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Document created: 1 September 2007
Air & Space
Power Journal - Fall 2007
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Lt Col D. Robert “Bob” Poynor, USAF, Retired*
When I entered the Air Force in the early 1970s, I could relate to my job on several levels. First, I was an Airman, part of a military service with a proud and powerful, yet short, history. Second, I was part of Strategic Air Command, Gen Curtis LeMay’s formidable shield that protected America from the commie horde. Third, I was a missileer, a trigger puller in a job with little tolerance for error. Finally, I identified with my squadron; we were the “Odd Squad,” with a different weapon system than the other three squadrons in the wing, a situation that lent itself to an unusual degree of camaraderie.
This self-identification on several levels is not unusual. Within any given population, a common identity will arise with which the group identifies. This cultural identity serves to bind its members together and is part of normal socialization. There’s nothing intrinsically bad about any of this—again, it’s quite normal behavior.
Problems can emerge when people identify themselves too strongly with one of the lower-level identities at the expense of a larger group identity—a phenomenon called “tribalism.” I believe that tribalism in the Air Force—identification with one’s career field—has recently become too strong and in fact interferes with the average Airman’s ability to identify with the overarching Air Force culture and mission. Arguably, this also may have deleterious effects when it comes to thinking about war fighting.
Many younger Airmen don’t see anything wrong with their embrace of tribalism within the service. After all, multicultural tribalism, which in our society results in the “hyphenated American,” is just part of the background noise in contemporary American society, especially for those who grew up from the latter 1980s onward when this phenomenon became prevalent. Having been raised in it and absorbed it, many young Airmen feel at ease identifying with groups. However, tribalism can be anathema to military culture. In order to explain why this is an issue within the service, we must first look at how and why this phenomenon appears in society. (What follows is a thumbnail summary gleaned from numerous readings. Readers may disagree with my viewpoint.)
Multicultural tribalism is a contemporary manifestation of cultural Marxism, which in its original model consciously sought to delegitimize and eventually destroy capitalist Western society. One key method entails chiseling away at national cohesion by fostering divisions among the population. Initially this division followed classic Marxism by emphasizing economic differences; more recently, it has expanded to include other criteria, most notably race, gender, and ethnicity. Emphasizing differences between tribes thus becomes politically useful since achieving national consensus becomes more difficult. Closely allied with tribalism is the process of establishing the political value of grievances against the “dominant culture”—usually interpreted in the United States as white, male, and Christian. This victimhood seeks redress of perceived grievances of the past through mandatory restructuring of society, usually through proportional representation (i.e., quotas) of “oppressed” groups. This approach attacks the classic liberal notion of achievement through merit and emphasizes equality of outcomes, not opportunity.11 It also erodes confidence in the nation to govern fairly, thus aiding the goal of delegitimization.2
How does this admittedly dense foray into social politics affect the Air Force? Airmen are products of the culture in which they were raised; thus, they unconsciously bring with them into the service some of the background social issues they’ve absorbed, so identification with a tribe in the form of a career field doesn’t seem unusual.
This is exacerbated by dramatic changes in career-field demographics that have occurred since the Air Force’s inception. When the Air Force was established, its main mission was flying. Every Air Force base had a runway, and the service had literally thousands of aircraft of all types. Because no one was very far from “the sound of freedom” coming off the ramp, everyone could easily relate to the unofficial Air Force mission of flying and fighting. Since those early days, however, the number of aircraft has declined dramatically as each platform became more effective. Also, as technology expanded, entirely new career fields grew up, most noticeably space- and information-related specialties, as well as other increasingly sophisticated support functions. Thus, over the past few decades, fewer and fewer Airmen related directly to flying operations, and the number of pilots, who comprise our warrior class and previously held most leadership positions, dropped correspondingly.
Aggravating this picture is the Air Force’s tendency to identify with technology instead of a unifying theory of war and to organize in peacetime around technological stovepipes.3 Airlifters identify themselves with Air Mobility Command, fighter pilots with Air Combat Command, space personnel with Air Force Space Command, and so forth. However, the Air Force’s war-fighting organization is the air and space expeditionary task force, comprised of forces tailored for a specific mission. Apparently, the Air Force begins thinking in terms of something approaching a combined-arms model only when it actually goes to war.
Arguably, the service’s changing view of itself has not helped. For most of its early existence, we talked of “airpower.” Around the 1990s, we expanded the vision to “aerospace power” in recognition of the increasing value of space and, later, information power. In 2001 the Air Force shifted to “air and space power,” supposedly (in classic multicultural language) to “acknowledge the inherent differences in the two media and the associated technical and policy-related realities.”4 The Air Force now talks about “Air, Space, and Cyberspace.”5
These changes have implications for how Airmen think about applying their capabilities. Of all the services, only the Air Force lacks an organic-employment paradigm in which its forces function in some sort of combined-arms model. Instead, we tailor our force packages and provide them to the joint force commander through a joint force air component commander. Even so, the Air Force is trending toward functional stovepiping in organization and employment. US Transportation Command centrally manages intertheater air mobility, the latter represented in-theater by a director of air mobility forces; similarly, US Strategic Command centrally manages space capabilities, represented by a director of space forces. In emerging discussions about cyberspace, some people have suggested centrally managing all cyberspace forces and perhaps presenting them through a director of cyberspace forces. I recently read a suggestion for a “director of unmanned aerial systems” to represent that community (admittedly, I’m not sure about the seriousness of that last suggestion). I have also reviewed a proposal from the other services’ medical communities to create their own US Medical Command (strongly resisted by the Air Force’s medical community). In each instance, a functional stovepipe is forming to optimize some aspect of operations and organization.
Another occasionally heard argument supporting some of this stovepiping concerns the complaint that “pilots don’t understand what we can do”—the in-service manifestation of the victimhood meme mentioned previously as another aspect of cultural Marxism. It has no place in the Air Force, but the fact that it comes up at all offers another indication of how deeply those entering the service have internalized the hyphenated-American model.
An unfortunate consequence of these tribal arrangements is that these stovepiped capabilities, with their associated command and control, may be severable from the commander of Air Force forces (COMAFFOR) and plugged anywhere into a joint force. This presents the possibility of a lack of unity of command of Air Force capabilities because they could be penny-packeted out across a joint force, leaving the COMAFFOR with only regionally based, fixed-wing strike forces. It amounts to optimization at the tribal level at the expense of the larger institution. This profound challenge to how the Air Force organizes and presents forces is happening without the institutional scrutiny I believe it warrants.
A key part of solving the Air Force’s fractured self-vision involves a conscious return to a unifying concept about what the service offers to the nation. Instead of stringing more and more adjectives together (i.e., air, space, and now cyberspace), we should return to simply “airpower” and define it as something more unitary. In short we must stop institutionalizing tribalism by offering an easily grasped vision that binds all Airmen together.
(I’m not saying that all tribalism is bad. At the micro level, identification with a unit is certainly healthy, especially in combat forces, for building esprit and fostering teamwork. I see the problem at the macro level, when Airmen try to articulate what airpower presents. Too frequently, tribalism gets in the way.)
In fact, the Air Force is investigating such a unitary model in the current revision of its basic-doctrine publication. However, the service appears on the cusp of taking the expedient path with a proposed airpower definition that conveniently links to its new mission statement, defining airpower as “the synergistic application of air, space, and cyberspace capabilities to project global strategic military power.”6 This is a case of one step forward, two steps back. By explicitly linking the definition of airpower to the three domains of the mission statement, the Air Force again identifies itself with technological stovepipes—and in terms of a very contemporary view.
I suggest that the Air Force devise a definition of airpower that encompasses the broad concepts which underpinned the original rationale for a separate service—something along the lines of “exploitation of the vertical dimension of the operational environment to leverage elevation, speed, range, and transparency to project national power at long ranges and on short notice.” Such a definition should explain what Airmen do as well as how and why they apply military power. Arguably more timeless than something that speaks in terms of current trendiness, it should not tie itself to the technological solution of the moment.
Before the Civil War, people thought of the United States as a collection of separate entities—“the United States are. . . .” After the war, the perception changed to a unitary whole—“the United States is. . . .” The question for the Air Force becomes whether we are a collection of tribes or some unitary whole—Airmen. If the latter, what is the overarching expression of our identity?
Maxwell AFB, Alabama
* Mr. Poynor is a military doctrine analyst at the Air Force Doctrine Development and Education Center, Maxwell AFB, Alabama. He is the editor of Air Force Doctrine Document (AFDD) 1, Air Force Basic Doctrine, 17 November 2003, and AFDD 2, Operations and Organization, 3 April 2007.
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Notes
1. One should not confuse the philosophical notion of classical liberalism (with a small “l”) with the current political manifestation of Liberalism (with a capital “L”). Classic liberalism stresses “the importance of human rationality, individual property rights, natural rights, the protection of civil liberties, constitutional limitations of government, free markets, and individual freedom from restraint.” Cultural Marxism has co-opted the contemporary usage of Liberalism into the opposite of its original meaning—“a revival of the very policies of state intervention and paternalism against which classical liberalism fought.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, s.v., “Classical Liberalism,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism.
2. For example, see a summary of John Fonte’s article “The Ideological War within the West” at American Diplomacy, 10 June 2002, http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/archives_roll/2002_04-06/fonte_ideological/fonte_ideo logical.html.
3. See Carl H. Builder, The Icarus Syndrome: The Role of Air Power Theory in the Evolution and Fate of the U.S. Air Force (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994).
4.“Terminology,” Doctrine Watch, no. 18 (15 August 2002), https://www.doctrine.af.mil/afdcprivateweb/DoctrineWatch/DWArchive.pdf.
5. Gen T. Michael Moseley and Michael W. Wynne, “SECAF/CSAF Letter to Airmen: Mission Statement,” 7 December 2005, http://www.af.mil/library/viewpoints/jvp.asp?id=192.
6. Based on discussion during the current revision of Air Force Doctrine Document (AFDD) 1, Air Force Basic Doctrine, 17 November 2003.
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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