The following are the author’s views and opinions only.

Step One: Identifying the Problem.

 A Military Service in Search of an Identity

 The dust has settled and the smoke has cleared. The Air Force finds itself under a new leader, Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, and facing an uncertain future. A debate roars over the service’s problems and how Gen. Schwarz should fix them. Should he focus on shoring up the strategic nuclear mission, repairing the broken acquisitions system, or concentrate on unmanned aerial vehicles? In fact, all of these issues are only symptoms. The first step in fixing the Air Force is discovering the common fundamental underlying problem - the US Air Force has lost its core identity.

Why do we have a separate Air Force? What makes Airmen different from Soldiers, Sailors and Marines? Those serving in Air Force blue, even senior officers and NCOs, often can’t convincingly answer those two questions.

Ever meet or know someone who has an identity problem? They’re easy to spot. They frantically dash about, from fad to fad. Flighty, they often they change their outward appearance with the latest fashions. They’re unfocused, trying to do everything at once and not doing anything particularly well. They don’t recognize what’s truly important in their life. Then, usually in response to a crisis, they wake up and can’t understand how things got so messed up. This has been the case with the US Air Force since the end of the Cold War.

How the Air Force Lost Itself

Here’s a little history lesson on how the Air Force got where it is. At the end of the Cold War the service found itself searching of core missions. For almost 50 years the Air Force was primarily identified by two unique organizations – Strategic Air Command (SAC) and Military Airlift Command (MAC). Those two major commands did what no other service was capable of doing: delivering death or stuff to any point on the globe in a matter of minutes or hours, all from US soil. The Air Force did what no one else could do; it had a clear purpose and unique identity. While the Air Force had tactical aviation assets like fighters, so did the Navy and Marines.

However, it was tactical aviation which carried spotlight during Desert Storm and therefore set the tone for Air Force thinking in the next decade. While MAC effectively just changed names, SAC was disbanded completely. Its remaining assets were placed under the tactical-centric Air Combat Command. The old core Air Force began to rot while tactical assets fell into a rut patrolling no fly zones over Iraq.  

Over the next decade the Air Force began to flounder. It poured immense resources into now forgotten fads like Total Quality Management and the ‘paperless Air Force’. Great emphasis was placed on slick new uniforms. The entire service seemed preoccupied with the trivial and neglected what truly made it unique among the services – strategic airpower and airlift. The last new airlifter and bomber models (C-17 & B-2) were products of the Cold War. Other promised new aircraft either failed to materialize or took over 20 years to deliver (F-22 & V-22). When 9-11 came, the service found itself ill-equipped and unsure of its future roles. Recognizing the impending crisis, the service bought new uniforms. 

Then, one day, the Air Force collectively woke up and couldn’t understand how things got so messed up. It lost some nukes (but found them), lost some nuke components (but found them, too), had a 30 year old fighter simply disintegrate in flight, lost key political turf battles over weapons and missions with its sister services, and it couldn’t cut through its own bloated bureaucracy to buy new tankers and helicopters. Secretary Gates politely tried to warn the service, but the leadership seemed deaf. So he fired the Secretary of the Air Force and Chief of Staff on the same day. 

In my opinion, these are signs this unfocused military service no longer really understands itself or its overall mission. So how does the service fix it? Start with a single word - Airman.

What’s an Airman?

According the gospel of Air Force Doctrine Document 1-1:

Air Force airmen are those people who formally belong to the US Air Force and employ or support some aspect of the US Air Force’s air and space power capabilities. The term airman is often used in a very narrow sense to mean pilot. An airman is any person who understands and appreciates the full range of air and space power capabilities and can employ or support some aspect of air and space power capabilities.

This statement was obviously written by a committee. What does it mean ‘formally belong to the US Air Force’? Does that mean Department of the Air Force civilians? What about contractors? The janitors at Air Force headquarters support some aspect of the air and space power capabilities, are they Airmen, too? This sentence is even more interesting: An airman is any person who understands and appreciates the full range of air and space power capabilities and can employ or support some aspect of air and space power capabilities. This means every Navy, Army and Marine Corps aviator is now an Airman. The sheepish sentence in the middle is thrown in almost apologetic: The term airman is often used in a very narrow sense to mean pilot.This is definition has been watered down and lawyered up to the point it’s practically meaningless. Why?

There are two reasons this official definition vague. First, as I’ve stated before in this blog, the vast majority of those wearing Air Force blue have little to do with aviation. For those unfamiliar with an Air Force wing, it is divided into groups, such as operations, maintenance, mission support, and medical. Functions outside the operations and maintenance groups, while tailored to support aviation, are not solely unique to the service. Are the vital and necessary for the Air Force mission? Yes. Are they dedicated professionals and the best at what they do? Absolutely. However, in technical jargon, their mission essential tasks are common throughout the military as a whole. These include contracting, medical, personnel, legal, contracting, civil engineering, pay, etc. To emphasize the point, these support personnel are being routinely siphoned off by the thousands to augment ground forces. The opposite is also true – aviation functions from other services often support collocated Air Force aviation assets; which brings us to the second problem.

Bluntly put, there is little about the Air Force which is unique. The Navy has satellites and intercontinental missiles. The Navy and Marines have many excellent tactical fighters. The Navy uses contractor aerial tankers. The Navy and Marines have C-130s and airlift. The Army has UAVs and cargo airplanes. The Marines have V-22s and everyone has more helicopters than the Air Force. About the only things the Air Force can call its own are bombers, strategic airlifters, the venerable F-15 and a handful of F-22s.

So, this is the underlying core problem from which all the Air Force’s other problems spring forth:

The Air Force lacks a uniting, common identity because most of its personnel aren’t associated with aviation and the other services have robust aviation branches which do many of the same tasks as the Air Force. There are very few mission essential tasks unique to the Air Force.

Does this mean there is no place for a separate Air Force? No, it just means the service has done a poor job defining itself. The second step in fixing the Air Force is defining what an Airman truly is (without using a committee or being politically correct). This will happen in Part Two of this series.