Document created: 15 September 03
Air University Review, November-December
1975
a new look from an old rooftop
The Air Force is stepping onto a new plateau of technological sophistication just as U.S. foreign policy finds its footing unusually slippery. It is a time for reappraisal and a detached look at assumptions that have been swept quietly along in the clutter of events.
“Air power” is a term worn smooth by years of friction. Notions about its employment have loosened and tangled. This review of the most evident characteristics of air forces suggests that surprise, shock, and concentration of force are the principles to which they continue to be best attuned. Some recent employment patterns, however, have wandered from these principles, and there is an attendant danger that they will wander still further or wear comfortable grooves of bad habit.
This article does not pretend to be a final word in any way. Much is left unsaid. Gaps and barbs in the treatment will, hopefully, attract counterideas and help to excite both energy and imagination in thinking that addresses the long-range questions facing today’s Air Force.
D.W.S.
THIS article has been written in the belief that the mid-1970s represent an unusually steep divide for military power, and for air power in particular. New concerns and new perspectives challenge, trouble, and in some cases haunt the West. Soviet power grows relentlessly. Terrorism wanders like a disease. Military spending is a mix of relative shrinkage with awesome absolute costs. We have tasted but have not yet digested new weapons technologies. The sense that pressures are great and the outlook confusing, which typifies every view from present to future, is especially strong in 1975.
One possible response, one that may be valuable and stabilizing, is for the Air Force to take a step back and examine its basic beliefs about air power. Paradoxically, this can best be done by lively debate over its future forms. Why, after all, do we have an Air Force? Are there some fundamental principles that still apply to the application of air power? If basic principles can be identified, what are the employment concepts and forms of organization that best express them? In short, is there a framework that can guide Air Force decision-makers and give them something solid to hold onto as they cope with the trade-offs and challenges ahead?
The contrast between early and contemporary thought on the application of air power is interesting and instructive. The giants of theory before World War I and in the colorful decade just after the war were positive and imaginative.
Some of their writing was visionary, some of it was polemic. The stance was
confident, and the ideas in book after book projected the inherent
characteristics of air forces into an open-ended future. Billy Mitchell wrote
in 1925: “In the development of air power, one has to look ahead and not
backward and figure out what is going to happen, not too much what has
happened. That is why the older services have been psychologically unfit to
develop this new arm to the fullest extent practicable with the methods and
means at hand.”1 He was brash, admittedly, but full of energy and
promise. Major General Orvil Anderson echoed Mitchell’s sentiments after World
War II: “If you will only let experience be your teacher,” he warned, “you can
have any damn lesson you want. Progress in the development of military science
and strategy is vitally dependent upon the soundness of the evaluations of past
battle experience and upon the boldness, inspiration and depth of the projected
thinking which creates the solution for the future.”2
The early thinkers had faced a virgin conceptual landscape, a new open flank in a new dimension, and they faced it with the confidence of adolescence. They had more to say because less had been said before. They could dream because there were few facts and little experience to muddy their visions.
Books on the theory of air power went out of fashion not long after World War II. Since then the subject has been treated most often in historical summaries or woven into broader studies on national strategy. The character of the writing has shifted from energy and advocacy to detachment and appraisal.
The initial turn from forward-looking enthusiasm was healthy and appropriate. The war was over. Its lessons had to be distilled and digested. By 1947 the Air Force had won its independence and could muse over those lessons, while developing its internal structure, in some comfort.
One part of the digestion process was the interest and effort given to doctrine in the years after the war. The Air War College Evaluation Staff, under General (then Colonel) William W. Momyer’s direction after June 1951, produced a series of valuable manuals on basic doctrine and its functional elaborations. Because these manuals were to be a blend of outlook and definition, the tension between law and imagination was constant. As General Momyer commented,
We have found from this past year
of research that the writing of manuals is perhaps one of the most difficult
tasks in the field of military writing. It is creative and yet it must be
exact. These requirements dictate thorough research and imagination on the part
of the author in translating the research into a manuscript that is easily
understood and yet is complete in context. Unfortunately, there are very few
individuals who possess this particular talent. . . . For the most part our greatest
difficulty has been a lack of precedent in this field of writing. . . . In this
attempt to strike out on our own, we have encountered many obstacles that were
certainly anticipated, and others that could not be foreseen. Of course, we had
encountered the additional prejudice in respect to what constitutes doctrine,
tactics, techniques, and procedures. Thus, we have been seeking for a level of
writing that has no definition and is not always apparent when one thinks it
has been obtained.3
The manuals, furthermore, were official documents requiring official acceptance and sanction. That meant filters and compromise and a general withdrawal from the precarious forward edges of thought. Writing to Lieutenant General Thomas D. White in early 1951 on the frustrations of producing doctrine, Major General John Barker commented: “It has taken the Air Force five tedious years to get an approved manual on basic air force doctrine.” The many rewritings of the manual had resulted “in no change of importance in the doctrine. The changes were in what to include or exclude, how to express an idea, arrangement of subject matter.”4
Although the borders between ideas, concepts, principles, and doctrine are vague, the broad function of doctrine is to crystallize, not energize, to incorporate compacted complexities, not slice through them to provocative visions. In spite of the attention to doctrine, visionary energy in the Air Force declined after World War II.
On a broader scale, the American experience in and after 1945 has pushed
conceptual thinkers at all levels into deeper and wider thickets of complexity.
The atomic spectacle rightfully attracted the best strategic minds and shifted
strategic speculation both up and around, to a grander perspective and to a
preventive cast of mind. These nuclear shadows have steadily darkened and
multiplied. The peculiar use of forces in Vietnam developed habits of
experimentation and transient expediency. Few thinkers at any level pretend to
understand all the implications of the accelerating and ghostly electronic
technologies. As Alvin Toffler has pointed out with convincing impact, the pace
of change itself and the deluge of information with which we are flooded evoke
a kind of intellectual vertigo.5
One upshot of the limitations of doctrine joined with a perpetually stronger appreciation for complexity, . nuance, and interrelationship is a marked erosion of prophetic conceptual thinking. Nowhere in the Air Force do we see a bold, bubbling fountain of fresh ideas. In the field of concepts the Air Force has become a status-quo institution, feeling middle age and inclined to rephrase proven formulas.
The following conclusion from an article titled, “Aerospace Doctrine in Modern Conflict,” is typical and represents the product of the forces we have noted:
The guiding principle in pursuing
national objectives is to limit military force to those systems and intensities
appropriate for the specific issues at stake. Military forces must be used in a
manner that denies the aggressor his objectives—through persuasion or by
destroying only those forces necessary to achieve satisfactory war termination.
In some instances, it may be necessary to increase the intensity of conflict to
signal our national resolve to prevent the success of an act or a threat of
aggression. This buildup requires superior, useable capabilities to provide the
graduated escalation necessary to convince an enemy that each escalatory step
moves him toward an increasingly critical disadvantage. In sum, we must have
controllable forces which can provide a flexible response to any level of
aggression, supported by strategic superiority at highest level of conflict, if
we are to ensure a credible deterrent posture for the future.6
This may be true but is not very useful. The intellectual product resembles a cotton ball. It can absorb, but it cannot direct.
Somewhere on the fringes of Air Force thought there should be a continuous, lively dialogue based on the fundamental characteristics, capabilities, and limitations of air forces. The focus of this dialogue should be future strength. It should be grand in scope and incisive in tone. Its principal value should lie in stimulation and conceptual energy.
SINCE WORLD WAR II there have been fundamental shifts in perspective that are important to understanding the present conceptual tenor. The simplest shift was from forecast to review. Where once there were theories to test, there were now lessons to formalize. The war was cataclysmic. The impressions it left were varied and deep. The role and value of air power in its conduct became subject to fascination and debate which continues today.
More important is a shift from projecting conceptual notions out of the fundamental characteristics of the weapons possessed to deriving these notions from the nature of the war envisioned. Obviously, there is a relationship between these poles. The shift is incomplete and hard to define.
There are, however, identifiable reasons for this shift, which may clarify its nature and extent. Military thinkers and strategists in general since 1945 have been fascinated by the upper and lower ends of the conflict spectrum. With the first nuclear detonation, Polyphemus appeared in the cave.* Until awe had had time to settle down to a more experienced and relaxed mood of respect, it was difficult for strategists to think about anything else. Avoiding use of the bomb became dominant, but avoidance itself required initiatives. What should they be? And what if the initiatives should fail? What would the character of the battle field become? Was Douhet suddenly valid? What kinds of forces could sustain combat? Would an exchange be spasmodic or incremental? Is there emotional room for serious thought at all on the subject of nuclear war? Questions and speculation about the nature of war itself drove strategic thought to a rarefied plane.
*Polyphemus is a Cyclops, one of a race of one-eyed giants encountered by Homer’s Odysseus on his voyage from Troy to Ithaca. Polyphemus surprised Odysseus’s band of men in his cave and devoured several of them before they blinded him in his sleep and escaped by hiding under the bellies of his sheep.
Gradually, confidence in the various umbrella theories and events in such scattered places as Indochina, Algeria, Angola, and Guatemala diverted a major portion of military theory to guerrilla warfare and People’s War. Although the techniques thus employed had been a part of war through virtually all its known history, they had not been employed so systematically. More important, they had not been postulated so poetically as they were in Chairman Mao’s small red books. Again, from the strategist’s perspective, there were new questions with which to wrestle and tinker. Where exactly is the battlefield? Is it geographic or psychological, or both? What forms should force take to be efficient, or even relevant? The nature of war was crucial.
A key point is that specific, detailed application concepts tended to become derivative, to grow exclusively downward out of visions of the nature of conflict. This is perfectly appropriate as one approach to research and development, one approach to strategy, one approach to the employment of forces. The early thinkers in air power theory used this perspective, working backward from a vision of future war—to possible objectives—to force recipes. But they balanced this pole of perspective with constant concern over the inherent characteristics of the aerial dimension and air forces. What does the new dimension mean? Where are the opportunities it opens? Where are the quicksands? What principles can we distill? This desire to identify inherent qualities in air power and project them gave strength and clarity to early theoretical work.
It was partially the rejection of this angle of vision that led to an unorthodox use of air forces in Vietnam and a tendency to wedge square weapon systems into round holes, with experimentation and economy the liveliest of bedfellows and with the whole drift of the war an inching antithesis of the shock theory of air power. Tactical and strategic results in Vietnam should serve as a caution against the notion that air forces are incrementally efficient or that any weapon system can be rationally applied across the entire spectrum of conflict. Flexibility, interpreted in this way, eventually makes a noodle out of a sword.
The period between World War II and the present has contained as many crosscurrents and logjams as any other. Any casual reader will be able to point out political influences, personalities, countering themes, and complicating examples. The arterial channels in strategic thought, however, show a tendency to ignore the relationship between categorical characteristics of weapons and their employment.
Hopefully, a fresh look from an old direction will bring new energy and clarity to Air Force conceptual thinking. There are some hard, reliable maxims about the application of air power—Have we defended old maxims or sought new ones with sufficient determination? We are nearing a significant watershed in both our international concerns and our technological opportunities, and we should get a grasp of our central convictions about air power and the Air Force before we pass that watershed. Speculation and debate cut the best trail to useful convictions, and speculation about the future is most useful when it is most concrete. The contemporary Air Force will gain both balance and energy from a reconsideration of the emerging nature of weapon systems.
AT LEAST FOUR questions need direct, reasoned response to maintain the Air Force on a confident, theoretical footing with a forward outlook: (1) Do we need an independent Air Force? (2) What are the emerging fundamental characteristics of Air Force systems? (3) What forms of utilization are most appropriate to systems with these characteristics? (4) What are the organizational implications of the emerging force structure?
1. Do we need an independent Air Force?
That we may not need independence is suggested by duplication of equipment and roles among the services, the increasingly evident convergence of weapons toward a common electronic character, the tendency to think and exercise in joint-force packages, budgetary pressures, and a tantalizing element of common sense.
The requirement for an independent Air Force, however, is sustained by more fundamental arguments. In one sense, the environmental consideration is crucial. Somewhere, under some name, there must be a team of thinkers, managers, and operators steeped in the air environment who understand the risks and returns from great speed, distance, and height from the surface of the earth to the depths of space with a sensory and intelligent appreciation for the aerospace experience. We can expect service roles to spill over and mingle at the fringes, that infantry officers will fly and pilots will swim, and that many military operations will be joint. This convergence at the points of application makes specialization in the preparation of military forces all the more important, to achieve the most realistic appraisals and the last ounces of performance. Aerospace forces have a special role because the aerospace environment offers special opportunities and demands special respect. The perspective is unique. Increasing speed and the special opportunities and vulnerabilities of forces in space promise to intensify that singularity. In a healthy military establishment, pragmatism may smear the wiring diagrams, but the core areas of force application will be under the direction of environmental expertise. For as far as we can see from the 1975 platform, the broadest natural boundaries in the military will be defined, as in the past, in environmental terms: land forces, sea forces, and air forces.
Mission effectiveness is further reason for independence and unity of
command. The arguments here are nearly as old as the airplane and need little
embellishment. Air Force striking power ranges freely in its geographic focus,
intensity, and concentration. It is a form of power that cuts but does not squeeze.
The ability to direct and shift this cutting force from the highest, most
informed, and cognizant level is one of the central lessons of twentieth
century warfare. General Eisenhower summarized the case at the end of World War
II, saying that the employment of air forces under a single command “assured a
maximum of flexibility, providing a command structure under which all
forms of available air power could be concentrated on tactical support missions
or on strategic missions, as the situation demanded—in other words, it
permitted the maximum concentration of combat air power at the decisive point
at the decisive time.”7
Unity and independence allow the perceptive concentrations of force at critical points that are the hallmark of air power. Localized control leads to localized perception and application, with a warlording tendency to hoard and spend for limited, local gains.
2. What are the emerging fundamental
characteristics of Air Force systems?
At the bone, these characteristics have not changed greatly from the introduction of the airplane into war. On the other hand, there are important trends that affect the application of air power.
—Aerospace forces can exploit the freedom of maneuver inherent in their medium to reach and influence virtually any spot on or above the surface of the earth. They can do this visually or physically; that is, they can extract information or they can deliver firepower, manpower, and material. They can act or react, assemble and disassemble, with great and increasing speed. Their responsiveness creates a continuous, stabilizing psychological pressure that is active even when unfocused.
—They are increasingly diverse systems, ranging in application from rescue and disaster relief to nuclear delivery.
—They are increasingly visible. The sky and ground are full of unblinking electronic eyes. The technological dynamics of recognition will outrun the dynamics of disguise.
—They are increasingly indirect systems, with standoff weapons and detached target acquisition allowing tangential delivery.
—In application, they are not persistent systems. They can recycle and restrike with exhausting effect, but they cannot grind or squeeze or hold tight. They come and go, with a high percentage of time and energy consumed in the coming and going.
—They enjoy increasing indifference to weather and nightfall, the traditional suppressors of air operations.
—They are, on the other hand, increasingly dependent systems, with a large appetite for fuels and a continuing need to be pampered with maintenance, supply, and guidance. They crave communications and require a roost.
—They are increasingly expensive, both to purchase and to operate. Materials, labor, and the dynamics of technological sophistication will continue to push unit costs upward, inciting abrasive displeasure. Force sizes will become smaller, which will in turn strengthen the imperative to sophisticate. Sophistication brings new anxieties with its new powers, but the risk in falling behind in a major technological lag is obvious. It would be like facing falcons with a flock of pigeons.
3. What forms of utilization are most appropriate
to systems with these characteristics?
—The most effective way to use air power both now and for the future is to eliminate key targets through concentration of force, surprise, and shock. Air forces are an offensive arm, more effective when used with initiative and advance planning than in a reactive role or on missions of opportunity. Merging forces of cost and kill confidence will reinforce this offensive bias.
—Through quick reaction, speed, and diversity, there will be an increase in the ability of air forces to interpose themselves with a specifically preventive aim and to interject a potential for immediate supporting or resisting actions. This interposition, with actual and symbolic impact, will range from rescue to airlift to firing across the bow. The quick erection or bolstering of emotional and physical barriers against aggression will increase in value. Kill confidence and discretion reinforce this argument. Focus itself will be an important deterrent, while readiness across the force spectrum will continue to gain in value.
—Air superiority will become increasingly problematic, with the continuing refinement of electronic acquisition and guidance. Air superiority missions will take on an increasingly point-oriented character, scouring airspace around key command and control terminals, bases, and force concentrations. The most lucrative targets will be on the ground. The air battle will be more and more a matter of electronic acuity and avoidance, less and less a matter of pilot skill and ferocity. It will be important to be aggressive, but more important to be sly.
—The character of close air support will change. Small, accurate antiair weapons will limit access to the battlefield and the approaches to the battlefield for both combatants. The battlefield itself will be increasingly fluid and hard to define. The primary concern of air forces, once the battle is joined, will be disruption across a wide band of enemy activities beyond the battle zone. The distinction between interdiction and close air support will fade.
—As weapons technology moves toward a 99 percent kill probability, wide-ranging, near real-time intelligence will become essential. Without virtually spontaneous intelligence, the force elements themselves will be like muscles moving ahead of the senses. A central lesson of the Vietnam experience is that the acquisition, digestion, and relay of intelligence trails the reactive capability of weapons by an enormous gap. This gap should be closed. For the future, intelligence technologies should be emphasized, and intelligence links should be considered vital. Blind firepower is pathetic.
—As reliance on command and control, delicacy of equipment, and costs increase, the security of key nodes in the support system will take on greater importance. Readiness, initiative, and effect of air forces will rest on converging flows of intelligence, control, maintenance, and supply. Blockage of anyone of these streams can quickly become disastrous.
—Persistence will not characterize air power in the foreseeable future. Its effects can be cumulative, but air power is by nature more like lightning than rain: it is least effective when applied in driblets across a broad front. Its most useful role in war is traumatic disruption to inspire collapse or to allow other kinds of forces to move, enter, and consolidate. Air forces should not hustle targets.
—The nuclear question lies like a fog over the entire discussion. The unknowns are overwhelming, but one certainty is that strategic deterrence in the form of a power reserve and perceived determination will look closely over the shoulder of any conflict short of a convulsive strategic exchange.
4. What are the organizational implications
of the emerging force structure?
—Air forces should be organized for quick reaction. Preparation is vital, in terms of both training and readiness posture. Communications must be open and assured.
—Rising kill probabilities cut two ways. They suggest that a smaller, more refined force may be feasible. They also imply that attrition rates, especially in the early stages of conflict, will be high. For a relaxed or poorly trained force, they could be catastrophic. Lively intelligence, wide dispersal, a taut posture, and sophisticated disguise for both the force elements and key points in the support entourage will be increasingly important. Training for air forces should incorporate as much realism, particularly as much of combat’s extemporaneousness, as possible.
—The inward stream of intelligence and the outward stream of command and control communications must be organized and guarded as carefully as the weapon systems themselves. In future war, decisiveness should be the governing principle for the management of aerospace forces. This will require hard, free-flowing intelligence and virtually instant, secure communications.
GIVEN THE TRENDS and implications identified, there are fundamental internal dangers that must be addressed:
Overall, the vulnerabilities and trade-offs associated with peacetime convenience in organizing and managing the emerging force—impulses to centralize, to consolidate, to let training intensity slacken, and to trade investment in the support structure for hardware numbers-constitute a question that is as important as any individual weapons imbalance vis-à-vis any nation, or the sum of such imbalances.
Hq United States Air Force
Notes
1. William Mitchell, Winged Defense: The Development and Possibilities of Modern Air Power—Economic and Military (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1925), pp. 20-21.
2. Robert Frank Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine: A History of Basic in the United States Air Force 1907-1964 (Maxwell AFB, Alabama: Aerospace Studies Institute, 1971), p. 132.
3. Ibid., p. 354.
4. Ibid., p. 358.
5. Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970).
6. Walter S. Van Cleave, “Aerospace Doctrine in Modern Conflict,” in The United States Air Force by Brigadier General Monro MacCloskey (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967), p. 224.
7. Ibid., p. 60.
Major Dennis W. Stiles (M.A., Georgetown University) is assigned to the Concepts and Objectives Division, DCS/P&O, Hq USAF. He graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1964 and has been an H-3 and HC-130 pilot during most of his career. His last flying assignment was with the 67th ARRSq at Woodbridge, England. Major Stiles won the Commandant’s Trophy in Squadron Officer School Class 68A and was recently named a Distinguished Graduate of the Armed Forces Staff College.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this
document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression,
academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official
position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air
Force or the Air University.
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