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Air & Space Power Journal - Summer 2007

Transforming Air Force Education
for the Long War and Beyond

Lt Gen Stephen R. Lorenz, USAF

Air University is currently in the process of transforming for the “long war” and beyond. The idea of a university reorganizing for war may seem odd, but in the Western way of war, warriors and academics have always enjoyed a close relationship. The West’s first great general, Alexander, was tutored by Aristotle, and when he went to war, he did so with academics in his train. According to noted military historian Victor Davis Hanson, the close relationship between warriors and scholars in the Western way of war is one of the main reasons for its success across the millennia.¹ In the US military, the connection between thinkers and fighters has become closer than ever, and exploiting this relationship to the fullest will prove key to winning the current war. Doing so, however, will require (1) understanding how military education differs from the traditional civilian model and (2) reorganizing our present system of military education to meet the emerging challenge.

The Unique Nature of Military Education

At its core, the US system of military education does not differ significantly from the civilian system. Both are based on the university model of research and teaching that has dominated Western education for centuries. In this model, professors conduct research to push their fields forward. They produce books and articles that they subsequently teach to their students and, in the process, become better educators themselves. This procedure, which systematically turns out better students, faculty, and ideas, has played a significant role in the explosion of knowledge in the West and is largely responsible for the lightning pace of innovation in science and technology today.

Military education, however, differs from most academic fields in a number of ways. First, although hundreds or thousands of schools offer instruction in most fields of study, in the United States only a handful of joint/service schools teach military art and science. Further restricting the breadth of the field, for the most part only those schools associated with certain service sponsors have faculties knowledgeable about particular domains of war. Thus, for instance, we have only one air war college, one land war college, and one naval war college, a situation that places an enormous burden on service-school faculties to research and publish work related to the type of war for which their service is responsible. In most fields of study, if professors do not publish, they can fall back on books and articles published elsewhere to stay current and educate their students. At service schools, however, they are often the only game in town.

A second difference between military schools and the majority of civilian schools involves pure versus applied research. In most fields of study, professors write for academic audiences. Promotion, tenure, and other benefits come from moving academic debates forward. In the civilian world, outside of business, law, and engineering schools, writing for policy makers and practitioners may even have negative connotations since it might appear to sully an instructor’s credentials as an unbiased observer. In military education, however, this relationship is reversed, with practitioners constituting our most important audiences. Military schools conduct, or should conduct, their most highly regarded research for policy makers in Washington, generals in the field, and students in the classroom. Though important, purely academic work does not have the pride of place it enjoys at civilian schools.

A third difference involves urgency. The ideas that we in a military university explore through research and the lessons we teach often pay off—for good or ill—much faster than in other fields of study. For instance, a school’s decision about whether to drop classes on conventional war and add lessons on insurgency this semester or to wait for another year can mean the difference between life and death; its results will show up on the battlefield with the next graduating class. This fact can place more pressure on our schools to change curricula and on military professors to develop new areas of knowledge and expertise than is the norm at civilian schools.

A fourth difference concerns the need to educate a larger portion of our workforce. Both civilian and military sectors desire more educated workers, but we have a stronger impetus. In modern warfare, particularly during times of rapid change, education acts as a massive power multiplier. Today the US military needs flexible and innovative thinkers almost as much as it needs bombs and bullets. Yet realistically, until fairly recently, we have had enough resources to educate only a small fraction of the force. The issue of increasing the size of the educated force carries high stakes.

The Need for Change

Currently the United States finds itself in the midst of geopolitical changes that tax the flexibility of our system of military education. After 9/11, the nation’s military schools worked to integrate lessons on terrorism into their curricula. As the war in Iraq heated up, they added seminars on insurgency. Yet today our schools face an underlying problem vastly greater than updating curricula and changing lessons. Essentially, we confront adaptable enemies who sometimes innovate faster than our own capacity to do so. Stateless organizational structures, ongoing cyber wars, and remote-controlled improvised explosive devices are only the most recent outputs of our enemies’ idea-generating systems. Using innovations produced by these systems, they have found ways to circumvent our ponderous Cold War military apparatus and have pinned down our forces across the globe. Their flexibility at times trumps our material advantages. All too often our enemies appear to be winning this war of innovation.

To answer our opponents, we must improve our system’s ability to produce and disseminate new ideas. This new system must have two parts: it must systematically generate relevant new ideas, injecting them into national debates, and it must develop adaptive, innovative students who can continue the process after they leave our military schools.

Air University has begun to play a role in this war of ideas, but doing so requires significant changes. The core of our strategy here at Maxwell AFB, Alabama, calls for reenergizing the university model of research and teaching that so effectively propels innovation in the civilian sector. This approach is not new to the Air Force. Throughout the 1930s, the Air Corps Tactical School employed it in an effort to confront the specter of a rising Germany and Japan and to develop new uses for emerging airpower technology. Using a combination of theory, history, and field research, instructors at the school wrote the plan employed by the United States in World War II and educated Airmen who developed strategies used by the Air Force for the next half century. Unfortunately at some point during the Cold War, Air University reduced its emphasis on this spirit of innovation and outreach to national policy makers. For the most part, the Air Force outsourced service-related research on military strategy to independent think tanks, and the university became mainly a teaching school.

This neglect of innovation has proved costly to the nation as well as to our faculty and students. Although the Air Force remains the world leader in developing military technology, it lags behind the Army in its ability to produce and disseminate thoughts about how to use its new technology and ideas. By one count, for every book published on airpower today, five appear on ground-centered military solutions. In 2006 the Strategic Studies Institute—the Army War College’s in-house think tank—produced 53 monographs, but during the same period, Air University’s tiny think tank produced only two. When it comes to injecting ideas into national debates, we find ourselves similarly behind. For example, of the military experts regularly featured on Fox News and Cable News Network, soldiers outnumber airmen five to one, and the vast majority of newspaper articles on airpower derive from interviews with ground-power experts. This lack of research production also has secondary consequences. Today the percentage of Air University professors with a strong grasp of air, space, and cyberspace theory and history is small compared to the percentage of land-power experts at Army or Marine schools. At times this dearth of experience shows up in the classroom. I firmly believe that each military school has a duty to develop and disseminate new ideas about the ways its service can assist the nation and contribute to the joint fight in the long war. Air University has not done as well as it could in this area.

Transforming Air University for War

To bring us back into the war of ideas, Air University has begun changing the way it does business. We are treating this endeavor as part of the war effort. Success will require an integrated campaign involving numerous approaches.

First, we are reorganizing our command structure. Although the Air Force originally colocated its schools at Maxwell AFB specifically to develop synergies, at present little overlap exists among the schools. Primarily, a command structure with too large a span of control drives this lack of lateral communication. By centralizing staffs and decreasing such spans, we hope to increase synergy among the schools and enhance their accountability to our Air Force, the joint community, and the nation.

The second set of changes involves providing our instructors with greater resources and incentives to publish on topics related to air, space, and cyberspace. To do this, we are building a new university research institute—an initiative taken by the other services decades ago with good results. We believe that this institute will go a long way toward generating and disseminating ideas about ways the Air Force can contribute to national security. In line with the university model of research and teaching, the institute will have a second purpose: giving Air University professors with innovative air-, space-, and cyberspace-oriented research agendas time away from the classroom to conduct their work. Doing so not only will increase our pool of researchers but also will improve our faculty—and hence the education we offer our students.

On a similar note, we are taking significant steps to give our professors incentives to conduct research on Air Force–related topics. Ironically, in the system that has evolved (partially because of the small audience for air-­related publications), instructors often have greater incentives to research topics unrelated to the Air Force than to examine questions pertaining to air, space, and cyberspace. Similarly, publications aimed solely at academic readers often receive more credit than work intended for policy audiences. Beyond this, the knowledge and expertise that active duty students and instructors bring back fresh from the field often go unheeded because these warriors do not possess academic-level writing skills. To correct these problems, we are asking the schools to reconsider how they reward research and promote professors. Research specifically pertaining to ways that air, space, and cyberspace can contribute to the joint fight will receive the highest honors. Applied research—white papers, group endeavors, and similar projects—will receive as much credit as purely academic work. Skilled writers who coauthor with instructors and students possessing practical experience will receive as much credit as do those who prefer to work alone. These changes should help vector research toward the war effort.

Producing ideas, however, is not enough. To be effective, they must disseminate to the nation’s intellectual centers, so we have launched a number of initiatives to facilitate this process. Every year our students and faculty write hundreds of papers—most of which either appear in forums read solely by academics or disappear onto library shelves. To correct this problem, we have begun to guide student research in directions that answer current questions related to the Department of Defense (DOD), Air Force, and joint community and to catalogue as well as track papers produced at Air University so that relevant audiences can locate them online. We have also created a requirement that students and faculty summarize their work in “blue darts”—short op-eds or influence articles—that we can forward to the DOD, joint service, or media audiences, as appropriate. Beyond this, we have begun to stand up special research teams that can rapidly respond to high-level research taskings, ensuring that DOD, joint, and Air Force policy makers can reach back to Air University for information and expert opinions.

On a more academic front, we have recently launched a new journal, Strategic Studies Quarterly, to help promote debate on high-level policy issues and have created a new online e-mail publication, The Wright Stuff, to quickly disseminate research and ideas to the Air Force audience and beyond. We are also experimenting with a number of other initiatives. We have begun to commission studies on important topics from well-known authors. In addition, we are once again sponsoring symposia that bring policy makers and academics together to discuss important issues and are partnering with civilian and military universities as well as think tanks to help stimulate research and debate on Air Force–related issues. Taken together, these steps and others like them should increase the flow of ideas dealing with air, space, and cyberspace to audiences that can use them. Over time these changes will substantially increase the number and quality of relevant new ideas flowing out of Air University. They will also help develop our faculty and improve the education we offer students.

The third approach aims directly at our student body. As the United States begins to understand the nature of the long war, the need for training in language and regional cultures has become even more apparent. Accordingly, over the last year we have substantially increased our offerings in these areas. To support the Air Force’s new cyber mission, the Air Force Institute of Technology will soon supplement its current graduate curriculum in cyber operations with a 12-month program in cyber warfare. Much like the Air Corps Tactical School’s efforts to pioneer air war in the 1930s, this hands-on initiative engages faculty and students in a combined effort to develop technology and doctrine for fighting in cyberspace. We have also added to the number of courses in other relevant fields such as counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, space, and cyber warfare. Finally, we are currently in the process of revamping our Air and Space Basic Course to do a better job of building the confidence and a warrior ethos that will serve our junior officers for the rest of their careers.

Lastly, we are taking steps to add dramatically to the number of students we educate. Through partnerships with civilian schools, we have been able to exponentially increase the educational opportunities for enlisted Airmen. By 2008 we will begin to offer them the opportunity to pursue a bachelor’s degree. Our new distance-learning program will soon allow us to give all officers a chance to pursue an Air University master’s degree by the 12th year of their careers. We are also attempting to create a new Air University PhD in strategic studies—the first of its kind in the US military—that will greatly increase the pool of doctorate-holding officers from which the Air Force will draw its future senior leaders. Beyond this, we are making major changes in our education of junior officers and in our noncommissioned officer academies as well as taking advantage of new cyber technology to develop communities of practice for squadron commanders. Our goal in all of this is to increase vastly the number of flexible and innovative thinkers in the Air Force.

 Conclusion

In sum, the United States has only now begun to come to grips with the nature of the long war and what lies beyond. Winning this war will require us to leverage our existing strengths. It will require new equipment, new tactics, and, from time to time, even new strategy. But it also requires something more. Our best hope for succeeding in this struggle lies in developing a system that institutionalizes innovation. More than anything else, we need new ideas as well as men and women who, understanding the problems we face, can innovate and adapt to overcome them. The system of military education we continue to pioneer at Air University will take a significant step toward developing this system and, over the long run, defeating our opponents.

1. Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (New York: Doubleday, 2001), chap. 5.