Air University Review, September-October 1981

Between Two Stools:
Very Long-Range Aircraft in Sea Control

As the first World War began, the problems of long-range aircraft were analyzed by Fredrick W. Lanchester, now best remembered for his "square law" of combat dynamics.¹ However valid his law, Lanchester failed to anticipate the dramatic changes in aircraft that were imminent. During the Great War, several nations had built aircraft able to fly previously unimagined distances and carry bomb loads not exceeded until well into World War II. The use of such aircraft in costal defense was the mainstay of the arguments of air power proponents Billy Mitchell and Giulio Douhet. For the next generation the United States Army and Navy hotly contended for the mission of reconnaissance and coastal defense, from Mitchell’s dramatic Hampton Roads bombing and commissions down to the MacAuthur-Pratt Agreement of 1931, which gave the U.S. army responsibility for defense within 200 miles of the American coastline. Although the oceanic role of long-range aircraft was a major element in air power policy, few now remember that the B-17 Flying Fortress was originally the product of an Army Air Corps "design competition for an offshore anti-shipping bomber."²

The rise of the Nazi Luftwaffe in the 1930s, congressional and army staff opposition to an intercontinental bomber, and the 1939-41 air war in Europe all forced U.S. air power policy and structure to focus on strategic bombing on land. By 1942-43, as American went to war, the role of very long-range aircraft (VLRs) in oceanic war had been subordinated to other priorities and thus became very much a product of strategy as defined by von Moltke the Elder: a series of ad hoc expedients.

Also forgotten, except as a curiosity reflected in occasional press and television features on Howard Hughes’s "Spruce Goose," is the sense of desperation that assailed American planners in 1942 as they looked across at the great spatial barrier of the Pacific and the lack of long-range aircraft that could match dirigibles in reaching MacArthur’s beleaguered command. A number of giant flying boats, the Martin "Mars" and "Mariner," partly filled the VLR gap in reconnaissance and transport roles, and PBYs did yeoman service in the United States and Royal Navies in the Atlantic and Pacific. The Hughes giant flying boat was the product of that period of shortfall in 1942-43, known as "too little and too late," an experience which has rapidly drained from the American collective memory. It was, however, in the Battle of the Atlantic that VLRs played a crucial role. The statistics tell part of the story:³

*includes shaved-kill crediting

The figures do not conform to popular nor even to many military and naval impressions of the Atlantic war. Indeed, VLRs are now seen as a vague, distant adjunct to the Battle of the Atlantic, only glimpsed in popular treatments of the U-boat war like The Enemy Below and The Cruel Sea. Nevertheless, in 1941-42, there was a "black pit," a deadly zone in the mid-Atlantic region that Allied land-based air could not reach but German VLRs and submarines could. From late 1940 until 1943, the Germans, in spite of their shortsightedness regarding VLR value before and during the war, did bloody execution through a somewhat haphazard synthesis of two systems.

The mainstay of the Luftwaffe’s Atlantic force during that period was the Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor,⁴ a four-motor transport with a range of approximately 2000 and eventually 3000 miles. Lightly armed, the Fw 200 was originally a 22-passenger civilian airliner; resultant structural weaknesses revealed in combat were sometimes fatal. Produced in eight versions, the later models of the Condor carried Hs 293 glide bombs. Considering their value to the Germans in the Atlantic, some Allied veterans of Atlantic convoy duty later found it hard to believe that fewer than three hundred were built.

When Condors became operational in October 1940, three squadrons of I/Kampfgruppe 40 averaged about two sorties a day, flying from bases in Norway and in France, near Bordeaux. Bureaucratic infighting between the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine over operational control ensued, and ultimately the Luftwaffe retained control of KG 40 under a Fliegerführer Atlantik. Requests for substantial production increases, however, met little response. The Luftwaffe commander cooperated closely with the Navy and also developed a special technique for attacking transports, adding further power to the Condor’s talons. By late February 1941, with missions peaking at half-a-dozen a day, Condors alone had sunk more than a quarter-million tons of Allied shipping, and over half of that from January through February. Groping for countersystems, the Royal Navy first employed "throwaway" Hurricane fighters, which catapulted from freighters and ditched near escorts, and then the escort carrier, which significantly reduced direct Condor attacks.

The ultimate menace of the long sweeps of those lumbering planes was in their spotting of convoys and reporting to U-boat Chief Admiral Karl Doenitz’s headquarters in northwest France, who then concentrated U-boats to assault the convoys en masse at night, the so-called Rudeltaktik—wolf-pack tactics. As an incremental Allied buildup of VLRs pushed U-boats westward, it blunted this system, as did decoding efforts by the first generation of large-scale ELINT-SIGINT.⁵ Nevertheless, it was Condors that first spotted PQ 17, the most badly savaged of all the Murmansk convoys.⁶

Condors also grappled with their Allied VLR counterparts in the biggest single convoy battle of war, in March 1943, when Convoy HX 229, with 50 ships, was beset by 40 U-boats.⁷ Twenty-one merchant ships and only one U-boat were sunk, but a super wolf pack, guided in by Condors, was denied its prey when Allied VLRs—B-24 Liberators flying on the edge of no-return fuel limits from Northern Ireland— forced them to dive and dive again.⁸

During the period of deadliest effect, the Condor’s bases were hit by Bomber Command raids. These attacks, as well as low production, relatively limited range (which put them out of reach of the wolf packs being driven west), and various Allied technical countermeasures, reduced the Condor’s role steadily. Since they were less heavily armed than U.S.-built B-24s, they lost many dogfights. Attempts to put more guns on Condors and successor types—the He 177 with a 3400-mile range, the Ju 290 with a 3800-mile range, and a special version of the Ju 88—failed to regain control of the Black Pit. At each point, such reactive incrementalism offset Allied ploys slightly but did not affect the overall Nazi performance in the air war during World War II. German estimates put the value of the Condors at 30,000 tons of Allied shipping sunk by their efforts per plane lost.⁹

The VLR contest also extended into the diplomatic arena. The vital necessity of extending aircraft range, dramatized in the key role of Northern Irish bases in the Battle of HX 229, pushed American and British diplomats into confrontations with neutral Eire and Portugal as they sought vital bases on the Atlantic littoral. The De Valera government in Eire, holding out for unification, denied the British access to the Treaty Ports evacuated in 1938. Portugal’s Salazar allowed access to the Azores under the cover of an ancient mutual-assistance pact with Britain. U.S. aircrews in the islands assumed the guise of U.S. volunteers in British service. The mixture of threat, ploy, inducement, and frustration vis-à-vis the Treaty Ports embittered many, especially those who underwent hazard as diplomatic minuets were danced, as Nicholas Monsarrat noted in The Cruel Sea.¹⁰

Luckily for the Allies, their heavier production and more solid aircraft types prevailed, albeit with little more forethought or strategic analysis than their German adversaries. The Allies were also fortunate that the German follow-on to the Condor, the Heinkel He 177, proved an engineering monstrosity; 50 crews were lost during development alone, a pattern that affected operations in addition to escort carriers and mounting Allied power.¹¹

By late 1944, German VLRs were out of the Battle of the Atlantic. KG 40 suffered heavily on D-day. Loss of airfields and U-boat bases on the Atlantic other than Norway ended the fusion of submarine and VLR aircraft judged as vital by both sides in postwar analyses of the Atlantic war.¹² In view of the crucial value of VLRs, interservice and inter-Allied wrangling over B-24 allocations seems especially bizarre but perhaps instructive. Only an appeal from Churchill to Roosevelt brought about the assignment of B-24 Liberators (2840-mile range) to the Battle of the Atlantic in the darkest hours. At this time, B-24s had met little enthusiasm in the Army Air Forces and were parceled out in various secondary roles, including service as VIP transports.¹³

As the Atlantic Battle mounted in 1942, Royal Air Force Coastal Command underwent revitalization under a new commander, Air Vice Marshal John (later Air Chief Marshal Sir John) Slessor. Meanwhile, a furious battle of statistics ranged between the Admiralty and the Chief of RAF Bomber Command, Air Marshal Arthur Harris. When naval operational researchers estimated that bombers on antisubmarine duty were far more effective than when used to attack German cities, Harris saw any diversion from the bomber offensive as an obstacle to his plan to win the war in Europe.¹⁴ Finally, in the summer of 1943, U.S. Army Chief of Staff George Marshall cut through the Gordian knot and ordered transfer of the B-24s on Atlantic service from the Army Air Forces to the Navy. While less congenial melding of function than that worked out by the Royal Air Force’s Coastal Command, it shunted VLR sea warfare role and doctrine into the shadows, which may explain subsequent differences between U.S.-NATO and Soviet structure philosophy in this area.

Long-range aviation in oceanic warfare was a greater source of interservice conflict in the Allied forces than it was for the Germans. Samuel Eliot Morison, with some acidity, later attributed those squabbles in the U.S. services mainly to "conflicting personalities and service ambition. . . . ."¹⁵ While such a judgment may overlook the role of structure in bureaucratic infighting, in any event land-based oceanic power since 1945 in the Western nations has produced a fragmented spectrum. The value of role multiplicity has been lost in the shadow of other programs and concepts.

In contrast to such splintering evident in the VLR doctrine of the Atlantic alliance, the Soviet Strategic Air Command is called Long-Range Aviation (LRA), a fact that one analyst of Soviet military systems deemed significant as far back as the 1950s"¹⁶ but which others viewed as merely a product of Russian literalism. Looking back at the experiences of World War II, Giuseppe Fioravanzo argued that:

Upon the sea, it is not possible to fight effectively with all one’s resources unless they are placed organizationally, disciplinarily, technically, and operationally within a single entity, which . . . can be called "naval-air forces."¹⁷

So it has been in the Soviet system, where both the LRA and Soviet Naval Aviation branches have sizable VLR components without clear exclusivity of function.

Some rough statistics on force array will help to suggest the potential. (See accompanying table.)

In the United States, however, as in the Second World War, the role of VLRs in seapower is still not coherent in terms of doctrine or force design. Some, looking at cost and apparent potential (true effectiveness being testable only in operations), have questioned the U.S. Navy’s dependency on the carrier task group as the main instrument of oceanic air power. One analyst argues that "modern technology offers the opportunity to dominate the oceans without necessarily building vast fleets of surface ships."¹⁸

On the other hand, Soviet VLR doctrine has conformed since the late 1950s to the argument of U.S. Admiral Richard Connolly, who early in the Cold War suggested that "it is not militarily practical to limit the employment of any one weapon to the fulfillment of any one function."¹⁹ While the Soviet’s VTOL carrier force is expanding, it is still true that: "US naval air power is mainly afloat. Soviet strength is almost all ashore."²⁰

A particularly haunting problem for U.S. negotiators and analysts in the SALT discussions and in strategic analysis in general has been what to make of the broad-gauge potential of the Soviet array of long-range aircraft. The Soviets, for example, have sometimes displayed intent to engage not only in nuclear war fighting but also in "broken-back war," i.e., fighting on after a major nuclear exchange had taken place.

Various types in reserve available from civil fleet in major crisis or
 war: 462, including 124 long-range cargo planes.

bombers and reconnaissance aircraft

Also in indeterminate numbers, various model of C-130 and 135, long-range weather reconnaissance.

Sources: Data drawn from Air Force (Soviet Aerospace Almanac), March 1980, including William Schneider, Jr., "Soviet Military Airlift: Key to Rapid Power Projection"; from Robin Higham and Jacob W. Kipp, editors, Soviet Aviation and Air Power: A Historical View (London: Brassey's, 1978), p. 311; and The Military Balance, 1979-80 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1980).

The role that VLRs would play in a war is obviously "scenario dependent." The surviving aircraft, base facilities, C3, crews, and service capacity would obviously determine utility. If nuclear weapons severely damaged C3 systems, if satellite reconnaissance were reduced or eliminated, and if electromagnetic pulse (EMP) reduced or eliminated communications, then direct-view, long-range reconnaissance would be at a premium, either for defense or war-ending reconnaissance. Whether such purposes are foremost or secondary in Soviet planning and force structure is problematical.

After analyzing the pattern of long-range aircraft use in OKEAN 75, Peter Rasmussen predicted that:

. . .the relevance of the SNAF [Soviet Naval Air Force] is likely to grow in the coming decade. The technological changes which have occurred already, the possibilities which they may open, coupled with the political trends, will have the likely effect of making the SNAF more ubiquitous and more effective in the years to come.²¹

Another key question, to return to specific numbers and types, is the potential of the Soviet Backfire bomber, of which about 250 have been assigned to Soviet Naval Aviation,²² a weapon that veteran naval analyst Norman Polmar has called "the major Soviet threat to the US surface fleet."²³

The posture of the Soviet VLR array, the heavy cross-equipage and intersystem linkage, military and civilian,* was of major concern to U.S. SALT negotiators.²⁴ These negotiators, recognizing the possibility of shifting modes without apparent change or warning, developed the concept of functionally related observable differences (FROD). The signatories of SALT II promised to build obvious features into strategic weapons that could be used in peaceful tactical or strategic modes. (Whether FROD = fraud remains a matter of concern to some SALT critics and intelligence analysts.)

*The Soviet airline Aeroflot maintains the Soviet military air transport service aircraft.

Soviet transports have on-board power sources, cargo-handling equipment, and landing gear designed to absorb rough landings on primitive airstrips. Such capacity is congruent with power projection. While it may also be a reflection of the crudity of Soviet aviation infrastructure, it also conforms to the logic of "broken-back" war fighting. When the Soviets export military aircraft, they exclude not only the latest types and special equipment but also principal long-range aircraft like the An-22 Cock and the various versions of the Tupolev Bear.²⁵

The prospect of nuclear war or "broken-back" war is far more remote and improbable than a major clash at sea in a conventional war, especially as the structure of détente shudders and wobbles. About 40 percent of the U.S. Navy’s investment is aimed at strengthening carrier battle groups. It is recognized that the result of a clash between Soviet standoffs missile mounting VLRs and a carrier group would be, as Wellington said of Waterloo, a "damned close-run thing."²⁶ Even some who see the carrier group as the main U.S. instrument of force projection for the next quarter-century have suggested the need for strengthening the United States VLR capability.

There is an unnerving disparity in scenarios of a confrontation between U.S. carrier task forces and Soviet LRA in its various modes. In suggesting that a Soviet air-supported excursion might be countered by "one or more" being shot down by U.S. carrier-based aircraft, a defense analyst has stated that: "Sea based aircraft would have an advantage over land-based aircraft in that they may be carried safely on board Navy vessels in the area when not in use. . . ."²⁷ The use of the word safely would lead to at least one more order of analysis. What a deliberate, direct attack by either of the superpowers upon each other’s equipment would mean in the larger context of cold war is another. A problem, overlooked in discussion of the NATO-Soviet VLR dichotomy, is that the radius of carrier aircraft is limited by the speed of their floating airfield, and that reliance on carrier task forces as the main means of bringing aviation to bear leaves a far greater part of the globe uncovered than does reliance on long-range aviation, and at a higher vulnerability potential. While one can understand how the aircraft carrier is still a powerful emotional symbol to many and a political and economic touchstone in the dynamics of interservice politics, the resultant either/or approach has led to organizational and doctrinal fragmentation for the VLR.

Beyond that, it is in the finer traditions of the history of the VLR in sea war and sea control that the U.S. Navy and Air Force have not yet capitalized on a common need for what Dov Zakheim called a land-based multipurpose naval aircraft (LMNA)²⁸ and what Lieutenant Colonel Edd Wheeler has more recently proposed: a land-based multipurpose aircraft (LMA) cheaper and slower than the B-1, noting that "few, if any, foresaw that the B- 17, designed originally for coastal defense, [would become] a high-altitude strategic bomber. . . ."²⁹ Those who remember the original logic of Dr. Barnes Wallis (of geodesic airframe construction and "dam buster" fame) regarding the swing-wing aircraft may regret how that useful concept has been tainted by the TFX/F-111 experience. Increasing fossil fuel costs, the need for endurance, and interim high performance point to a need for hybridization in design, and, in the case of the LMNA-LMA, a synthesis of service needs.

The great conceptual porridge of Soviet propaganda, history, "disinformation," and the uncertainty of what constitutes genuine doctrine has turned Sovietology into an elaborate form of augury. As Churchill observed at the beginning of World War II, the Soviet Union "is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma . . . ." The key may still be "Russian national interests" but what is that? It may be useful to consider the nature of the Soviet military system as perceived by the Germans, especially Admiral Friedrich Ruge, who commented on a notable lack of initiative, an exaggeration of achievement, and a system in which everyone strove for "good marks."³⁰

While that may come close to a universal description of bureaucratic behavior, the networking of Soviet command and control and of the array of VLRs suggests a model of strong central control. The operational fusion of VLRS from Long- Range Aviation, Naval Aviation, Aeroflot, and their military transport force, working closely with their ocean-going submarine force, could present a deadly synergy to a foe who depended on too narrow a range of attack and defense modes. In this respect, John Erickson has observed that:

It may well be that we pay too much heed through the eccentricities of the Western press to the armadas which the Soviet Navy might or might not assemble against us. Meanwhile the skies darken with real armadas . . . .thrusting out from the Soviet perimeter, all usab1e militarily if only for the purposes of intimidation or displaying a Soviet form of global droit du seigneur. That "balance" which so preoccupies us is, in fact, a balance of available air power . . . .Our only response is to furnish ourselves with more aircraft—and that quickly: mass should work both ways and numbers count both in the short and long run. For our safety it should be a long run.³¹

In his ruminations on naval history and sea power, Admiral Sergey G. Gorshkov discussed the important synthesis of elements and, notably, the endurance of ships and aircraft.³² In his analysis of World War II, Gorshkov emphasized the vast numbers of Allied men and equipment pinned down by the relatively small German submarine and maritime air forces, and concluded that: "one of the main reasons for [the German U-boat failure] was that the submarines did not receive support from other forces . . . ."³³

During World War II, the VLR in oceanic warfare, as a system and as a subsystem of a nexus of weapon systems, was an orphan of sorts. Yet it delivered results far out of proportion to numbers, plans, or expectations. The continuing failure to view the VLR as the hub of a major subsystem can be traced to many things, including the preeminent images of the strategic bomber, the fighter, and aircraft carrier; difficulties in conceptualizing the spatial complexity and fluidity of oceanic war; and the deterrent and passive role of VLRs, their flights and low levels of engagement with the enemy, and low glamour profile among aviators.* The VLRs of World War II attracted no celebratory novelist such as Herman Wouk or Nicholas Monsarrat, and they inadvertently generated friction between the services. Interservice rivalry in the postwar years and the conceptual vortex set up by nuclear weapons further eclipsed the issue in the West, where VLR capacity lives on in parcels, highly specialized, and without the evidence of the potential synergy or articulation implicit in Soviet VLR organizations. One hopes that the falling between two stools which has typified doctrine, command arrangements, and force design in this area will not ultimately offer a footnote to Heinrich Heine’s cynical observation that: "The only thing we learn from history is that we don’t learn from history."

*VLR crews face tedium and airsickness in larger doses than most other mission profiles.

1. See "The Question of Radius of Action," F. W. Lanchester, Aircraft in Warfare: The Dawn of the Fourth Arm (New York, 1916), pp. 195-96.

2. Kenneth Munson, Bombers, 1939-45: Patrol and Transport Aircraft (London, 1969); for another perspective, see Harold B. Hinton, Air Victory: The Men and the Machines (New York, 1948), p. 71 ff., which suggests the B- 17 served as a "thin edge of the wedge" for a series of ever longer-range bombers.

3. These statistics (which include shared-kill crediting) are from Elmer B. Potter and C.V. Nimitz, Sea Power: A Naval Power (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1960), pp. 551-57; Sir John Slessor, The Central Blue (New York, 1957), pp. 467-70.

4. See Kenneth A. Poolman, Focke-Wulf Condor: Scourge of the Atlantic (London, 1978); J. Rohwer and G. Hummelchen, Chronicle of the War at Sea, translated by Derek Martin, volumes 1 and 2 (New York, 1972, 1974).

5. F. H. Hinsley et al., British Intelligence in the Second World War (New York, 1979), p. 329.

6. Cajus Bekker, Luftwaffe War Diaries, translated and edited by Frank Ziegler (Garden City, 1968), pp. 256-58.

7. John Costello and Terry Hughes, The Battle of the Atlantic (London, 1977), p. 271.

8. Friedrich Ruge, Der Seekrieg: The German Navy’s Story, 1939-45 (Annapolis, 1965), p. 305.

9. Asher Lee, The German Air Force (New York, 1946), p. 205; Bekker, p. 258.

10. See Sir Llewellyn Woodward, British Foreign Policy in the Second World War, vol. 1 (London, 1970), pp. 387-92; Joseph T. Carroll, Ireland in the War Years (Newton Abbot, 1975), especially pp. 24-38; and Foreign Relations of the United States, series 1940-45.

11. Richard Suchenwirth, Historical Turning Points in German Air Force’s War Effort (New York: USAF Historical Division, 1968), pp. 38-39.

12. Karl Bartz, Swastika in the Air (London, 1956), pp. 152-53.

13. See Document 186 Churchill to Roosevelt, November 20, 1942, in Francis L. Loewenheim, Harold D. Langley, and Manfred Jonas, Roosevelt and Churchill: Their Secret Wartime Correspondence (New York, 1975).

14.E.g., Public Record Office, AIR 20-2470, First Sea Lord Memorandum of March 1942, Annex to Chiefs of Staff Doc. (42) 71 (0); Arthur Harris, Bomber Offensive (New York, 1947).

15. Samuel Eliot Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, vol. 1 (Boston, 1947), p. 247.

16. Raymond L. Garthoff, Soviet Strategy in the Nuclear Age (New York, 1958), p. 183.

17. Giuseppe Fioravanzo, A History of Naval Tactical Thought (Annapolis, 1979), p. 143.

18. Seymour J. Deitchman, New Technologies and Military Power: General Purpose Forces for the 1980s and Beyond (Boulder, Colorado, 1979), p. 125.

19. Quoted in Alfred Hurley and Robert C. Ehrhart, Air Power and Warfare (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1979), p. 262.

20. John M. Collins, American and Soviet Military Trends since the Cuban Missile Crisis (Washington: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1978), p. 213.

21. Peter Hertel Rasmussen, The Soviet Naval Air Force since 1945: Development, Organization Capabilities (Copenhagen, 1977), p. 3l.

22. For a lengthy analysis see William D. O’Neil, "Backfire: Long Shadow on the Sea-Lanes," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, March 1977, pp. 26-35.

23. Norman Polmar, "Soviet Naval Aviation," Air Force, March 1978, p. 70. In June 1980, a Labour Member of Parliament suggested that Soviet land-based aircraft were a greater threat than submarines, pointing out that "Soviet Naval Aviation (had) received the new Backfire bomber before the Soviet air force." See "Navy Improvements to Counter Soviet Threat," The Times, June 20, 1980, p. 6.

24. William Schneider, Jr., "Soviet Military Airlift: Key to Rapid Power Projection," Air Force, March 1980, p. 82.

25. F. Clifton Berry, "Military Aircraft Exports: Soviet Foreign Policy Tool," Air Force, March 1980, p. 78.

26. For example, see F. J. West, "A Fleet for the Year 2000: Future Force Structure," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, May 1980, pp. 66-81; Deitchman, pp. 101-2; Norman Polmar, Strategic Weapons: An Introduction (New York, 1975), p. 80.

27. Mark N. Katz, "An Alternative to Appeasement," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, June 1980, p. 61.

28. Dov S. Zakheim, "Land-based Aircraft Options for Sea Control," in James C. George, editor, Problems of Seapower as We Approach the Twenty-first Century (Washington: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1978), pp. 230, 241-48.

29. Edd C. Wheeler, "Prospects for the Manned Bomber: High Noon or Sunset?" Air University Review, January-February 1979, pp. 10-11, 14-15.

30. Friedrich Ruge, The Soviets as Naval Opponents, 1941-45 (Annapolis, 1978), pp. 193-95.

31. John Erickson, The Expansion of Soviet Air Power (University of Edinburgh Defense Studies, 1979), p. 30.

32. See S. G. Gorshkov, "Navies in War and Peace," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, November 1974, pp. 62-64.

33. Ibid., September 1974, p. 61.

The author also wishes to acknowledge the aid of Professor John Erickson, Director of Strategic Studies at the University of Edinburgh, who provided several documents used in this analysis.

Whereas the old rationale for success used to be performing well in a wide variety of jobs, it now appears to be avoiding failure in a series of so called "career enhancing" assignments.

Major General R. C. Schulze
"Challenges to Integrity: Fitness Report Inflation & Careerism,"
Marine Corps Gazette, August 1981, p. 36

Roger A. Beaumont (B.S., M.S., University of Wisconsin; Ph.D., Kansas State University) is Professor of History, Texas A&M University. Dr. Beaumont was formerly an American Military Institute Trustee and is now a Fellow of the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society and a member of the international institute for Strategic Studies. He is author of Military Elites and Sword of the Raj: The British Army in India, 1747-1947 and coeditor of War in the Next Decade; he has published articles in the Naval War College Review, Parameters, Aerospace Historian, and Military Review.

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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