What the Air Force Can Do for You

“What can you do When your dreams come true
And it’s not quite like you planned?”

So sang the Eagles, a popular group of the 70s. But today, “After the Thrill Is Gone” might well become the service anthem of the United States Air Force. Despite the magnificence of Desert Storm, despite all the wondrous new technologies and capabilities developed since then, despite all the stuff in the R&D pipeline, air power’s gotten a bad reputation within the Beltway.

“Nobody wants to hear about it,” complained one Air Force officer at a recent “Dueling Doctrines” conference sponsored by CSIS and VII Inc.–a conference that sometimes seemed more a dirge than a duel between air and land power advocates. As for air power’s accomplishments in Bosnia:

“The silence in this town is deafening.”

Perhaps. But if the Air Force message isn’t getting through, the problem may well be that the Air Force doesn’t have a message. Or, more to the point, the Air Force has yet to craft a compelling message. And it won’t, unless and until it comes to terms with its past and its future, and with the irony of its present.

Historically, air power advocates have had a tendency to oversell. Of course they have. Hype makes the world go round. All advocates oversell, and military history is littered with false prophets and seers who were right at the wrong time. Military history is also littered with false negative prophets: those who denied the inevitability of change and who led their countries to greater disasters than the futurists ever contrived.

But what of it? Today, nobody questions the Marines because the British failed at the Gallipoli landing in 1915, or sneers at modern warships because a claque of long-dead admirals resisted the shift from sail to steam. Yet the Air Force finds itself constantly attacked because of what some British or Italian (or American) zealot proposed fifty or seventy years ago . . . or because of some ripped-out-of-context Air Force comments in the aftermath of Desert Storm.

Further, as one colonel pointed out at the conference: “For fifty years, we’ve let other people do our thinking for us.” Many of air power’s most hyperbolic advocates have been civilian defense intellectuals: Herman Kahn, Thomas Schelling, Bernard Brodie. They provided the Big Picture; those in uniform wrote the target lists and called it strategy.

If the Air Force wishes to make a compelling case for 21st century air power, its response to invocations of the past must be:

“That was then. This is now. Our job is not to defend the Dead Prophets Society. Our job is to shape the future.”

And that’s the second problem. The soul of the Air Force has always been the flight crew, and especially the pilot. But the era of manned–or, for the gender-neutral, “inhabited”–flight may be ending. Not immediately, probably not for several decades, but the technological trends, from micro-miniaturization to space-based platforms, point away from cockpits and toward consoles. No other service faces such a threat. Ships will still sail; grunts will keep grunting. Only the Air Force finds its essence imperiled by success.

And thus the service becomes, in many ways, a stranger unto itself, trapped between an irrelevant and burdensome past and a brilliant yet threatening future. Small wonder that it lacks a compelling message, or that its advocacies founder against theories of land war that, in the words of one retired Air Force general, seem “designed to get the maximum number of young men and women within range of enemy fire as quickly as possible.”

Still, the Air Force could have a resonant message, one that both encompasses and transcends all the doctrinal debates over the uses and limits of air power. That message must be based upon one of the greatest ironies in military history.

Fifty years after the Air Force was created as an independent branch, it is now the most vital service . . . to the others. Almost nothing of military significance can happen today without Air Force participation: a condition that will only intensify in the future. And this goes far beyond Air Force combat and airlift operations. It includes all the communications and intelligence support the other services require, services that are migrating into space. Air Force capabilities now suffuse and enable the other services to an unprecedented extent.

Further, the Air Force may develop a similar relationship to the civilian economy and society, as we become more dependent upon space-based assets, as protection of computer systems grows more vital, and as civilian and military technologies interact. Forget the old military-industrial complex horror stories. It is at least conceivable that, in the 21st century, the Air Force may develop a “cavalry” relationship with those operating on the outer and cyberspace frontiers.

So what should the Air Force message be? “We Do It All for You” might be a stretch, and nobody inside the Beltway would believe it, anyway. Maybe “Don’t Leave Home without Us.”

That might work.