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Published Airpower Journal - Fall 1987
OLD DIONYSIUS often employed an artful device to keep tabs on his kingdom. By listening above an ancient quarry in Sicily, at a convenient orifice where the chasm tapered to a virtual ear trumpet, he could monitor expressions of divergent viewpoints. The informed monarch would then act to defuse criticism or to redirect policy. Of course, he was not an enlightened bureaucrat. A few people were killed. He was just beginning to wield the informational instrument that Stalin perfected centuries later with his diabolical policy against "state wreckers." Nonetheless, the ancient tyrant was onto something of benefit to more benign megaorganizations like the United States Air Force. It is never too late to provide safe channels for the upward flow of informal feedback in an enterprise with lots of people, even if you do not intend to crush those thinkers who will surface from time to time. Their usefulness to the life of a military service is a basic premise of this article that should not require overmuch support. The "ear" and the Eakers are what we are after.
Gen Ira Eaker was remarkable for many reasons. He became a legend by dint of heroic leadership and longevity. Having been honored in recent time with a fourth star that recognized the patriarchal role he had fulfilled since the close of the Second World War, Ira Eaker was a role model for the officer corps. Even in retirement his labors in the realm of communications were legion. Especially in the defense of Air Force roles, missions, and people was the pen of Ira Eaker often the sole focal point for expressing the very vital informal feedback that provides leaders with countervailing viewpoints and permits a clear assessment of whatever potentialities exist within the scope of those challenging views. Percolating up from the ranks were hosts of ideas. General Eaker amplified those worth labeling as concepts. He frequently passed them along in the open press. His was an ear like Dionysius's.
During the halcyon days of Billy Mitchell's fiery ascendancy, Capt Ira Eaker had functioned as an ear for the Chief of the Air Service--Maj Gen Mason Patrick--and for Assistant Chief Mitchell himself while the famous court-martial was in progress. Sitting between the offices of the chief, both and the embattled assistant chief, Eaker and Maj Carl "Tooey" Spaatz were fully tuned in to distracting waves of opinion wafting up from the far-flung officers' clubs and thinly manned airfields and warehouses across the continent.
The service was small enough in the twenties and early thirties for a handful of opinion samplers like Spaatz and Eaker to track almost all disparate opinions. And shyness was no hallmark of the aviators who comprised the interwar air arm. Eaker and Spaatz could capture inputs from a Horace Hickam, a Frank Andrews, or a "Hap" Arnold, and the word would quickly get to the highest echelon ungarbled.
But not everyone who is positioned to listen to contending opinion will faithfully retransmit what is gleaned. If a large, modern military organization relies solely on verbal feedback from the troops, it will face the hazard of inevitable distortion manufactured by purveyors of comment who fear self-incrimination. Such is the natural human response once the scale of an organization gets so large that full trust cannot be automatically assured in interpersonal relationships. An impersonal vehicle for carrying viewpoints is needed. And as long as the growing yet fledgling air arm lacked such a vehicle, it paid the bloody price that is the product of bad doctrine. The lesson is that bad doctrine means bad guidance. There is a direct impact of warfighting potential.
Maj Gen I. B. Holley, Jr., USAFR, Retired, tells us that immediately after World War I the Army Air Service courted just one fashionable viewpoint despite the expression of several diverging opinions. The combat experience of qualified fliers was not assiduously sought. Instead, the Air Service afflicted itself with a flawed doctrine: "For want of an objective and authoritative method of formulating doctrine on air power, the manifestly inadequate doctrine ... reached publication and consequent circulation while opposing points of view did not."1 Without an aggressive policy of canvassing and evaluating the variety of thought in the vast marketplace of ideas represented by its own constituency, any service can be caught wearing the blinders of the Army Air Service. Ignoring the combat experiences of the only war in which aircraft had flung mankind's military combatants through the firmament, the spokesmen of the earliest airmen managed to invent a particularly egregious way to start their doctrinal process--administering poison at its birth. What it meant for our forebears was "a doctrine which utilized far less than the maximum potential of aviation."2
From that awful doctrinal beginning in 1919, when the observation role was foisted on an inarticulate Air Service, until 1931, when another equally dangerous doctrinal variant was perfected, the air arm had miscarried in every attempt to give birth to a coherent doctrine. In 1975 Col Fred Shiner asked General Eaker for his appreciation of the doctrinal difficulties facing airmen of that decade-plus period. Eaker's estimate in recalling the struggles to tie down ideas of warfighting is captured by his terse comment that Air Corps doctrine "remained fluid."3
Meanwhile, the almost mythical Air Corps Tactical School (started at Langley Field in 1920) had removed in 1931 from Langley to Maxwell with the aim of becoming the primary locus for doctrine development. Until 1928 it had boasted no victories on the mental front. That year, however, saw a surprising turnaround. Maj Gen James E. Fechet, chief of the Air Corps, reversing a potent engine of ideas, boosted the school into the too familiar fatal groove from which it was never rescued. When Fechet's staff reminded the Air Corps Tactical School of the "independent decisiveness of airpower,"4 a headlong drive toward the obsessive idea of bomber invincibility began in earnest. The somber fruit of that flawed doctrine required major and wrenching repairs in the white hot combat of the Combined Bomber Offensive. That tale of bombers and fighters is the one legend Air Force partisans do not need to rehash. In the end, a proud combination of missions made victory in the air possible. That lesson is inculcated in various teachings of air power. It is enshrined as well in US Air Force doctrinal publications. Perhaps, on reflection, the corporate Air Corps had once upon a time located its ears too far from the geography of its brain.
All the interwar fumbling for coherence in terms of doctrine amounted to another fashionable thought train that excluded any competing views. Clearly, there is a danger involved in stifling too completely any opposing thought. How does the US Air Force preclude the hazard of a single-frequency receiver today?
Happily, the free society wherein the Air Force is rooted provides plenty of external criticism. Air Force leaders can pick and choose from whatever wends its way across their desks. And military leaders are sensitive to myriad views expounded in the open press. But how does our modern air arm provide an "ear of Dionysius" to collect vital internal opinions reverberating around the interior of its own collective expertise? Does any such device exist?
For 40 years the device was the Air University Review. Sometimes maligned, sometimes exalted, this professional journal of the Air Force was the focal point for manifold rays of wisdom within blue-suit ranks. It had no challengers within or without the service. Editorial awards rained praises on its authors, artists, and staff. Unlike the Navy with both Proceedings and the Naval War College Review (not counting the Marine Corps Gazette, which enjoys a dynamic reputation within a separate constituency in the same department), and the Army with Parameters and Military Review, the Air Force has no internal competition among journals vying for thoughtful reflections or insightful advocacy’s. The single vehicle for carrying first-class thinking across the global Air Force was the Air University Review.
Having had a solid reputation for years, the Air University Review once enjoyed wide readership. Retirees, civilian scholars, flag officers, and active-duty types of all ranks competed for the limited space available in the bimonthly journal. Despite severe budget cuts and concomitant circulation restrictions, a series of great editors labored in recent years to cull the submissions for gems while rejecting other offerings of excellence. Yes, the Air Force had an "ear of Dionysius," but curious brambles have obscured that only opening available to commentators and readers. A new title (Airpower Journal), tighter quarters, and even tighter thematic approaches; threaten the larger voice of service critique.
What does all this have to do with Air Force doctrine? Well, for years Air Force doctrine briefers from Headquarters USAF/XOXFP (formerly XOXID) have affirmed to audiences the threefold sources of Air Force doctrine:
Of these three sources, two were solidly the subject matter of the Air University Review. And the technology category, if not so boldly proclaimed, was regularly reflected in discussions arrayed upon the journal's pages.
What other source so admirably combined the available wisdom in a single format? The Air University Review, was famous as a vehicle for ideas. It owned a known constituency. The journal was attractive. The arena for debate by thoughtful contributors was unmatched within the Air Force family. Therefore, any diminution of the carrying capacity of the journal should be resisted. Can anyone promise the recent downward spiral will be stopped?
In the 1920s, when the United Kingdom faced the prospect of budget cuts such as now afflict the American services in these late 1980s, Lord Rutherford offered a somber yet comforting thought: "We've got no money, so we've got to think. "5 One reality of budget-cutting is a perceived threat to luxury. But one would hope the last thing slated for slicing is the arterial conduit through which surges spontaneous thinking to enliven the realm of thoughtful airmen. An Air Force that fails to consider every competent challenge might as well confine itself to two-dimensional warfare. There is simply little hope for a blindered military force. All the dancing on "laughter-silvered wings" will not recoup bad doctrine. And bad doctrine always costs lives in combat. In the end, it can catastrophically break the back of the American effort in battle.
Notes
1. I B. Holley, Jr., Ideas and Weapons (Washington, D. C,: Office of Air Force History, 1983), 169.
2. Ibid.
3. Footnoted in John P. Shiner, Foulois and the U.S. Army Air Corps, 1931-1935 Washington D.C.: Office of Air Force History, 1983), 43.
4. Ibid., 45,
5. E. N. da C. Andrade, Rutherford and the Nature of the Atom (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1964), 188.
Editor's Postscript
PAS INTENDED, the author makes a case for the usefulness of internal discussion and dissent in any military service, pointing out that the Air Force's only written, open forum for this activity has been the Air University Review. To these points and others pertaining to the importance of doctrine and its origins, the Airpower Journal can only nod in wholehearted agreement. The author's desires for an open Air Force forum are exactly coincident with those of the Journal and are incorporated into our editorial and operating philosophy. The Airpower Journal's purpose is to provide the forum and to act as an educational tool, the end result being solid air doctrine that will stand us in good stead. KWG
Col Timothy E. Kline (USAFA; MA, Louisiana State University) is a member of the staff of the National War college. His previous assignments include chief, Long-Range Planning and Doctrine Division, Headquarters USAF; chief, Operations Division, Air Ground Operations School; chief, Fighter Wing, Kadena AB, Japan; assistant operations officer, 12th Tactical Fighter Squadron at Kadena; and chief, Doctrine and Concepts Division, Headquarters USAF. Colonel Kline is a graduate of Air Command and 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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