Air Force Col. Kathryn Gaetke poses alongside her husband, Col. Matthew Gaetke, at Osan Air Base, South Korea, July 27, 2023. (David Choi/Stars and Stripes)
OSAN AIR BASE, South Korea — When the 51st Operations Group at this U.S. air base south of Seoul changed commanders recently, few failed to notice the incoming and outgoing colonels shared the same last name.
Col. Kathryn Gaetke took over on June 14 from her husband, Col. Matthew Gaetke, who moved over to lead the 607th Air Operations Center at Osan.
Married 21 years and the parents of two daughters and a son, the Gaetkes are also F-16 Fighting Falcon pilots with more than 3,800 flight hours, including nearly 850 hours in Iraq and Afghanistan, between them.
Air Force regulations forbid spouses from working in each other’s chains of command, but the Gaetkes have managed throughout their military careers to stick together, often by taking assignments in out-of-the way places like Cannon Air Force Base on the plains of eastern New Mexico.
"Because we can’t be in charge of each other, we’ve always been next to each other,” Matthew Gaetke recently told Stars and Stripes at his wife’s office near Osan’s airfield. “Which makes it harder for anyone to point the finger and say that one of us was really helping the other — except to the extent that by helping and coordinating things that you’d otherwise want to do.”
The couple admits their relationship permits them to help their respective organizations by sometimes helping each other.
“We’ve been in some places where we’ve been able to capitalize on the level of trust and communication in ways that not every commander-to-commander relationship can [achieve],” Kathryn Gaetke said.
Air Force Col. Matthew Gaetke, center, passed command of the 51st Operations Group to his wife, Col. Kathryn Gaetke, at Osan Air Base, South Korea, June 14, 2023. (Tristan Truesdell/U.S. Air Force)
Before taking command of the operations group, she was director of operations and plans for 7th Air Force, also at Osan.
She described her husband as the ideal “study partner” and that they “learned from each other’s mistakes.”
The couple met in 1998 as undergraduates and ROTC cadets at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was a freshman majoring in mechanical engineering and he was a sophomore in electrical engineering and computer science.
After an on-and-off relationship, the Gaetkes were engaged in 2001 and married a year later.
With their commissions and diplomas in 2001 and 2002, the couple pursued their mutual goal of flying the F-16, a single-engine, supersonic, multirole fighter.
Matthew Gaetke attended flight school a year after his wife at Vance Air Force Base, Okla., a fact he said led to light ribbing from his instructors.
“The F-16 wing instructors said things like, ‘Your wife was a lot better at this than you are,’” he said. “I think they wanted me to get mad — but yeah, she’s also better looking, smarter and more pleasant than me. Why does it surprise you?”
Despite the odds, the couple managed to stay relatively near each other throughout their careers, due in part, Matthew Gaetke said, to “great leaders” in the Air Force.
“I can, at each point, name those who stuck their necks out or worked hard behind the scenes … to try to align some of these things because all of them seemed low probability at the time,” he said.
Kathryn Gaetke said their circumstance is the result of hard work from “people making the system work for people.”
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that ‘sooner or later, you’re going to have to pick one of your careers,’” she said.
The colonels and their children are planning another change of duty station next year.
“We’ll start all of the same processes again for what comes next,” Kathryn Gaetke said. “We’ll have to see what happens.”
