, Embry-Riddle forms the largest university-based Air Force commissioning source in the nation, second only to the Air Force Academy.

The Training

The Overwatch Project is the flagship program of FORGE, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and the only national organization working exclusively from within the firearms community on non-political initiatives to end gun suicide. The program operates on an insight backed by decades of peer-reviewed research: put time and distance between a person in crisis and the most lethal means available to them, and you save lives.

The training delivered to those 350+ cadets was a peer intervention framework built around one radical, uncomfortable, absolutely necessary idea: Ask your buddy if they’re okay. Ask if you can hold onto their weapon for a while. Ask if they’d be willing to disassemble it, lock it up, or hand it to someone they trust. Not forever. Just until the storm passes.

Training Tomorrow’s Leaders Today

This event represents a new chapter for the Overwatch Project: bringing peer intervention training to future military leaders before they ever take command. Not after a unit suffers a loss. Not as a reaction. As preparation.

Consider what that means. These 350+ cadets, future squadron commanders, flight leads, mission planners, now carry a practical framework for the hardest conversation in the military. They will bring it to their first assignments, their first deployments, their first real moments of leadership.

The Mission Continues

At Embry-Riddle, 350 future Air Force officers now have exactly that. And somewhere in Kentucky, a cadet is getting ready to have the most important conversation of his life.

The Overwatch Project is the flagship program of FORGE, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. To learn more about peer intervention training for your unit, campus, or organization, visit overwatchproject.org.