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2015-09-01 From Independence to Interdependence: The U.S. Air Force and AirLand , 1973-1985

Cutler, Trevor

Cutler, T. (2015). From Independence to Interdependence: The U.S. Air Force and AirLand Battle, 1973-1985 (Unpublished master's thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. doi:10.11575/PRISM/26232 http://hdl.handle.net/11023/2413 master thesis

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From Independence to Interdependence:

The U.S. Air Force and AirLand Battle, 1973-1985

by

Trevor Cutler

A THESIS

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN HISTORY

CALGARY, ALBERTA

AUGUST, 2015

© Trevor Cutler 2015

Abstract

In the early 1970s, the Air Force underwent a massive series of reforms and innovations. The Air Force shed itself of the culture and tactics that had defined it since becoming independent in 1947. In order to better serve executive policy and to gain a prominent role in defense, the Air Force moved from an independent nuclear-based posture, to one of interdependence with the Army and reliance on conventional .

This change is a classic case study in military innovation. The Air Force changed not only the way it planned to fight , but also the way it conceptualized itself and warfare. This shift called into question many of its underlying assumptions about doctrine, tactics, and aircraft, producing the Air Force that still flies today. Without an active Congress, strong-willed leaders, and capable young officers, these reforms would never have occurred.

ii Acknowledgements

I am grateful to have had the opportunity to continue my professional development in

Calgary. I would like to thank Colonel Mark Wells and Lieutenant Colonel Edward

Kaplan for their roles in letting me have this wonderful year to experience graduate education and life outside the zoo. I am indebted to Dr. John Ferris, not only for his support and advice in producing this thesis, but also in his willingness to take on a one- year MA student, with very little notice.

The author is a U.S. Air Force Officer. The views expressed in this thesis are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the United States Air Force,

Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.

iii Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii Acknowledgements ...... iii Table of Contents ...... iv List of Abbreviations ...... v Table of Ranks and Commands ...... vi Epigraph ...... vii Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 1 Chapter 2: Reform, Innovation, and Education ...... 9 Chapter 3: Politics and Command ...... 32 Chapter 4: Hardware, Technology, and the Military Balance ...... 54 Chapter 5: Doctrine and Cooperation ...... 74 Chapter 6: Conclusion ...... 89 Bibliography ...... 96

iv List of Abbreviations

A – Abbreviation for Attack AAH – Advanced Attack Helicopter ACC – Air Combat Command ACRA – Airlift Concepts and Requirements Agency ACSC – Air Command and College ACTS – Air Corps Tactical School ADS – Air Defense Systems AFB – Air Force Base AFM – Air Force Manual ALB – AirLand Battle ALFA – Air Land Forces Applications ATACMS - Army Tactical Missile System ATAF – Allied Tactical Air Force ATM – Anti-Tank Missile(s) AWACS – Advanced Warning and Control System AWC – Air College A-X – Attack Experimental Programs B – Air Force abbreviation for Bomber BAI – Battle Area Interdiction CAC – Continental Army Command CAS – Close Air Support CJCS – Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff CSAF – Chief of Staff of the Air Force ECM – Electronic Counter Measures FORSCOM – Forces Command F – Air Force abbreviation for Fighter F-X – Fighter Experimental Program F-XX – Early LWF Program FA – Frontal Aviation FAC-X – Forward Air Controller, Experimental FEBA – Front Edge of Battle Area FOFA – Follow-On Forces Attack GPS – Global Positioning System HASC – House Armed Services Committee HQ - Headquarters IAF – Israeli Air Force ISR – Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance JSTARS – Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System LWF – Light Weight Fighter Program MAC – Military Airlift Command MAD – Mutually-Assured Destruction MGO – Middle-Grade Officer NATO – North Atlantic Treaty Organization OSD – Office of the Secretary of Defense

v PACAF – Pacific Air Forces PGM – Precision Guided Munitions PME – Professional Military Education QITARS – Qualitative Intratheater Airlift Requirements Study SAC – Strategic Air Command SAM – Surface to Air Missile(s) SEAD – Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses SECDEF – Secretary of Defense SOS – Squadron Officer School TAC – Tactical Air Command TACAIR – Tactical Air TAF – Tactical Air Force TFX – Tactical Fighter Experimental TRADOC – Training and Doctrine Command USA – United States Army USAF – United States Air Force USAFE – U.S. Air Forces Europe USAREUR – U.S. Army in Europe USMC – United States Marine Corps USN – United States Navy VFX – Program that led to F-14

U.S. Rank Abbreviation Table

Rank Army Air Force Marine Corps Navy O-1 2LT 2d Lt 2ndLt ENS O-2 1LT 1st Lt 1stLt LTJG O-3 CPT Capt Capt LT O-4 MAJ Maj Maj LCDR O-5 LTC Lt Col LtCol CDR O-6 COL Col Col CAPT O-7 BG Brig Gen BGen RDML O-8 MG Maj Gen MajGen RADM O-9 LTG Lt Gen LtGen VADM O-10 GEN Gen Gen ADM

U.S. Air Force Organizational Table

Air Force Unit Example Rough Army Equivalent Element Several Aircraft (1-2) Platoon Flight Several Aircraft (3-4) Company Squadron 21st Fighter Squadron Battalion Group 477th Fighter Group Brigade Wing 1st Fighter Wing Division Numbered Air Force First Air Force Corps/Numbered Army Major Command Tactical Air Command Army Group/Command

vi Epigraph

``It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more

dangerous to conduct, nor more doubtful in its success, than an attempt to introduce

innovations. For the leader in the introduction of changes will have for his enemies all those who are well off under the existing order of things, and only lukewarm supporters

in those who might be better off under the new.'' Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

“Military superiority on the part of the Soviet Union – real or perceived – is not a condition that the U.S. and its allies can or need accept… We probably have lived off our

earlier investments longer than we should have. We have some catching up to do.”

Harold Brown, Secretary of Defense, 23 May 1977

“…General Schwarzkopf's conduct of Desert Storm reveals how fortunate we were that

Air Force doctrine fully recognized air power's ability to dominate the conduct of modern war. Thanks to Air Force doctrine, General Schwarzkopf possessed aerospace forces that

made it possible for him to achieve his objectives at a very low cost in terms of friendly

lives.” Lt Col Price T. Bingham, USAF, Airpower Journal, Winter 1991

vii Chapter 1: Introduction

In the quarter century since the end of the , American and NATO military actions have swung wildly between vast commitments of “boots on the ground”

(a poor but ubiquitous phrase that belies the risk and scale of operations involving airmen and/or special operators) and more limited efforts launched primarily or only from the air.

Airman often claim that airpower (or in the contemporary lexicon, “aerospace power”), is

“the ultimate high ground.” That the United States Air Force (USAF), which waged an all air campaign in Kosovo in 1999 and “” in 2003, views itself as strategically essential should come as little surprise. Each always views itself as being crucial to national security. However, the apostles of airpower also claim that air forces can go it alone in achieving strategic results and policy aims.

The brand of airpower proselytized by airman today is the product of decades of grueling reforms. The Air Force that exists today, in terms of airframes and identity, sprang from a less confident, capable, and relevant ancestor. When the U.S. left

Vietnam, the entire military stood in dire need of serious overhauls to its doctrine, culture, and equipment. Though the Army also faced significant challenges, those facing the Air Force were existential. As policy and technology changed in the 1960s, the

USAF’s showcase, Strategic Air Command (SAC), found itself marginalized and the Air

Force’s fixation on the nuclear mission impeded its ability to recognize the need for innovation. Only the jolt of the end of the Vietnam War and Israeli performance in the

Yom Kippur War shook the Air Force from its slumber.

The Air Force’s move from weakness to prominence is a case study in military innovation. While many military innovations begin with just one influence, that of the

1 Air Force included all of the standard catalysts for change which have been emphasized by scholars. The Air Force realized that its old nuclear centered identity had collapsed, prompting both top leadership and officers from the ranks to demand reform.

Congressional oversight pushed action through bureaucratic hurdles and parochial resistance. An increasingly aggressive Soviet Union added a sense of urgency to the endeavor. This series of reforms allowed for the rise of the AirLand Battle (ALB), one of the central events in the history of modern airpower and the USAF. It is not well understood.

Despite playing a significant role in almost every conflict since the First World

War, the literature on airpower, both historical and analytical, is limited. Armies continue to dominate the works produced by military historians and strategists alike, leaving airpower to airmen and the occasional disciple of Douhet. This approach leaves huge gaps, as most of these scarce works focus on airpower in the context of broader events, such as the Vietnam War or the , or specific weapons. As a result, scholarly efforts at tracking organizational and cultural developments within air forces, or assessing issues like doctrine and training, are rare, and mostly address the Interwar period. Moreover, works that look at the USAF after 1945 as an institution are primarily the product of American airmen (I am no exception), who have attempted to identify the rhyme and reason that has governed their service since its independence.

The study of past air strategies and reforms is essential to understanding the problems and conditions of airpower. In eras when the USAF failed to adapt quickly, it became a source of ridicule and derision. Most famously, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr.

Strangelove highlighted the apparent absurdity of Air Force plans for nuclear war. At

2 best, plans to use nuclear weapons and win a nuclear war seemed dislocated from executive policy. At worst, they seemed insane. The posture, however, was not accidental or careless, but rather the product of decades of development and theory in airpower. In To Kill Nations, Edward Kaplan (currently an Air Force Lieutenant

Colonel) challenges these assumptions and traces the origins of Air Force nuclear strategy. Kaplan establishes the logic that guided Air Force thinking from independence in 1947 until the mid-1960s. Though political and diplomatic developments eroded the

Air Force’s posture during the Eisenhower administration, strategic bombers equipped with nuclear weapons formed the backbone of U.S. defense strategy for the 1950s.

During this period, the Air Force enjoyed a share of the budget almost equal to the other services combined. The nuclear bomb vindicated the views of airpower theorists from the interwar period, establishing the Air Force as the sole branch capable of immediate, independent, and strategic action. The nuclear Air Force, or, as Kaplan calls it, the Air

Force of the “air-atomic age,” promised to keep the country safe with much lower budgets than an army or a navy would require. It also fit ideologically with the teachings of Douhet, Trenchard, and Mitchell, who all espoused the use of airpower for independent action against not enemy armies but their cities and industry.

Kaplan’s work demonstrates the centrality of this period to the development of the

USAF, and how devastating was the collapse of this paradigm. When Kennedy abandoned the Massive Retaliation stance of Eisenhower, the instant and binary strategy

(either peace or annihilation) offered by the Air Force and SAC no longer matched the priorities and realties of executive policy. The war in Vietnam heightened this disparity, as aircraft built for a nuclear exchange in Europe dropped conventional bombs near

3 Hanoi or hunted enemy . The air war in Southeast Asia is not the central focus of this thesis, but is important to its context.

Before that war ended, the looming crisis in Air Force leadership, culture, hardware, and doctrine was becoming evident. SAC officers had held the reins of power in the USAF for decades, and Air Force doctrine and procurement process had failed to keep pace with developments in technology for conventional air forces. An increasingly assertive Soviet Union started to procure vast amounts of tactical aircraft as well as ground-based air defense systems (ADS). The Yom Kippur War, in the fall of 1973, demonstrated the threat posed by ADS not only to U.S. airframes, but to its entire strategy for war in Central Europe. Rising leaders in the Air Force and the Army understood that survival in the 1970s would require closer cooperation than either service had ever known or desired.

Mike Worden (who later retired as an Air Force Lieutenant General) chronicled this change in senior Air Force leadership, tracking the emergence of the fighter pilots who eventually displaced the bomber men in the top commands of the Air Force.

Worden explains several factors that led to this shift, including the combat experience that fighter pilots gained in Vietnam, the growing exposure to academic and professional military education (PME), and the realization of Tactical Air Command’s (TAC) inadequacy in Southeast Asia. He traces the Air Force’s leadership much further back, but his coverage of the period from 1965 to 1982 is of the greatest relevance to this thesis. During this period, the Air Force transitioned from SAC dominance to having a fighter pilot Chief of Staff. Worden’s case study of Air Force leadership is perhaps the most extensive look at the Air Force as an organization after the Vietnam War. His

4 study, in tandem with that of Kaplan, provides the best academic work to date on Air

Force identity, leadership, and strategic culture.

The other two major secondary sources that discuss airpower and the Air Force in the late Cold War were produced by civilian academics, albeit historians working for the

Air Force. Brian Laslie’s The Air Force Way of War, released earlier this year, looks at the changes that occurred in training for fighter and attack pilots in the 1970s and 1980s.

This work shares the temporal focus of my thesis, but avoids broader discussion of the

Air Force outside of TAC and the way it prepared for war. Laslie’s identification of innovations in tactics and training corroborates reforms stemming from upper levels and the ranks that I identify. The exercise and drills that Laslie explores form the bedrock of the modern fighter community and the U.S. policy of maintaining qualitative dominance in the skies. His work helps to bridge the gap between the crisis in the tactical portion of the Air Force and the contemporary airpower environment.

The other secondary work by another civilian Air Force historian is Robert

Futrell’s two volume Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine, which describes the Air Force in the context of the decisions and actions of senior military and political leaders. His second volume begins in 1961 and ends in 1984, focusing heavily on the influence of events like the Yom Kippur War and the major airframe procurements of the period. Futrell’s inclusion of copious primary sources is likely the product of his time spent at Air

University, the location of the Air Force’s archives and PME institutions. As a result, his work provides the best narrative of leadership decisions made by the Air Force during this period. Many of the events and developments cited in his book are based on primary documents that are not yet releasable to the public. Frustratingly, many of the documents

5 that recorded the efforts of reform and cooperation during the 1970s fall into this category. Thus, Futrell’s work provides a greater degree of insight that might have otherwise been absent, regarding the infancy of Air Force-Army cooperation and changes to doctrine. As more documents from this period come to light, no doubt scholarship will advance, but in the meantime, the literature remains limited.

The changes the Air Force experienced in the 1970s and 1980s are an example of military innovation. I have viewed them through the lens of works by Theo Ferrell and

Terry Terriff. Their study on military innovation attempts to identify the most common catalysts for change in military institutions and then to measure the success of modern cases of that phenomenon. Many reforms and innovations happen after a country is defeated in a war or at the behest of an involved ruler or government. Figuring which influence led to successful military change is often difficult. In the case of the USAF during the late Cold War, there is little mystery. The Air Force experienced a wide array of pressures to change itself and the way it understood airpower. As a case study, the success of the Air Force in rebuilding and rebranding itself is hard to top. It also reinforces the value of the analytical framework which contemporary strategists use to assess military innovation as a whole.

This dissertation addresses a topic which is on the leading edge of the declassification of documents. Much key material remains classified, but enough evidence now is in the public domain to try, for the first time, to treat the rise of AirLand

Battle and the reform of the USAF during the 1970s as historical topics. In exploring this massive shift in the Air Force, I rely on sources that characterized the top-down and bottom-up nature of the innovations. The Air Force’s archives at Maxwell Air Force

6 Base (Maxwell AFB) provided a wealth of sources that documented the changes my thesis describes. As junior officers participated in military education, they contributed to new ways of planning for air campaigns and conceptualizing airpower. Meanwhile, Air

Force leaders began to adopt an amiable tone toward the Army and supportive air missions. The conference papers of the young officers and the speeches and statements of the generals provide an excellent window into the period. Of course, the Air Force was not simply trying to reform itself in a vacuum. End of tour reports and war college journal articles offer a compelling assessment of an increased Soviet threat and the promises of new technology. Records from the House Armed Services Committee

(HASC) demonstrate the attention and confidence of Congress toward the military.

Interviews with top commanders, like GEN Donn Starry, convey the impact of the Yom

Kippur War and the Vietnam War on military thinking and culture.1 These sources approach the topic from vastly different angles, but they demonstrate the confluence of many influences that allowed the Air Force to triumph in its rebirth.

This confluence was absolutely essential to the survival of the Air Force as a relevant and capable military branch. Had the senior leadership ignored the need for change or the officer corps resisted their efforts, or the military lacked the positive influence of an active Congress, the Air Force would not have had the breadth of support it needed to overcome its vast challenges. The diminishing significance of SAC’s mission represented a crisis to the USAF. Not only did this decline threaten Air Force budgets and pride, it called into question the most basic assumptions the service made about the nature of war and airpower, and its ability to execute any significant role for the

1 Service specific abbreviation of rank will be used to avoid confusion – COL for Army, Col for Air Force (see rank table in introduction)

7 United States. Only through the vast undertaking begun in 1973 was the Air Force able to reemerge from decline. The process was not without its pains. The Air Force entered the process of reform as an organization that thought of itself as independent in its actions and of vital strategic importance to national security. When it came out of the other side, it emphasized interdependence, and its central missions were operational and tactical in nature. The willingness to question everything from doctrine to airframes is what allowed the Air Force to survive and later thrive. Decades later, the Air Force began to claw out a new independent role, but it never abandoned its acceptance of the need for interdependence. This thesis explores how the Air Force shifted from independence to interdependence, and, in doing so, became the most lethal agent of airpower in human history.

8 Chapter 2: Reform, Innovation, and Education

The U.S. military faced an array of challenges in the early 1970s, which produced many reactions with long lasting consequences. The military sought to sidestep the failures and frustrations of the Vietnam War while handling an increased Soviet threat to the vital European . These experiences caused greater cooperation between the services. Improved working relationships between the Army and the Air Force helped, first, to resolve existing conflicts and, then, to coordinate efforts at training, war planning, and weapons procurement. Through increased dialogue with Congress and the American people the military sought to redefine its relationship with the country and to define its role more clearly. These developments represented changes not only in tone and posture, but in substance and composition. The military, specifically the Air Force and the Army, altered the way they planned to fight and the weapons they hoped to use. Senior leadership pressed these reforms, but that was not enough to achieve them. Equally important were decisions made by the educational institutions of the services and the middle ranking officers, who embraced, enhanced, and executed the reforms. This process enabled the Air Force to overcome the greatest threat it faced since becoming an independent service. It emerged revitalized in its character and relevance, reconnecting with its traditional faith in the utility of airpower and realigning to national interests in the clearest way since its “air-atomic” role collapsed in the 1960s.

A look at these changes instituted by the Air Force in the 1970s and early 1980s raises questions about the nature of military innovation, including whether it actually occurred in this instance. In order to consider these questions, one needs a framework for innovation as a tool to categorize change and continuity. In their work on military

9 innovation, Theo Ferrell and Terry Terriff list three main catalysts for change: threat, civil-military relations, and military culture.2 Individually, each of these components shaped the development of Air Force reform, and deserves consideration. The loss of a role threatened the survival of the USAF. Growing Soviet nuclear and conventional forces formed a threat in the minds of U.S. policymakers and military leaders. This danger, in turn, prompted political engagement from U.S. military leaders, who worked to inform the American public of the need for reform, and to cooperate with an active

Congress. These processes also overlapped with substantial changes to the Air Force’s culture and identity, which also enabled innovation to occur. This chapter will analyze the internal organizational and cultural shifts that altered the way the Air Force conceptualized itself and its purpose.

The Air Force and National Security

In the early 1970s, the military attempted to change not only the composition of its forces, but also how they would be employed. Within the Air Force, long-term generational challenges bubbled to the surface and shaped attempts to reassess the service’s weapons systems and leadership. From the birth of an independent Air Force, the mission of strategic nuclear deterrence and warfare had made SAC the dominant operational unit of the Air Force and the military at large. This position was gutted by the Kennedy Administration’s decisions about Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), in light of both superpowers’ nascent nuclear ballistic missile arsenals. The emergence of viable ballistic missiles undermined SAC’s nuclear monopoly, and cleared the way for the nuclear triad, a policy that included land and submarine based ballistic missiles, as

2 Terry Terriff, Frans P. B. Osinga, and Theo Farrell, eds., A Transformation Gap?: American Innovations and European Military Change (Stanford, Calif: Stanford Security Studies, 2010), 7–9.

10 well as strategic bombers. This shift in rhetoric and policy away from Massive

Retaliation, prompted by a “trip wire,” toward Flexible Response brought sweeping changes to the role of airpower and conventional forces in Europe. The Air Force and the military took over a decade to adjust to these changes. Even in the mid-1970s, plans for war with the Soviets in Central Europe anticipated a warning time of weeks before attack and narrow parameters for the scale and duration of combat operations.3 This position reflected a military that was not truly considering conventional war with the Soviets, but still relying on nuclear capability as a deterrent.

By the end of the Vietnam War, SAC had lost relevance to the foreign policy of several consecutive administrations, and its role as an incubator for Air Force leadership became more and more anachronistic. The dominance of SAC and SAC generals within the Air Force stemmed from decades of development, and was tied intimately to the birth of the Air Force as a separate service. Just as the use of the atomic bomb against Japan at

Hiroshima and Nagasaki marked a coda to the Second , it also vindicated doctrine that dated back far before the war.4 Since 1918, airpower theorists and practitioners had viewed strategic bombing as the ultimate end of the weaponization of the skies. Airpower advocates made vast promises to their respective publics during the interwar period, trying to win outside support for ideas that threatened the prominence of traditional military policies and forces.5 The efforts of the Air Force in the Combined

Bomber Offensive in Europe, and the conventional and nuclear bombing of Japan

3 John J. Emanski Jr., “Implications of Continous Land Combat on Air Support Doctrine,” Airpower Symposium (Menlo Park, CA: Stanford Research Institute, March 1977), Maxwell AFHRA: K239.151-30. 4 Beatrice Heuser, The Evolution of Strategy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 311. 5 Tami Davis Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914 - 1945, Princeton Studies in International History and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2002), 69–76.

11 encoded strategic bombing into the very DNA of the nascent Air Force. As the size of the U.S. military swung up and down in the first decade of the peace, the Air Force looked to the nuclear mission as a perennial source for bigger budgets. Not only did this role give the Air Force a prominent and independent position within national security, it also fit the theoretical framework of strategic airpower that went back to the “Bomber

Mafia” at the Air Corps Tactical School (ACTS) in the 1930s.6 SAC seemed to let the country feel secure even with most of the nation’s manpower and industry being devoted to peaceful endeavors.7

Today’s image of the Cold War is characterized by ideas about the absurdity of nuclear war and the seeming obviousness of mutually assured destruction. That view was not held during the early years of the Cold War. The Air Force and its leadership intended to develop its nuclear capabilities so that it could win a war with them. In his work on the first two decades of the nuclear military, Edward Kaplan explains that the

Air Force was preparing to fight a real nuclear war. The Air Force included nuclear operations in all of its war plans, and nuclear and delivery platforms dominated procurement. It planned to direct the lion’s share of its nuclear arsenal against industrial targets, which ACTS had deemed strategically imperative since the interwar period.8

When the size of the U.S. arsenal increased and the Soviets acquired atomic capabilities, the Air Force added strikes against Soviet nuclear sites to the list of targets. Interestingly, its strategic and operational focus did not include the destruction of the enemy military force. The earliest airpower visionaries had emphasized the offensive and strategic

6 Maj Howard D. Belote, “Warden and the Air Corps Tactical School: What Goes Around Comes Around,” Airpower Journal Fall 1999 (1999). 7 Edward Kaplan, To Kill Nations: American Strategy in the Air-Atomic Age and the Rise of Mutually Assured Destruction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 19–25. 8 Ibid., 24–26.

12 potential of air warfare. The newly independent and nuclear Air Force accepted the narrative, unlike the other services. It offered to prevent and/or to win the nation’s wars without the need for large standing conventional sea or land forces. Therefore, the Air

Force did not need to cooperate closely with the rest of the military or invest seriously in its tactical capabilities.

The nuclear mission defined not only how the Air Force conceived of itself, but how it fit within the military as a whole. The immediate post-war period witnessed severe tensions between the services, especially through the creation of the Air Force as a separate and co-equal branch and the birth of a Department of the Air Force. These developments suited defense policy but caused problems with the other services. These frustrations boiled over into the infamous “Revolt of the Admirals,” when the Navy questioned Air Force efforts to procure the long range B-36 bomber.9 Though the Navy was defeated, its failure to secure prime real estate in the nuclear mission sowed the seeds of future enmity. Additionally, the Army shrank drastically, after both the Second World

War and the Korean War. It briefly restructured its divisions to a “pentomic” system, removing the battalion level of command and increasing the number of combat companies to facilitate autonomy, and to account for anticipated losses in a nuclear engagement.10

Challenges to Nuclear Hegemony

The 1950s were the heyday for SAC and the Air Force, but the emergence of long-range and accurate rocketry, ballistic missiles, began to cut the prominence of the

9 Keith D. McFarland, “The 1949 Revolt of the Admirals,” Parameters, Journal of the US Army War College Vol. XI, no. 2 (1980): 53–63. 10 The Big Picture: The Pentomic Army, Television Public Broadcast Series (US Army, 1957), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UH9s82thVRk.

13 bomber-borne nuclear capability. Even before the Kennedy administration’s questioning of U.S. foreign and defense policy, President Eisenhower identified the bomber as potentially becoming obsolete in a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1960.11 The potential of ballistic missiles, launched from land or submarines, undermined the country’s reliance on nuclear bombers. The continued emphasis on the latter also eroded the Air Force’s ability to use airpower in other ways. When combat operations began over Vietnam in the 1960s, U.S. airpower was used in a supportive, tactical, and limited role. The vast majority of the service’s airframes and personnel, however, were oriented to the direct, independent, and strategic use of airpower. From doctrine to training, the

Air Force and SAC had prepared for a war without or campaigns. If war against the Soviets would be decided in a nuclear exchange, then the only strike that mattered was the first. Of course, this way of thinking was a closer match to Clausewitz’s dialectic ideal, absolute war, than it was to the policies of the Kennedy and Johnson

Administrations. Thus, in Indochina the Air Force used airframes designed as tactical nuclear bombers to fly interdiction missions against supply lines and the mighty B-52

(under strict state-side control by SAC) for punitive bombing raids. In less than five years (1960-65) the Air Force fell from the height of power and prominence in national defense, to a position of increasing irrelevance.

As President Kennedy and SECDEF McNamara clawed back authority over nuclear weapons, and abstracted them into levers for policy, the Air Force’s seminal contribution to defense became latent and passive. For the first time since the end of

World War II, nuclear weapons, which were becoming close to unusable to policy

11 Heuser, The Evolution of Strategy, 311.

14 makers, no longer benefited Air Force budgets or prestige. Continued focus and investment into the nuclear mission became a case of diminishing returns. Despite this transition, so central was SAC to Air Force identity and personnel that over a decade passed before the USAF began to adjust its posture and composition, and cease to focus its energies in fighting a lost cause. Kaplan explains this situation poignantly:

For twenty years, air-atomic strategy existed independently of the declaratory policies enunciated by American civilian leaders. These policies were not harmonious. When the White House changed declaratory policy, air-atomic operational plans altered only gradually, sometimes reluctantly, in the direction civilian leaders wanted.12

This fall from the pinnacle of power was the product of changing military currents, but also reflected shifting policy and strategy. The prevailing focus of U.S. foreign policy after 1945 was the security of Europe and East Asia, regions with wealth and geography that made them vital to the stability of the international order and the ability of a rival to threaten the United States.13 Military action in Europe did not reach beyond the Iron Curtain, though it assisted in preventing Soviet expansion into places like

Greece and Turkey, but Asia presented a different situation. The fall of China shook

American decision makers and the Soviet acquisition of the atomic bomb that same year

(1949) horrified them. The combination of these developments prompted American efforts to defend Korea from northern invasion and the support given to France in holding its Indo-Chinese colonial possessions. When the U.S. took the lead in Vietnam during the 1960s, the importance of Asia became dominant in the minds of policy makers, to the detriment of Europe. Yet American military leaders continued to place the strategic, or

12 Kaplan, To Kill Nations: American Strategy in the Air-Atomic Age and the Rise of Mutually Assured Destruction, 3. 13 Robert J. McMahon, The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction, Very Short Introductions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 8.

15 nuclear, dimension of the Cold War at center stage. Plans for the tactical dimensions of war against the USSR fell to the backburner and made huge assumptions about the tactics and composition of the Soviets. This emphasis hurt U.S. efforts in Vietnam, a , the efficacy and necessity of which leading European allies and many at home openly questioned. From its airframes to its ground forces, the military attempted to wage an unconventional asymmetric war in Southeast Asia while also defending Europe behind the umbrella of its nuclear arsenal. It paid inadequate attention to conventional tactical warfare. By the time the Vietnam War ended, the U.S. stood in poor shape for a confrontation in Europe.

Strength and Détente

For much of the Cold War, the United States counted on a technological and qualitative advantage over the vast Warsaw Pact legions arrayed in the east. Even after

President Kennedy’s shift from “Massive Retaliation” to “Flexible Response,” the U.S. still talked of a “trip-wire” in Europe. Meanwhile, nuclear weapons remained on the table for NATO in the thinking and rhetoric of senior military leaders.14 Kennedy’s desire for more options with military force increased the role for conventional forces and also raised the prominence of efforts in the Third World, such as Vietnam.

Dissatisfaction at home after tens of thousands of casualties in Vietnam prompted

President Nixon to choose a different course for military and foreign policy. Nixon’s general effort at détente coincided with Congresses reduction of forces in Europe and the draw down of forces in Vietnam.15 Structurally, the U.S. military, shifted from a stated goal of being able to sustain two wars and a smaller crisis (the 2.5 strategy) to a one war

14 Robert Frank Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine: Basic Thinking in the United States Air Force - 1961- 1984, vol. II (Maxwell AFB: Air University Press, 1989), 467. 15 McMahon, The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction, 124–25.

16 and one crisis (1.5) footing. The military tried to maintain its capability to fight in

Europe by creating the Return of Force to Germany (REFORGER) policy, which eventually constituted an annual exercise.16 This planning still relied on the superior training of NATO forces and the relative weaknesses of Soviet kit and doctrine. Changes in operational and tactical issues forced serious discussion of reform in the Army and Air

Force.

The end of the Vietnam War signaled a change in the willingness of the U.S. to enter limited conflicts, while national leadership tried to move the strategic focus of the

U.S. back to its real priorities. Nixon’s shift to a one and a half conflict posture let him reduce defense expenditures in order to shore up the domestic front, much as Eisenhower had done after the Korean War when he turned to the nuclear force for defense. Though he did not halt combat operations in Vietnam immediately, Nixon attempted to end the conflict while maintaining or increasing American influence and power through diplomacy.17 The Chinese condemnation of the Soviet crackdown on the Prague Spring in 1968 confirmed what Henry Kissinger and Nixon saw as an opportunity to exploit

Sino-Soviet divisions.18 Nixon understood that normalized relations with China would facilitate many of his broader goals. If China moved from outright enemy to at worst an ambivalent power, sustaining the two and a half war capability no longer made sense.

Working with China strengthened the U.S. and undermined the position of the

USSR. To Nixon and Kissinger, this rebalancing enabled the U.S. to engage the Soviets from a position of strength, with the goal of achieving détente. Europe reemerged as the

16 Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine: Basic Thinking in the United States Air Force - 1961-1984, II:474–77. 17 Richard M. Nixon, “Address to the Nation on the War in Vietnam,” Nixon Library Archives, November 3, 1969, http://www.nixonlibrary.gov/forkids/speechesforkids/silentmajority/silentmajority_transcript.pdf. 18 Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine: Basic Thinking in the United States Air Force - 1961-1984, II:477.

17 center of gravity for American foreign and . The American people had little appetite for continued operations in the periphery, a sentiment capitalized by

SECDEF James Schlesinger. In the words of Terry Terriff, “Schlesinger was a confirmed Atlanticist and believed that Western Europe was the main pillar of U.S. foreign interests…”19 Additionally, to those who viewed the Soviets as a “normal” power, the rise of the Soviets to a position of parity promised a better prospect for stability.20 The Army and Air Force were not in this group. They viewed the U.S. as falling behind a recidivist Soviet Union. This conflict between the declared policy of the administration and the tactical plans of the military was not new: it mirrors the prevailing situation that Kaplan describes during the “air-atomic age.”21 This contrast between the stated goals of the president and the plans of the military had boosted the leverage of the

U.S. in foreign policy during the air-atomic age. With the military advantage of the U.S. slipping by the 1970s, however, the military knew that it could not give policy makers the boost it had done during the 1950s and early 1960s. This realization of diminishing utility drove reform minded officers to break the inertia of , culture, and doctrine.

Throughout the 1960s the Soviet Union increased its nuclear arsenal and began to modernize its conventional forces. This process brought the USSR to a position of near military parity with the United States by the beginning of the Nixon administration. This situation explains Nixon’s efforts of détente and the policies enacted by his successors

19 Terry Terriff, The Nixon Administration and the Making of US Nuclear Strategy, Cornell Studies in Security Affairs (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1995), 191-92. 20 Raymond L. Garthoff, “Detente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan” (The Brookings Institution: National Council for Soviet and East European Research, December 22, 1982), 3–4. 21 Kaplan, To Kill Nations: American Strategy in the Air-Atomic Age and the Rise of Mutually Assured Destruction, 19.

18 and Kissinger, but it did not bode well for the military. Détente required a certain level of military strength. Since 1945, the U.S. had enjoyed a vast superiority in nuclear weapons and in the quality of most conventional weapon systems. Soviet progress equalized the nuclear balance and added quality to the quantitative advantage it always had held in conventional forces. Advances in Soviet aircraft and air defense threatened the way that the U.S. planned to use force in Central Europe, especially tactical air forces

(TAF). The Army counted on the Air Force to aid its operations or, at the very least, prevent Soviet attacks from the air. For the Air Force, the tactical domain suddenly became its most important role, one for which it was badly prepared.

The lag in the Air Force described by Kaplan (in thinking and strategy) lasted into the late 1960s, but the impact on leadership and hardware remained much longer. The

Air Force promoted its first Chief of Staff without a background purely in SAC, only in

1973. The first Chief with a purely fighter background was not selected until 1982. The

Air Force’s tactical fleet was designed for use primarily as supersonic nuclear bombers and its doctrine did not match the increasingly capable Soviet threat or the expectations of the Army. One aircraft deployed in Vietnam, the F-105, suffered 332 combat losses, over a third of its fleet, forcing the Air Force to move most of the remainder to the Air

Force Reserve and Air National Guard. 22 So great was the aircraft’s reputation for vulnerability that F-4 squadrons disguised themselves as F-105s to bait enemy MiGs into air combat during Operation Bolo.23 The replacements for the century series fighters (F-

100, F-105, etc) and the F-4 did not enter service in significant numbers until 1980.

22 Surivability/Vulnerability Branch: Vehicle Equipment Division, “A Comparative Analysis of USAF Fixed- Wing Aircraft Losses in Southeast Asia Combat,” Technical Report: AFFDL-TR-77-115 (Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio: USAF, December 1977). 23 Capt B. Chance Saltzman and Thomas R. Searle, Introduction to the United States Air Force (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012), 73.

19 From 1970, U.S. airpower entered a period of increasing risk that only substantial reforms to leadership and service culture could reverse. Fortunately, the Air Force’s educational institutions embraced the need for reform and a massive generational leadership change was underway. Though agreeing to redefine doctrine and procuring new airframes could take time, internal changes could occur much more quickly.

USAF Leadership and PME

The change of tactical capabilities in the U.S. and the Soviet Union coincided with a changing of the guard in Air Force leadership. In the early 1970s, the Air Force faced a major generational shift in leadership. Retired Maj Gen Mike Worden’s seminal work, Rise of the Fighter Generals, highlights the transition in the period between 1973 and 1982. 1973 witnessed a break from the traditional dominance of Strategic Air

Command flyers. The choice of Gen George Brown as Chief Staff of the Air Force

(CSAF) gave the Air Force its first chief with extensive experience in the fighter and training communities, and also in the PME system.24 Brown’s selection marked a generational shift for the Air Force, which was increasingly aware of the need to look for new ideas. The majority of its officers understood that the old SAC approach and formula was no longer working, and focus on its continued use was making the Air Force less important within national defense. The previous generation of the general officers that led the Air Force in 1950s and 1960s came up through the ranks during the Second

World War and Korea. This shaped the way they understood airpower, as many equated the use of nuclear weapons against Japan and the Combined Bomber Offensive over

Europe as the source of Air Force independence. To this generation, the purpose and

24 Col Mike Worden, Rise of the Fighter Generals: The Problem of Air Force Leadership 1945-1982 (Maxwell AFB: Air University Press, 1998), 213–216.

20 identity of the Air Force and airpower was wrapped up entirely in strategic nuclear bombing. The following generation had a vastly different set of experiences to draw upon as commanders. Worden emphasizes the influence on USAF policy of an absence of graduate level education, both academic and military, in Air Force leadership up to the end of the Vietnam War, in part as a way of contrasting the influences that affected each generation.

PME institutions gave each branch a means to educate officers in preparation for higher levels of command and responsibility. Though this purpose was not dissimilar from civilian education programs (like business school, for instance), it was unique in the military for offering officers a channel to voice lessons learned and concerns about doctrine and training. Additionally, PME offered the Air Force, which lacked a major command dedicated to doctrine, a way to conceptualize itself and the way it fought wars.

Thus, PME served as an intellectual marketplace for new ideas as well as a reservoir of service culture and identity. Changes in institutions like the Air Force’s Air University reflected those to the overall culture of the Air Force and how it viewed its future.

Reforms to Air Force PME starting in the early 1970s shaped the debate over the service’s role and nature of air warfare.

By the mid-1970s, the Air Force finally began to reap the rewards of its advanced education system. The graduates of Air University’s programs began to fill the upper ranks and to further promote Air Force PME. Reforms undertaken during and after the

Vietnam War increased the rigor and scope of all of the military’s PME institutions. The influence of PME and the rise of non-SAC officers into positions of leadership, combined to shake up the Air Force intellectually. By 1982, the Air Force had its first primarily

21 fighter-aircraft CSAF, just in time for the introduction of the Army’s 1982 FM 100-5

(better known as “AirLand Battle”). The ascent of a new crop of leaders changed the tone for the younger members of the officer corps. These officers had first-hand experience flying and serving around the world, bringing an operational perspective to planning and doctrinal discussions. Indeed, many of these men had served in Vietnam, and witnessed the shortcomings of U.S. efforts in that conflict. The task of implementing reform in tactics and doctrine largely fell to officers between the ranks of Captain and

Colonel (who, for the sake of brevity I will hence refer to as Middle Grade Officers or

MGOs). They explored topics of reform in PME programs and developed new styles of training. Indeed, some of the key elements in Air Force policy originated from MGOs, like reforms in the tactical training for pilots and even the idea for the F-16.

Without the military’s educational infrastructure, these MGOs would have lacked an avenue for professional discourse. This infrastructure was in the midst of substantial turmoil, after its curricula and graduates proved mismatched to years of fighting in

Southeast Asia. The burden of the Vietnam War rippled through the PME system heavily into the 1970s and 1980s. In many ways, the raison d'être of institutes like the Naval

War College became to avoid another Vietnam. While this effort included a renewed (or perhaps inaugural) look to the classics of Sun Tzu and Clausewitz, it also involved a reconsideration of doctrine and its place within officer education. In the search for new service identities, each branch grappled with tactics, strategy, and a shrinking budget.

Out of this environment, a new period of cooperation blossomed between the Army and the Air Force. Cordial relationships at the top of the Air Force and the Army, such as that demonstrated by the service chiefs, GEN Creighton Abrams and Brown, positively

22 flavored the nature of cooperative projects. This tone trickled down to junior officers, as they viewed their role in a future air land battlefield (not yet the popular name for Field

Manual [FM] 100-5 [1982], but already a common term in Army and Air Force discussions of doctrine and war planning) in Europe.

Officers involved in Air Force PME came from all of its branches. Many completed educational requirements remotely, through correspondence, but the best (or the most competitive on paper) went to Maxwell AFB in residence. Maxwell AFB hosts

Air University, which includes the subdivisions of the Air War College (AWC), Air

Command and Staff College (ACSC), and Squadron Officer School (SOS).25 These subdivisions educated Lieutenant Colonels, Majors, and Captains, respectively. Each served as a significant career milestone, and often an outright requirement for promotion and certain assignments. While not every graduate of Air War College becomes a general officer, nearly every Air Force general officer is a graduate of Air War College

(or a sister-service war college). Though some aspects of Air University’s structure have changed in recent decades, much remains the same today as in the 1970s. The changes that occurred in Air Force PME did not happen passively, but rather were the product of dedicated reformers, who fought against the friction of the system.

The Air Force’s PME organizations displayed a strongly conservative streak in their method and curriculum, resisting most efforts at reform during the 1960s.26 Many officers believed that Air University had ossified during the Vietnam War. Fortunately,

25 “Air University Homepage,” Air Education and Training Command: Air University, 2015, http://www.au.af.mil/au/index.asp. 26 It remains conservative today on many issues. If any doubt exists on this topic, just ask about Col John Boyd at the Air Force Academy. Since the Academy began its History Department-sponsored Exemplar Program (which has each class pick a deceased officer as a leadership role model) in 2000, Col Boyd has been a finalist on each class’s ballot every year. Though his work is taught to every cadet, he has yet to become a class exemplar.

23 Lt Gen Raymond B. Furlong, the general who assumed command of Air University in

1975, shared these convictions, observing wryly that, “with a command motto of

‘Progress Unhindered by Tradition’ we had too often become traditionalist.”27 Furlong had just finished assignments as a military assistant to the Deputy SECDEF from 1968 to

1973 and as the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Legislative Affairs.28

This time in the capital gave him experience with the Pentagon’s views on reform and

Congress’s oversight efforts. He believed that Air War College had shifted too much toward the realm of policy and decision-making at the expense of war fighting. Decades of focus on the nuclear mission as an element of policy had come at the expense of discussion about actual warfare. He committed to “putting the ‘war’ back into the war college.”29 This meant focusing education on the realities of combat operations, not the more nebulous political and civil-military themes that dominated Air University in 1960s.

One manifestation of these reforms was the March 1977’s inaugural Airpower

Symposium at Maxwell AFB. Speakers at this symposium discussed a range of topics, but each related to specific challenges facing the Air Force.

This first symposium illustrates the state of thinking within the Air Force in the midst of reform. Officers in Air University programs wrote not only about their own roles within the Air Force, but also about new capabilities and doctrine that utilized their experience and expertise. MGOs and academics wrote papers for the first Airpower

Symposium on a wide range of topics, which demonstrated self-awareness and a desire to shape the broader discussion on airpower. Notably, many papers focused on tactical

27 Air University Directorate of History, A Short History of The Air University, Maxwell AFB, and the 42nd Air Base Wing (Maxwell AFB: The Intellectual and Leadership Center of the U. S. Air Force, 2014), 7. 28 “Lieutenant General Raymond B. Furlong Biography” (USAF, December 1975). 29 Air University Directorate of History, A Short History of The Air University, Maxwell AFB, and the 42nd Air Base Wing, 7.

24 airpower and its context within the air land battle. Such academic exercises demonstrate a desire by Air Force officers to fill in the gaps not yet defined by doctrine. They had the opportunity to write about their ideas and institutional conduits to share their insights with other officers of various ranks and civilian academics. Company grade officers, with great operational expertise and insight, fleshed-out broader plans and policy. Field grade officers represented the cream of the crop for their career fields and year groups.

Together, these MGOs were among the Air Force officers most likely to implement the ideas and understandings shared at the symposium.

Many of the officers who participated in the inaugural Airpower Symposium in

1977 discussed supportive and tactical roles, eschewing the traditional focus on independent functions (that is, separate from the actions of the other branches) and strategic operations. Thus, while at higher levels the Air Force’s leadership invested time, money, and attention into the betterment of tactical capabilities and training, officers of all ranks complemented their efforts. Some of the papers focused on the far periphery of the Air Force’s focus, like the potential for unmanned systems to provide tactical capabilities, airlift to the European theater in conjunction with Army, and the tactical use of B-52s against enemy ground forces and supply lines. Rapid shifts in and their implications for doctrine grounded discussion not just of

TACAIR assets, but of other Air Force platforms that operated in the tactical environment. Perhaps a signal of the thawing of parochialism within the Air Force (as seen with Gen Brown’s background with a mixture of airframes), officers without

TACAIR background saw the need to apply their expertise and assets in a conventional war with the Soviets. Alternatively, many in the nuclear career field must have noticed

25 the diminishing prominence of their role, and sought new ways of contributing and surviving.

The papers at the symposium did not focus exclusively on contemporary problems, but also looked at the potential offered by emerging technologies. These officers sought procedures, doctrine, and tactics to match anticipated capabilities. Maj

Eugene F. Bigham’s paper on drones imagined unmanned platforms performing tactical duties. He identified utilities offered by drones, from fuel savings to expendability in the face enemy fire, and missions where they could supplement existing capabilities and platforms.30 His assessment was not far from today’s reality. Capt Roger G. Garrett advocated the need for greater strategic airlift in the event of war in Central Europe.

With the reduction of forces in Europe in the late 1960s, the U.S. and NATO needed to conduct REFORGER expeditiously. At the heart of that operation stood strategic airlift.

The importance of this mission made strategic airlift just that – strategic. Garrett suggested innovations to get more troops to the fight more quickly, or even equipping some tankers as missile platforms. His suggestions are another example of non- traditional thinking about strategic and operational issues.31

Finally, Capt Kenneth M. Stewart looked at how strategic bombers could serve in the tactical realm, an idea which would have been heresy fifteen years before. He noted the strong record of strategic bombers acting as deep penetration raiders, as during the

Vietnam War. The B-52’s size made it good candidate for modifications that were impossible to make with any existing fighter platform. Thus, B-52s could deploy “smart”

30 Maj Eugene F. Bigham, “The Future of Drones - A Force of Manned and Unmanned Systmes,” Airpower Symposium (Maxwell AFB: Air University, March 1977), Maxwell AFHRA: K239.151-34. 31 Capt Roger G. Garrett, “Military Airlift -- The Need for Massive Air Transports: Their Technology and Applications,” Airpower Symposium (Maxwell AFB: Air University, March 1977), Maxwell AFHRA: K239.151-38.

26 bombs against tactical targets, or serve as mobile electronics warfare platforms to support air operations in theater. The spectrum of missions, and thus flexibility, provided by strategic bombers might blunt Soviet . While bombers presented big targets and were less nimble than fighters, their size afforded room for modification, flexibility, experimentation, and the optimization of existing resources. 32

The next year, Gen Dixon spoke at the Airpower Symposium at Maxwell AFB, explaining the coming changes in doctrine and the advance made through the TAC-

TRADOC relationship. Dixon’s presentation focused one “Battlefield Support in the

1980’s.”33 Even in 1978, supportive air to ground missions were given a large amount of attention, and also a place in the title of Dixon’s presentation. The infrastructure of cooperation, then five years old, was paying handsome dividends, especially when paired with the continued intervention of leaders like Dixon.

As a reflection of the changes that took hold in Air Force PME, many of the ideas discussed by these MGOs in 1977 were taught to young Captains at SOS by the mid-

1980s. An SOS history, describing the program’s operations and curriculum in 1983, mentioned the addition of “the new Army doctrine, Airland [sic] Battle.”34 AirLand

Battle, the Army’s 1982 edition of FM 100-5, had only been released the previous fall.

Most of the students at SOS were not in the doctrine business, and few would be in large command positions for at least several years. The quick digestion of new Army doctrine indicates how close the ties between the services had grown over the previous years. By

32 Capt Kenneth M. Stewart, “The Role of the in a Tactical Nonnuclear Environment,” Airpower Symposium (Maxwell AFB: Air University, February 1977), Maxwell AFHRA: K239.151-36. 33 Gen Robert J. Dixon, “Speech by Gen Robert J. Dixon to the 1978 AU Airpower Symposium” (TAC and AU, February 10, 1978), 1, Maxwell AFHRA: K417.168. 34 “History of Squadron Officer School 1 Janurary - 31 December 1983” (Squadron Officer School - Air University, 1983), 4, Maxwell AFHRA: K239.07P.

27 1984, the curriculum included 17.5 hours of instruction on Army-related topics.35 Army officers briefed the students on the doctrine of the Army, the AirLand Battle doctrine and the Air Force’s role within it, and the general role and mission of the Army. Other lectures given included: “U.S. Navy and Marine Corps Forces; Soviet Army; U.S. Army;

Airland Battle Doctrine; Soviet Threat” and “Current Doctrinal Issues.”36 While much of this content seems rudimentary, that material would have been the first taste of joint operations and doctrine most of the captains received. Additionally, it represented an appreciable portion of training time spent on non-Air Force topics. Regardless of the enthusiasm shown by the young captains, the Air Force and its PME branches recognized the need for creating a new type of officer. Increasingly, being an Air Force officer meant being an officer of the military at large, with a firm understanding of the other services, especially the Army.

Training Renaissance

In parallel to discussions with the Air Force’s PME organizations, a renaissance of tactical training bloomed in TAC. Because of the prominence of SAC and the nuclear mission, Air Force fighters were designed to intercept and escort heavy bombers, and/or function as light bombers. These priorities dictated not only hardware, but also the character and format of the training that fighter pilots received. Brian Laslie highlights this problem as one reason why the U.S. suffered so many losses in Vietnam. Air Force pilots flew into combat unprepared for the enemy they would face or the missions they

35 “History of Squadron Officer School 1 Janurary - 31 December 1984” (Squadron Officer School - Air University, 1984), 17, Maxwell AFHRA: K239.07P. 36 Ibid., 3.

28 would fly.37 A major overhaul of training was needed if the U.S. hoped to recover the human element of its qualitative edge.

Throughout the Vietnam period, TAC commanders tried to increase the realism and variety of the training provided to their pilots. Pilots and units already deployed to

South East Asia did not feel the benefits immediately. However, the pilots who returned from Vietnam brought back the lesson that better and more regular training might help to prevent the losses suffered in that conflict. In 1975, TAC rolled out the first “Red Flag” exercise, in an effort to prepare pilots for air-to-air combat and ground fire.38 Though

TAC’s commanders deserve credit for establishing a culture that tolerated reform and innovation, it was an MGO who led in creating the new exercise, Maj Richard “Moody”

Suter. That fact indicates that the Air Force listened to its MGOs when it considered change. Suter, working at the Pentagon, initiated a meeting on this issue with TAC leadership at Langley AFB in Virginia. Ultimately, he convinced Gen Robert Dixon,

Commander of TAC, of the need for a new training program. Suter’s plan incorporated the use of opposing forces (OPFOR) equipped with aircraft that imitated the enemy’s planes and tactics, and low-level flying that allowed pilots to counter ground-based air defenses. The Chief of Staff, Gen Brown, supported this emphasis on realism, which fit his broader desire to reform the Air Force’s training.39 Gen Dixon’s successor, Gen

William Creech, made training and the Red Flag exercise priorities during his time in command, when they became fixtures of the culture and modus operandi of tactical airpower in the U.S.

37 Brian D. Laslie, The Air Force Way of War: U.S. Tactics and Training after Vietnam (Lexington, Ky: University Press of Kentucky, 2015), 10–12. 38 Ibid., 55–57. 39 Ibid., 57–60.

29 Conclusions

The crisis of role, culture, and leadership that the Air Force faced at the close of the Vietnam War challenged the very purpose and identity of the service. The changes that occurred in the 1970s marked a substantial break with previous eras of airpower.

The Air Force changed how it conceptualized war, planned to fight war, and trained and prepared for war. It adopted a war-fighting style that emphasized close cooperation with land forces, which would have seemed iconoclastic to the first generation of airpower prophets and leaders. Throughout its earliest decades, the writings of luminaries like

Douhet, Trenchard, and Mitchell fired the imagination of the nascent branch’s officer corps. Technology promised to erase the limits of air warfare and eliminate the constraints of geography. The arrival of the atomic bomb seared this assumption into

American airpower thinking, producing a Jominian approach not only to airpower but to warfare itself. This version of airpower ignored the friction of warfare, in favor of a statistical and technical understanding that resembles Clausewitz’s derisive “war by arithmetic.” Transitions in presidential policy and the harsh realities of limited warfare prompted the first major changing of the guard within the Air Force. This pressure produced new leaders and weapons systems, but, more importantly, an entirely different philosophy of airpower. The new party line held that cooperation with ground forces and the tactical use of airpower were essential roles for the Air Force. Airpower thinking acquired a Clausewitz complexion, with attention paid to losses expected not just in single combat but over the course of a campaign. The Air Force turned its gaze toward the destruction of the enemy in the field, the traditional role of armies, but anathema to the indirect economic focus that characterized sea and airpower theorists for so long.

30 Such a shock could have overwhelmed the service. Instead, it led to a period of renewal and success, because of the fortuitous combination of top-down and bottom-up reform by generals and captains.

31 Chapter 3: Politics and Command

To understand how American commanders perceived the Soviets and the need for service reform in the early 1970s, one must assess the events that influenced their thinking. Though the military’s view of itself and the world evolved continually, a coincidence of events in 1973 had a special effect. Major operations in the Vietnam conflict ended, the Yom Kippur War challenged assumptions about , and the draft ended as a source for U.S. military manpower. The end of the Vietnam War and the draft did not surprise the U.S., but the Yom Kippur conflict was a bolt out of a blue sky. Western-built equipment in Israeli hands faced Soviet gear under Arab use.

Although the equipment did not represent the cutting edge of either bloc’s arsenal, the war personified the classic paradigm of quantity vs. quality through which the U.S. imagined a potential conflict with the Warsaw Pact. The influence of these events, along with a perceived increase in the threat posed by the Soviet Union, drove the program of reform that the U.S. military pursued over the following decade. This program required substantial effort within the services and in convincing Congress and the American public change was needed. In large part, this effort was successful.

The Yom Kippur War and its Implications

In October 1973, a coalition of Arab states conducted a coordinated strike on

Israel. Israeli leadership had received some advance warning, but political considerations blunted any effort by the Israeli military to preempt or prevent the Arab assault. Having suffered grievous losses from the Israeli Air Force (IAF) during the Six Days War, the

Arab states opted to spoil the aerial arena instead of competing for it. Though the Israelis eventually halted the Arab attack, and airpower was central to its survival and victory, the

32 Arabs still inflicted substantial losses on the Israelis with relatively low-tech and inexpensive weaponry. The IAF dominated air-to-air combat, achieving a kill ratio of roughly 20-to-1, but most Israeli aircraft losses came from surface to air missiles.40

These Soviet built air defense systems (ADS) let the Arabs inhibit Israeli air operations in a manner that did not require the price or training involved in sustaining tactical air forces. This air defense capability did not bode for well for air forces centered on air superiority. It threatened to make their strengths largely irrelevant.

During the Six-Day War, the Israelis destroyed Arab air forces on the first day of the conflict. In 1973, political considerations restricted the IAF from striking either air defense targets or Arab planes on the ground before the war started. The Arabs hardened aircraft hangars to avoid the losses suffered on the ground during 1967. The failure to crush the Arabs early and hard in 1973 prevented the IAF from achieving air superiority in the first days of fighting. It had to devote many resources to the suppression of enemy air defenses (SEAD) instead of close air support (CAS) or battle area interdiction

(BAI).41 At several points in the conflict, the IAF abandoned efforts to support ground operations because losses to air defense were simply too high.42 These developments unsettled U.S. war planners. If the Soviets decided not to play in the air but rather to prevent entry with ADS, the tactical air (TACAIR) forces of NATO and the U.S. would lose their very raison d’etre - gaining air superiority and aiding the ground effort.

Fortunately for American TACAIR, Gen Robert Dixon assumed command of

TAC several days before the Yom Kippur War began. When it received a memo that

40 Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine: Basic Thinking in the United States Air Force - 1961-1984, II:486. 41 Ibid., II: 487. 42 Col Robert D. Rasmussen, “The Cental European Battlefield” (Maxwell AFB: Air University Review, August 1978), 3, Maxwell AFHRA: 168.7646-14.

33 same month, TAC informed all of its staff officers about the creation of a new Army unit,

Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC).43 Dixon understood that the new command presented an opportunity for cooperation and visited it just two weeks into the job at TAC.44 His determination to change TAC and work with TRADOC started an effective partnership that later proved to be the most important single vehicle for Air

Force innovation with the Army.

TRADOC received its first commander, GEN William DePuy, in 1973; around the same time that Gen Robert Dixon assumed command of TAC. Their service chiefs,

GEN Creighton Abrams and Gen George Brown, instructed them to cooperate closely.

These chiefs believed that their services had cooperated well during the Vietnam War, overcoming institutional failings through an earnest desire to break through bureaucracy.45 Such a position would have been hard for a purely SAC experienced commander to adopt, but not for an officer with Brown’s breadth of experience. Within weeks, the commands established a working group that eventually became a permanent body for dialogue and de-confliction, and a standing organization, the Air Land Forces

Applications (ALFA) office, to coordinate doctrine, training, and the acquisition of new weapon systems.

TAC and TRADOC had no time to congratulate themselves on their newfound camaraderie. Just as the two organizations began their initial working groups in October

1973, the Yom Kippur War erupted. Many of their assumptions regarding tactics and doctrine went through the gauntlet. The Yom Kippur War shaped conventional military

43 Brig Gen Jesse M. Allen, “USAF TAC Memo: U.S. Army Reorganization,” 1973, Maxwell AFHRA: K168.03- 2342 Part 2. 44 Gen Robert J. Dixon, “Tactical Fighter Forces and NATO” (TAC, January 27, 1978), 10, Maxwell AFHRA: K417.168-117. 45 Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine: Basic Thinking in the United States Air Force - 1961-1984, II: 530.

34 thinking more than the Vietnam War. While the latter witnessed a mismatch of tactics and strategy, Yom Kippur called into question latent American assumptions about a land war with the Soviets. That conflict placed qualitatively superior, Western-outfitted Israel, against a coalition with quantitatively superior Soviet-equipped Arab states. The performance of Soviet-made weapon systems raised serious questions about U.S. defense plans and policy. Soviet air defense systems (such as the SA-6, SA-3, and SA-2) downed the better-trained and equipped Israeli pilots in the early stages of the war. While most missiles fired at the Israelis missed, many did not, and the Arab nations inflicted losses at a fraction of the price of Israeli aircraft. Before Israeli aircraft could provide CAS or interdiction, they faced a struggle for air superiority and SEAD. Maj Gen Harold E.

Collins, the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Air Force for Research and Development observed:

[The Israelis] made a basic assumption that the SAMs were not going to bother them all that badly… So they decided that they would go ahead in, and when they found that the SAM environment was pretty tough, and particularly the fact that that SA-6 had mobility, that drove them down to the deck and, of course, drove them in the AAA. That is where they got a devil of a lot of losses.46

This development threatened the U.S. Army, perhaps even more than the Air Force, because it challenged the ability of ground forces to rely on support from the air.

Military writer Thomas Ricks traced this influence on Army planning and thinking through to conflict in Iraq in 2003, no small accomplishment for a 30 year-old war.47

The Army had good reason to cooperate with the Air Force. So too, the Air Force had a strong incentive to work with the Army to clear air defenses not just from the air

46 Ibid., II: 484. 47 Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin Press, 2006), 129– 133.

35 and also the ground. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staffs (CJCS), ADM Thomas

H. Moorer, summed up the newly realized vulnerability after Yom Kippur:

First, ready, in-being, deployed forces are essential to maintaining the territorial integrity of any area whose defense is required… Additionally, the classic doctrine that the priority of employment of air assets must be given to gaining and maintaining air superiority over the battlefield has been proven once again. Today gaining air superiority includes defeating SAMs in detail. Until enemy air defenses are degraded, any application of aerial firepower will be costly, but the losses will go down as air defenses are taken out… In the interim, ground force must be capable of fighting with reduced reliance upon close air support. 48

The Yom Kippur War demonstrated the ability of an army to contest air superiority from the ground and at low cost. Retired Israeli general and future President of Israel Chaim Herzog remarked after the Yom Kippur War:

The proliferation of light, portable missile launchers in the front lines meant that close air support would be the exception to the rule in the future, with the air force being obliged to concentrate on isolating the field of battle, maintaining supremacy in the air, and destroying the forces in and near the field of battle.49

While this statement was not what the Army wanted to hear, it fit the traditional priority of the Air Force in conventional operations – air superiority. As early as May 1965, Maj

Gen Arthur C. Agan, the Assistant Deputy CSAF for Plans and Operations, recognized the existence of a Maslowian hierarchy in the air:

Reconnaissance, close air support, or interdiction may hold the key to a particular facet of tactical air operations; but if an enemy makes a determined bid for air superiority, the indispensable condition for success in joint operations will be our ability to seek out and destroy enemy fighters.50

While this narrative focused on the air-to-air dimension of achieving superiority, it also demonstrates the Air Force’s understanding of how to prioritize operations. To air

48 Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine: Basic Thinking in the United States Air Force - 1961-1984, II: 485. 49 Ibid., II: 489. 50 Ibid., II: 471.

36 planners and flyers alike, this ordering of mission types was self-evident. Without control of the skies (at least locally), the utility and survivability of air support quickly would collapse.

A paper presented at the first Air University (AU) air symposium, in 1977, by

John J. Emanski Jr., of the Stanford Research Institute, highlighted the assumptions made by the U.S. in its planning for war in Europe. It demonstrates the limitations that Air

Force and Army leaders artificially imposed on the Central European theater in plans and doctrine. Emanksi analyzed Heinz Guderian’s accounts of pushing troops to the limit, arguing that the Soviet system of rotation gave them an advantage in sustaining offensive operations.51 American (and NATO) divisions were handicapped at the tactical and operational levels against the Soviet concentration of firepower into smaller divisions with much more tooth than tail. American divisions contained their own support apparatus and relied on a replacement pool system, equipping them for a long-term war after mobilization at home. Soviet troops stood ready for a lightning campaign with support functions under centralized control. Their ability to sustain fast-paced operations for longer than the Americans threatened to the Army. Even worse was Emanski’s list of planning assumptions before fighting even began:

Some days of warning before attack… A large supply of reserve war materiel on hand in Europe to support massive land and air offensive and defensive operations… An initial supply and subsequent flow of petroleum… Effective road and rail networks… NATO control of the air… The Soviets not using nuclear weapons up to that point… The Soviets not using chemical weapons at all… NATO operations in the Mediterranean… Timely decisions by NATO authorities… NATO continuing to act in concert when one or all are under attack…52

To complicate matters from an air perspective, airbases must sustain conventional

51 Emanski Jr., “Implications of Continous Land Combat on Air Support Doctrine,” 1–15. 52 Ibid., 21–24.

37 TACAIR operations, maintain a nuclear force on stand-by, and serve as the entry point for thousands of arriving reinforcements. These assumptions riddled U.S. plans like

Swiss cheese, highlighting the complacency that characterized conventional planning in the Air Force and the Army. Limited warfare in Southeast Asia and the ever-present nuclear option had distracted the Army and the Air Force from preparing for war with the

Soviets.

Emanski also questioned how well the current U.S. procurement programs could work. He doubted the ability of the A-10, product of the A-X program, to serve as a universal panacea for CAS in Europe. The A-10 promised to provide an inexpensive dedicated CAS aircraft prepared for target lethality, responsiveness, survivability, and simplicity.53 Though it achieved those goals, keeping the project on time and under budget deprived the first series of A-10 of the advanced avionics necessary for flying in inclement weather and at night. In sustained continuous operations, most TACAIR missions would fall to the F-111 – already busy with and deep interdiction.

U.S. and NATO plans for war against the Warsaw Pact in Central Europe relied on airpower and technical superiority. As they counted on air assistance even more than the Israelis, and the Soviets emphasized air defense forces even more than the Arabs, the developments of the Yom Kippur War were particularly alarming. 54 The mobility and technological advances of the SA-6 “Gainful”55 threatened to crush the capabilities of

53 Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine: Basic Thinking in the United States Air Force - 1961-1984, II: 527–8. 54 Ibid., II: 484. 55 The NATO designation for the 2K12 Kub

38 U.S. electronic counter measures (ECM).56 Additionally, the U.S. and NATO would face the same political constraints before war against the Soviets that prevented a preemptive

Israeli strike in 1973. The Israelis quickly recovered from early losses, but their experiences indicated the weaknesses inherent in a reserve-based high quality fighting force that favored skill over mass. The U.S. military could not change its political situation or the exigencies that democratic rule imposed on aggressive action. It could, however, adapt how it employed, and conceptualized, the use of force.

Structural Changes and Strategic Realignment

As part of broader reforms within the U.S. military, the Army split its old

Continental Army Command (CAC) into two new units. CAC had been responsible for training troops for Army commands across the world. In 1973, however, the training mission was separated from the force production mission, and the Army stood up (the military phrase used to describe the activation of a new unit, organization, or command)

Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) and Forces Command (FORSCOM).

TRADOC was responsible not only to train the Army, but to craft the plans and procedures to guide its tactics and operations in war. TRADOC’s headquarters (HQ) remained at the old CAC HQ, Fort Monroe, Virginia. This location proved propitious, as its most important partner in the reformation of joint planning and operations stood less than ten miles away.

Just up the road stood Tactical Air Command (TAC) HQ, at Langley Air Force

Base (AFB). (As an indication of the proximity of the two organizations, TRADOC

56 Dr Carlo Kopp, “NIIP 2K12 Kub/Kvadrat - Self Propelled Air Defence System / SA-6 Gainful: Technical Report APA-TR-2009-0701,” Air Power Australia, January 27, 2014, http://www.ausairpower.net/APA- 2K12-Kvadrat.html.

39 today is located on a joint base that includes TAC’s successor, Air Combat Command.)57

TAC was responsible for all of the Air Force’s fighter and attack aircraft, and the aircraft that supported those missions. Essentially, it controlled all of the armed aircraft in the inventory that did not belong to the nuclear mission and SAC. The emphasis on nuclear weapons for deterrence and war fighting gave the Air Force the planes it used for

Vietnam. These aircraft were designed to fly as supersonic tactical nuclear bombers during World War Three, not in ground support roles. Many were not even appropriate for air-to-air combat. However, by 1973 the Air Force was changing its view of the tactical side of airpower. This perspective drove the Air Force’s effort to regain a prominent role in national defense, which had diminished since 1961. Projects to replace the F-4 and the F-111 spurred much innovation for tactical airpower. Thus, TAC refocused its interests toward the types of air operations in which the Army had the greatest interest, and would help the Air Force to acquire new airframes.

With shrinking budgets and fewer forces deployed forward in Europe, resilient

Soviet air defense challenged the survivability of NATO in Central Europe. As late as

1977, war plans for Central Europe relied on three weeks notice before a Soviet or

Warsaw Pact attack. This assumption fit Nixon era political objectives, but not the military realities confronting commanders in Europe.58 By limiting the scale and duration of a war in Central Europe in planning, American commanders artificially imposed limitations on the battlefield and removed the role of uncertainty and friction from fighitng. At least on paper, to defeat the Warsaw Pact in Central Europe would require far more attention, coordination, and firepower than the U.S. had dedicated in the

57 “The TRADOC Story,” United States Army Training and Doctrine Command, n.d., http://www.tradoc.army.mil/About.asp. 58 Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine: Basic Thinking in the United States Air Force - 1961-1984, II:499–501.

40 1960s.

The new generation of leaders and officers in the Air Force understood the way forward. They knew that changes to USAF could make the service more effective and more vital to defense than it had been for a decade. Though military budgets were declining, still, vast amounts of money lay on the table for the Air Force, if it chose to adopt policies close to interdependence. This money helped to sweeten the prospects of cooperation with the Army, and gave officers from career fields like fighter and airlift opportunities to find a prominent role. The threat posed by Soviet kit and a dysfunctional identity provided the Air Force with a stick, but a receptive Army and willing Congress offered a large carrot. This combination allowed the Air Force to change more in the mid-1970s than it had done in the previous two decades. This period of change witnessed the Air Force’s major branches exploit these opportunities by fundamentally, and successfully, reconfiguring their organizations, kit, doctrine, and training.

MAC, TAC, and Consolidation

The challenges facing TAC were by no means exceptional in the Air Force.

SAC’s role and identity were in crisis after a decade of dislocation from executive policy and military realities. The largest shift for SAC was the recognition within the command and the Air Force that its mission was no longer the central pillar of U.S. defense policy or even the Air Force. Despite this, however, its nuclear capabilities and basic operations remained the same, even after the reforms of the 1970s. The same could not be said of

Military Airlift Command (MAC).

The experience of Southeast Asia and Vietnam had profound effects on TAC, but

MAC learned the clearest practical lessons. While SAC and TAC trained and prepared

41 for WWIII, and occasionally operated at a small scale, MAC moved cargo everyday, rain or shine, peace or war. The organization of the Air Force’s airlift assets was divided between MAC, TAC, USAFE, and PACAF. This created confusion and required redundant facilities, command, and staffs. MAC was strained to its limits during the

Vietnam War. It devoted 80% of its assets to supporting operations in Southeast Asia, a proportion far greater than TAC or SAC, which remained focused on Europe.59 The existing distinction between tactical and strategic airlift became increasingly blurred during the conflict. The Air Force’s “CORONA HARVEST” study recommended a unification of strategic and tactical airlift assets, as their missions often overlapped and their required support facilities were similar.60

While TAC watched the Yom Kippur War, and the use of Soviet ADS, MAC engaged in a massive airlift operation. The Soviet deployment of supplies to Egypt and

Syria on the 10th of October precipitated American support for Israel, Operation NICKEL

GRASS beginning three days later.61 The MAC effort surpassed the Soviet airlift effort in sorties and tonnage delivered. Significantly, the average MAC route was over four times as long as that of their Soviet counterparts. Political considerations restricted U.S. cargo planes to neutral airspace over the Mediterranean, flying out of the Azores.62 This operation highlighted both the utility of airlift in an overseas conflict and also the limitations present in the old organization.

The result of these of events, along with MAC’s role in the evacuation of South

Vietnam and its refugees, was a substantial alteration in airlift. Gen Paul Carlton, MAC’s

59 Sam McGowan, Anything, Anywhere, Anytime Tactical Airlift in the US Army Air Forces and US Air Force from World War II to Vietnam. (Authorhouse, 2012), 144-45. 60 Ibid, 145. 61 Ibid., 154–56. 62 Ibid., 156.

42 commander, realized the necessity of aerial refueling for his long-range airlift planes.

MAC’s C-141s were not equipped for aerial refueling and only some of the new C-5s had the capability.63 While increasing aerial refueling seems intuitive, it had not previously been a regular part of strategic airlift operations. The expansion of this capability required an increase in the number of air tankers, most of which had previous belonged to the nuclear mission and SAC.

The other major change to come out of Vietnam and Yom Kippur was the unification of the airlift mission. Ad hoc agreements had previously coordinated local airlift operations, as PACAF, USAFE, and TAC each controlled their own airlift wings.

Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, a major supporter of reform, Gen Brown, then

Chairman of the JCS, and Gen Brown’s successor as CSAF, Gen David C. Jones, all pushed for MAC to assume control of all airlift missions and assets.64 In total, MAC gained 25 units ranging from flying wings to medical clinics. This not only augmented

MAC, but also streamlined the roles of the losing commands. TAC alone lost eleven independent units, helping it refocus on its fighter and attack TACAIR mission.

Ultimately, the reforms to MAC produced a more efficient command that offered a greater contribution to the REFORGER strategy, which planned on transporting huge numbers of state-side troops into Europe as reinforcements. In yet another way, the Air

Force’s reforms post-1973 made it more relevant to nation’s defense.

MAC and TRADOC

The reforms to airlift did not end with consolidation in 1974. As TAC and

TRADOC planned for war in Central Europe, the need for American reinforcement

63 Ibid., 158–59. 64 Ibid., 164–66.

43 continued to play an important role. The Army’s FM 100-5 (both 1976 and1982 versions) emphasized the need to win the first battle of the next war.65 Though this primarily meant a focus on defeating the enemy in the field, and preventing his reinforcement, the supply and growth of NATO forces remained essential. In recognition of the centrality of airlift to this mission, TRADOC and MAC created a joint office, the

Airlift Concepts and Requirements Agency (ACRA).

ACRA’s 1985 report, “A Qualitative Intratheater Airlift Requirements Study

(QITARS),” captures the results of a decade of cooperation. The MAC-TRADOC (the order found on the report) relationship had matured to include detailed planning and coordination. By 1985, this meant joint procedure and doctrine that reflected a reformed

Air Force and the Army of AirLand Battle (ALB). Though the relationship was still what

GEN Starry called “asymmetrical,” it had changed drastically since the mid-70s. MAC was an operational command with a specific mission, while TRADOC remained a training and educational unit. Despite this, the officers who signed the QITARS cover page were both major generals with similar jobs –Deputy Chief of Staff, Plans at MAC, and Deputy Chief of Staff for Doctrine at TRADOC.66

As the report states, “Its purpose is to define, from a qualitative standpoint, the

Air Force intratheater airlift requirements to support current service doctrines for the deployment, employment, and sustainment of combat forces.”67 The report identified a series of lessons from the previous forty years, highlighting the Army’s rotary aviation as a complement to the Air Force’s fixed wing airlift assets. MAC was viewed as a means

65 Army Operations, Field Manual 100-5 (“Active Defense”) (Fort Monroe: TRADOC, 1976); Army Operations, Field Manual 100-5 (“AirLand Battle”) (Fort Monroe: TRADOC, 1982). 66 Airlift Concepts and Requirements Agency, “A Qualitative Intratheater Requirements Study (QITARS)” (Scott AFB: MAC-TRADOC, November 30, 1985), Maxwell AFHRA: K168.03-274. 67 Ibid., i.

44 to quickly establish the infrastructure for sustained support operations by further airlift and by sealift. The QITARS introduction also included specific mention of the ALB doctrine and the role of airlift in deep operations.68 Among its many recommendations were increased coordination between the services to clarify expected needs in areas like deep battle support and airborne drops.

The report included an explicit definition of the “operational level of war:”

“Employment of available military resources to attain strategic goals within a theater of war. It involves the planning and conducting of campaigns, generally at the corps or theater level.”69 This description fit closely with the way the Army understood the

“operational level,” a matter not previously central to Air Force ideas, which indicates the degree that Army influenced its thinking and doctrine. The embrace of ALB represented the acceptance of an aggressive style of warfighting that placed maneuver above firepower and attrition. Such an approach, operational in scale, required speed of movement in the field and ready resupply.70 This doctrine offered an aggressive spirit that proved popular in the Army among the same officers who rejected Active Defense.

It also provided a clear niche for the Air Force. TAC and MAC understood that relevance to national policy meant relevance to an operational campaign against the

Soviets. Even if this equated to interdependence with the Army, and the loss of independence, the Air Force had a route back to bigger budgets, a greater position in the military, and value to national security.

Selling the Threat: TAC on the Road

As the U.S. military refocused its planning and capabilities around Europe, the

68 Ibid., xii. 69 Ibid., I-4 70 Ibid., C-1.

45 need for new ways of fighting and equipment became clear. U.S. commanders could not yield tactical or operational superiority to the Soviets in the European theater. The

Vietnam War represented the style of unconventional limited war, in a peripheral theater, that the military did not like to fight. A confrontation with the Soviets in Europe challenged the heart of U.S. interests, via bread and butter conventional warfare that the

U.S. always claimed to prefer fighting. Presidential policy toward détente and

Congressional limitations to defense budgets increased an already daunting task. To meet this challenge, military leaders appealed directly to Congress and the American people. After the experience of Vietnam, these leaders understood the need for public support.

As the Commander of Tactical Air Command, Gen Dixon took it upon himself to inform the public of the challenges facing the U.S., and how the Air Force planned to confront them. Like most upper leadership within the Army and Air Force, he believed that the strategic balance with the Soviets was shifting in an undesirable way. Reductions in the size of the U.S. forces in Europe and increasing Soviet capabilities challenged the calculus of deterrence and the outcome of a conventional war. Combating these risks would require support from the American people, as the Air Force’s solution involved funding new weapon systems. Dixon did not limit his sales pitch to the public. He also worked to convince the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) that more tactical aircraft were needed to ensure Europe’s security.

An example of Gen Dixon’s effort to sell the airpower cause is a speech given to the Texas National Guard Convention in 1975. After just two paragraphs of introduction, he jumped immediately to his assessment of the defense environment:

46 It is no secret that our military strength has declined substantially… Compare the fiscal 1968 Army and Air Force of almost two million five hundred thousand [sic] members with the less than one and one half million member Army and Air Force at the end of fiscal 1974. Even taking into account the Vietnam Conflict, the reduction is significant.71

Notably, Dixon spoke of the Army and Air Force together, both as a rough measure of total military strength and as two sides of the same coin. An Air Force general trying to garner support for new weapons systems and a bigger budget during the 1950s would not have included the Army in his pitch. Dixon then claimed that defense spending as a portion of the budget was the lowest since 1940, while in real terms, accounting for inflation, the Soviets had increased their defense budget by five percent a year. This increasing disparity in conventional forces in Europe made the National Guard and

Reserves essential to the outcome of a war in Central Europe. They could no longer be considered the “second team” of TAC, because they formed a substantial portion of the fighting force.72 Guard units began to receive newer airframes so that they could train and fight at the same level as the rest of the active force, a change that has effects today.

Gen Dixon told a chapter of the National Aviation Club about the vast improvement in the education and quality of the airmen in TAC. From the mid 1960s, the percentage of enlisted airmen with a high school diploma increased dramatically, because a smaller Air Force could be more selective with recruits.73 This trend extended to officers, who had more advanced degrees and training than ever before, partly because of better PME. The quality of personnel was a great strength for TAC, but modernization was its greatest obstacle. Meanwhile, the Soviets had achieved quality in the air that

71 Col Richard D. Moore and Capt John Terino, “Transcript of General Dixon Speech at Texas ANG Convention,” February 20, 1975, Maxwell AFHRA: K417.168-90. 72 Ibid., 3. 73 Col Richard D. Moore, “National Aviation Club Speech - General Dixon,” March 17, 1975, 5–6, Maxwell AFHRA: K417.168-91.

47 vastly exceeded anything in the previous decades of the Cold War. This came at a heavy cost to the Soviets, who allegedly had increased their spending on tactical aircraft 33% compared to a U.S. decrease of 17% in the ten years up to 1975.74 Even more, American actions were producing favorable consequences. The F-15 and A-10 had met expectations, and the F-16 looked promising in both the numbers that could be procured and the potential for standardization with other NATO allies.75 The major problem was the budgetary constraints on TAC’s ability to procure this next generation of aircraft.

The Air Force had a solution to the Soviet challenge in quantity and quality, but it could work only if funded.

Generally, Dixon emphasized the economic dimension of modernization.

Inflation threatened to upset the Air Force’s ability to sustain its existing fleet of aircraft, much less modernize them. Defense concerns existed in a broader environment of national interests and vulnerabilities. Increasingly complex weapon systems coupled with inflation meant that the Air Force needed more money to get fewer aircraft.76 In a speech before the American Defense Preparedness Association in Los Angeles, Dixon wove together his plans for TAC, President Ford’s national objectives, and the will of the

American people. He emphasized several quotations from Ford: “We must be strong enough, and we will be strong enough, to make certain that the United States is second to none. Period.”77 Dixon also included polling data conducted by the Opinion Research

Corporation. When asked whether they wanted the U.S. to have greater military strength

74 Ibid., 4–5. 75 Ibid., 11. 76 Gen Robert J. Dixon, “The Adequacy of Our U.S. Aerospace Power,” April 29, 1975, 13, Maxwell AFHRA: K417.168-92. 77 Gen Robert J. Dixon, “The Future and Tactical Air Command,” October 15, 1975, 4, Maxwell AFHRA: K417.168-97.

48 than the Soviets, most Americans were willing to spend more to catch up to the Soviets, and rejected détente.78 Dixon tied these threads together brilliantly, exemplifying the attitudes of U.S. military leaders toward the American response to the Soviet threat.

Congress and Reform

In September 1976, Gen Dixon answered questions regarding procurement before the CAS Panel of HASC. Dixon highlighted the numerical superiority of the Soviets in tactical airpower, and the need for immediate local superiority in the air and on the ground, since the Soviets likely would have the initiative in launching World War

Three.79 When pressed to prioritize the acquisition of tactical aircraft, Dixon declined to answer, saying that aggressive procurement by the Soviets made all U.S. projects a priority. However, he then mentioned the increased cooperation of the Air Force and

Army in planning how to increase aircraft survivability and coordinate electronic warfare operations, and discussed several of the Air Force’s newest platforms, like the Airborne

Warning and Control System (AWACS) and the new A-10.80 Dixon expressed his anxieties clearly, and his vision of the way forward for TAC, articulating the necessity and utility of new weapon systems.

Not only did the senior leadership of the Army and Air Force recognize the need for reform, but interested members of Congress took on a role overseeing the process. In the 1970s, veterans formed a large majority of Congress’s members (often 70%), and many senators and representatives held commissions in the Reserves or the National

78 Ibid., 7–8. 79 Congressman Lucien Nedzi and et al, “CAS Panel, Investigations Subcommittee, HASC, September 1976” (Washington D.C.: HASC, September 1976), Maxwell AFHRA: K417.168-123. 80 Ibid., 8–9.

49 Guard.81 A strong familiarity with military matters sprang from decades of large-scale conflict and the draft. Congress felt comfortable questioning the military not just about its execution of strategy, but its acquisitions choices, inter-service cooperation, and doctrinal process. What began as a House Armed Services Committee (HASC) inquiry into CAS evolved into the Committee’s Close Air Support panel by mid-decade.82 It enjoyed asking generals tough questions and often hit the nail right on the head. In a

1976 hearing with Generals Dixon and DePuy for Congress, several panel members asked about weather-imposed flight ceilings, the influence of the Yom Kippur War on tactics and doctrine, and redundancy in CAS acquisition.83

Beyond the high-profile hearings with generals like Dixon, HASC also frequently met representatives of ALFA. ALFA provided the Congressmen with detailed explanations of the vision set by higher leadership. A 1976 memo documents the type of questions asked of ALFA officers and the notes they made:

a. Why aren’t the Navy and Marines participating in ALFA? Staff members asserted that Navy and Marine Corps were well ahead of Air Force and Army in CAS procedures. b. Does the Air Force Support the Army AAH program?84

Fielding questions like these forced ALFA, and by extension TAC and TRADOC, to define their positions on many issues. Congress applied just enough scrutiny to make these officers reflective and self-aware of what they were doing. The parochial divisions that had poisoned and inhibited close cooperation in previous decades seemed petty,

81 Rachel Wellford, “By the Numbers: Veterans in Congress,” PBS NewsHour, November 11, 2014, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/by-the-numbers-veterans-in-Congress/. 82 Kenneth Rush, “Close Air Support Study for Congressman John C. Stennis,” 1973, Maxwell AFHRA: K168.03-2342 Part 2. 83 Nedzi and et al, “CAS Panel, Investigations Subcommittee, HASC, September 1976,” 1–11. 84 Lt Col John M. Reeves, “Memorandum for Record: ALFA Presentation to HASC,” 1976, 1–2, Maxwell AFHRA: K168.03-2342 Part 2.

50 when the ALFA staff viewed national security from the perspective of HASC.

Many of the solutions that Dixon and other reform minded officers identified amounted to upgrades in hardware. Thus, to complement the capabilities of the F-15 and

F-16, the Air Force decided to create a new dedicated attack aircraft. The Air Force and

Navy’s experience with the F-111 had soured their taste for multi-role and multi-service platforms. The F-111 had promised to provide a plethora of roles, ranging from deep penetration to electronic warfare. Though its all-weather capabilities earned it a special place within NATO war plans, its procurement had been unfortunate, as it did not deliver all of its promised capabilities.85 The early 1970s marked a low point for proponents of aircraft that could “do it all.” In response to this tone within the Pentagon and Capitol

Hill, the A-X project became distinct from efforts at acquiring fighters. The Pentagon and Congress also were willing to let the Marine Corps look into the Harrier and the

Army develop its Cheyenne attack helicopter prototype (or AAH). In the end, the

Pentagon killed the Army’s project, but it provided the basis for the Apache helicopter.

The A-10 emerged from the A-X program, designed to work with existing Army helicopters and forces on the ground to perform the CAS mission more effectively.

These developments demonstrate the balanced approach that the military, and particularly the Air Force, struck between each other and Congress.

Even with these new airframes in development, much remained to be done. The policy of public engagement begun by Gen Dixon was continued by his successor, Gen

Wilbur Creech, although the Air Force already had implemented many of the reforms of the early 1970s. Creech emphasized the numerical superiority of the Soviets and the

85 Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine: Basic Thinking in the United States Air Force - 1961-1984, II: 479–483.

51 need for the U.S. to create a firm qualitative advantage. Speaking at the Western Reserve

Aviation Hall of Fame in September 1981, Creech outlined recent Air Force actions to confront the Soviet rise in strength. At the time, the Soviets allegedly continued to outspend the U.S. two to one in procurement, and research and development, accelerating the growth of a force that already held a three to one advantage in manpower, if reserve forces were included.86 With fighter aircraft, the Soviets enjoyed a 2.5 to 1 ratio in 1981, and were procuring an additional 1300 a year. All of the services in the U.S., conversely, procured just 300 fighter aircraft in 1981. Creech understood that increased spending was only part of the solution. He quoted Gen James Doolittle, of Tokyo Raid fame:

We cannot match the Soviets man for man. We need not match them piece for piece in equipment so long as the quality of our equipment remains decisively superior to theirs. If we should have to fight, we should be prepared to do it from the neck up and not the neck down.87

Doolittle exemplified the overarching U.S. strategy in Europe throughout the Cold War.

Creech furthered the U.S. focus on quality by intensifying and broadening the training given to fighter pilots and increasing the realism in Air Force’s exercises, including changes to the “Red Flag” exercise.88 The dominance of the nuclear mission on Air Force thinking and planning had flattened a war against the Soviets into a one-dimensional affair, with little heed given to attrition over a period longer than a day. SAC pilots trained to annihilate the Warsaw Pact had little need to train for a campaign. The same could not be said of TAC.

Improvements in training and preparation for fighting wars, not battles, helped

TAC regain a qualitative advantage going into the final decade of the Cold War. By

86 “Assorted AirLand Battle and Threat Assessment Papers - General Wilbur L. Creech” (USAF and USA, 1981), Maxwell AFHRA: 168.7339-740. 87 Ibid. 88 Laslie, The Air Force Way of War, 68–71.

52 1983, the Air Force’s official description of TAC’s mission reflected the changes of the

Dixon and Creech eras. TAC’s missions were listed as:

(1) Gain and maintain air superiority. (2) Inhibit the movement of enemy forces into and within an objective area. (3) Seek out and destroy enemy force and their supporting installations. (4) Directly help ground or naval forces achieve their immediate operational objectives within an area.89

Additionally, the document spent twice as much space talking about TAC’s role in land operations as air operations. Among the combat missions of TAC were Counterair, Air

Interdiction, Tactical Surveillance and Reconnaissance, CAS, and Strategic Air Defense operations. These reflect a strong emphasis on the operational level of war and a high level of interdependence.90 The document also describes the Air Force’s Tactical Air

Control System, which had ended the ambiguity and tension of the Vietnam era. Many of the structural reforms began in the 1970s were realized by the mid-1980s, paying dividends for the painful changes the Air Force underwent.

Conclusions

Creech realized that even if the Air Force regained its qualitative superiority, numbers still mattered. Thus, he emphasized how far the Soviets had succeeded in creating a militaristic posture. As the U.S. reasserted itself militarily in the late 1970s, the Soviets escalated their own efforts even further.91 This process threatened any hope of success for détente. American opinion and policy shifted against détente and Carter adopted a more hawkish approach to foreign policy after the Soviet invasion of

Afghanistan and the Iranian hostage crisis. The efforts of U.S. military leaders to highlight the need for modernization fell on increasingly receptive ears. President

89 “United States Air Force - Commands and Agencies: Basic Information” (Air University, 1983-4), 29, Maxwell AFHRA. 90 Ibid., 45–48. 91 Garthoff, “Detente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan,” 8–9.

53 Reagan’s election in 1980 marked a decisive shift away from détente and balanced-based policies in favor of an all-out American advantage.

The reaction of the Air Force and Army to the mounting Soviet threat during this period set a course for military innovation during the remainder of the 20th century.

These reforms worked best when they emphasized an increasingly professional force operating as one whole on the battlefield. The services eroded the barriers that had defined internal relations in the Department of Defense for previous decades. Failed organizational structures yielded to improved, mission-oriented, arrangements. The Air

Force’s commands increasingly centered on a deliberate style of operations, and turned to

TRADOC to coordinate with Army counterparts. Changes to doctrine promoted the coordination of each branch in order to optimize the expensive new kit each procured.

This equipment seemed to solve many of the perennial problems the U.S. military faced.

While many strategic and cultural hurdles remained, the embrace of new weapons systems firmly wedded the military to an overwhelming confidence in technology. This had serious consequences for the military’s long-term ability to think strategically, and the Air Force especially viewed technology as a panacea for its problems.

Chapter 4: Hardware, Technology, and the Military Balance

At the close of the Vietnam War, many U.S. leaders and general officers believed that the heavy military investments of the Soviet Union were narrowing the American lead in military quality. Army planners began to plan against not only the first wave of

Soviet troops, but also against the “Second Echelon,” the destruction of which necessitated an active tactical air force (TAF) role. Soviet advances improved the quality

54 of their front line forces and the presence of large quantities of ADS threatened the ability of the Air Force to aid in the destruction of each Warsaw Pact wave. This situation forced the Army and Air Force to reconsider how they planned to fight and how they must cooperate in order to do so successfully. Fortunately, although the transition from a strategic to an operational focus was outside of the Air Force’s culture and heritage, embracing new technology was something with which it was very comfortable. If the Air

Force embraced an interdependent and operational role, vast sums of money were on the table for new equipment. New weapon systems promised not only bigger budgets but also a more pronounced role in the opening battle of World War III. TAC stood to inherit the centrality of SAC.

Challenges to the USAF Fleet

When the United States ended operations in Vietnam, technology offered the Air

Force opportunities and pitfalls. Development on the next generation of combat aircraft started during the war, but remained far from complete in 1973. The fleet of aircraft that the Air Force employed in Vietnam had proven largely inappropriate to their assigned missions. The kill ratio of fighter aircraft dropped substantially from the Korean War, as

U.S. pilots encountered adversaries with airframes and training that often exceeded their own. Fighters, like the F-4 Phantom, entered the war without guns, reliant entirely on missiles which were designed more for long-range engagement than dogfighting. Soviet

ADS provided to the North Vietnamese reaped scores of American losses in the skies over Hanoi. Early experimentation with radio, television, and laser-based precision guided munitions (PGM) showed some promise, but the capability remained in its infancy. The further success of ADS in the Yom Kippur War demonstrated the increased

55 risk to TACAIR assets posed by Soviet ground forces, and undermined how the U.S. planned to fight. Improvements in and the expansion of Soviet TACAIR threatened to alter drastically the balance in the skies above Europe. The Air Force faced a challenge to its technical prowess and its ability to assure superiority on the battlefield and in the theater. Its traditional disposition toward viewing problems through a technological lens, however, in this case proved an asset. The need to adopt new airframes and hardware made the Air Force more able to embrace changes to doctrine and culture. Because of the perpetual need to innovate aircraft, the Air Force was familiar with making huge technical leaps. This habit coupled comfortably with a determined effort by Air Force leaders to change the service’s culture and its conceptualization of airpower. Together, these forces allowed the Air Force to return to a firm qualitative advantage in airpower, and the achievement of an asymmetrical lead in technology that lasts today.

Technical reform and innovation are closely tied to national defense procurement.

Since the Second World War the length of the aircraft acquisition process has grown dramatically. When U.S. operations in Vietnam expanded in the late 1960s, the Air

Force and Navy were flying planes that fit the policy and defense posture of nearly a decade earlier. The century series fighters that formed the backbone of the U.S. fleet closely fit the nuclear reliant national and defense strategies of the air-atomic age. These planes were designed to operate as tactical nuclear bombers, making their speed and range more important than survivability or maneuverability. An Airpower Journal article described the situation:

Vietnam was not what the Air Force envisioned as its next conflict. Thinking in terms of a massive nuclear exchange, the airmen planned, equipped, and trained for nuclear war. …This emphasis not only put the other services at a disadvantage, it also crippled other Air Force missions.

56 Consequently, the Air Force story in Vietnam is how an air force designed for one kind of war performed in a drastically different one.92

The experience of that war influenced the views of an entire generation of rising junior officers. The losses that their aircraft suffered forced a reevaluation of fighter aircraft that greatly shaped subsequent developments during the 1970s. Battlefield performance provided tangible feedback for decision makers who realized the need for fighter aircraft to regain their focus on air-to-air and ground support missions.

Lessons in Procurement

The major air procurement during the war years, the F-111 “Aardvark,” had a checkered record that did not bode well for the next generation of fighters. When the Air

Force began to search for a replacement to the F-105, it wanted a tactical bomber capable of deep strike and long-range low-altitude missions.93 Such a plane would continue the capability offered by the F-105, augmenting the Air Force’s deliverable nuclear firepower and complementing the national policy of Massive Retaliation. The Navy, however, needed a replacement for its F-4 Phantoms, which served as its workhorse fighters.

Though these aircraft served very different functions, the new SECDEF, Robert S.

McNamara, wanted to cut what he viewed as redundancies and waste. In order to align military capabilities more closely to the new policy of Flexible Response, he ordered the cancellation of the nuclear focused F-105 program and the Air Force’s adoption of the

Navy’s F-4 as a multi-role fighter.94 The adoption of the F-4 was a wise decision, as the

F-105 proved vulnerable in the skies of Vietnam. Because of what McNamara, and

92 Dr. Kenneth P. Werrell, “Did USAF Technology Fail in Vietnam? Three Cases Studies,” Airpower Journal, Spring 1998, http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/apj/apj98/spr98/werrell.html#werrell. 93 Robert F. Coulam, Illusions of Choice: The F-111 and the Problem of Weapons Acquisition Reform (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 36. 94 Ibid., 49–52.

57 others at the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), viewed as the overlap of requirements between the Navy and Air Force, their replacement programs were merged as a joint project. Unfortunately, this attempt to please everyone with one project, the

Tactical Fighter Experimental (TFX), resulted in an airframe designed by committee. As capabilities slipped away from initial requirements, the Navy began to lose interest in its own version of the TFX, the F-111B, ultimately canceling the project in 1967.95 The

Navy instead adopted the F-14, developed from the VFX program, as a substitute for the

F-111. This choice demonstrated the Navy’s preference for its own projects and requirements, straining the desire of the either service to cooperate closely on procurement. Development to meet the Navy’s needs in the project had increased the cost and time invested in the TFX, even though the Air Force was the only customer in the end. This relationship complicated, and perhaps compromised, the design process and the eventual airframe. The institutional memory of this painful process had long- lasting consequences, turning a generation of officers and officials away from joint procurement and multi-role platforms. Though it succeeded in specialty roles late in its career, the F-111 failed to live up to its promise. The Deputy Chief of Staff for Research and Development, Lt Gen Otto J. Glasser, observed in 1970:

We have learned through our F-111 experience… that [an] aircraft designed for too many purposes, that is too much of a multipurpose airplane is not a good thing. In many cases single purpose airplanes are best, and if an aircraft is to be built for more than one purpose, the purposes should be closely related.96

This sentiment roughly encapsulates the ruling philosophy of military procurement that held sway in the 1970s. As part of the broader reforms facing

95 Ibid., 244–251. 96 Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine: Basic Thinking in the United States Air Force - 1961-1984, II:481.

58 the Air Force, the need for a wide range of new tactical aircraft dominated procurement. Despite frustrations with drawdowns in force, cooperation between the services and the next generation of weapon systems promised to restore the qualitative balance in favor of the U.S. and NATO. During this period the Air

Force’s programs to produce its next generation LWF intensified, and the Air

Force procured the smallest amount of aircraft since 1935 in anticipation for massive turnover.97 The Air Force already had moved ahead with the A-X project, the B-1, the F-X, and the AWACS, none of which was inexpensive. In order to compound the gains that these aircraft presented, the Air Force needed a fighter that could be produced in massive numbers at a low price. The search for an LWF yielded the F-XX program, which gave the military the YF-16 and YF-

17 (which would itself become the F-18 after the Navy took an interest in it). The

LWF optimized the design process espoused by Col John Boyd, whose “Energy

Maneuverability” concept allowed engineers and pilots to plot out the ability of a fighter to out fly other aircraft before the first test flights ever happened. The willingness of the Air Force to produce the YF-16 and YF-17, albeit after some serious resistance, and great bureaucratic buccaneering by Boyd, reflected the realization that the sheer number of Soviet aircraft could potentially crush small numbers of more advanced U.S. planes.98 The investment in the program paid off handsomely, as versions of both prototypes eventually entered service with the

Air Force and the Navy respectively and remain in use today.

Although the services avoided direct cooperation on individual airframes,

97 Ibid., II: 479-80. 98 Worden, Rise of the Fighter Generals: The Problem of Air Force Leadership 1945-1982, 221.

59 the entry of the Navy into the LWF program resulted in its acquisition of the F-18 from the YF-17 prototype. Increased budgetary oversight by Congress ensured that a healthy level of competition arose, while also pressuring the services to avoid redundancy. Though the Air Force rejected the YF-17, the fact that it had two engines greatly appealed to the Navy and its carrier-based aviation branch.

Cooperation was able to thrive and trust in the procurement process to grow largely because the one size-fits-all approach of the TFX, and F-111 was abandoned. The greatest wedge between the Air Force and the Navy was not based in latent service rivalry but rather in competing expectations and capabilities for the same airframe. Although the services procured different aircraft, they did so through an amiable and cost efficient process that allowed each to select very capable aircraft adept in missions each service needed. For the

Air Force, this need meant fighter aircraft designed explicitly for air-to-air combat and the achievement of air superiority. Increased dialogue with the Army and consideration of the lessons of the Vietnam and Yom Kippur wars led the Air

Force to pay serious attention to air-to-ground roles. Congress encouraged the development of multiple CAS options, yielding the A-10 for the Air Force, the

Harrier for the Marines, and a prototype Cheyenne for the Army. Given the political dimension of procurement, the degree of reform in the development process and success seen in the production of airframes is astonishing and a credit to civil and military leadership.

Theory and Design

One of the most significant developments for air superiority during this period

60 was the F-16, which exemplified many of the capabilities and tactics espoused by Col

Boyd. He had flown as a fighter pilot in the Korean War and then spent years at the

Pentagon fighting for a lightweight fighter that could optimize what he called Energy

Maneuverability. This concept encapsulated the Newtonian physics that Boyd studied at

Georgia Tech in the 1960s. In physics, all energy can be understood as potential or kinetic, with objects having a proportion of each with sum of 100 percent. For instance, aircraft frequently trade altitude for speed, as their height above the ground represents potential energy and speed is a form of kinetic energy. Boyd’s model tied the basic metrics of aviation, like speed and altitude, with the basic movements of an aircraft, its maneuverability. This relationship between the potential energy of an aircraft, and its kinetic energy, allowed designers to compare aircraft that had never flown or flown with each other by using mathematic models that represented maneuverability and aerodynamics.99 Such models gave engineers the ability to design airframes around specific roles, such as air-to-air combat. Boyd first arrived at the Pentagon to help the

Air Force with the design and production of the F-X, which became the F-15. Boyd’s models for analysis found that older heavier fighters, like the F-4 (which had been designed for service on carriers), lacked the ability to maneuver with the agility needed in air-to-air combat. This flaw might not have mattered in Vietnam, where aircraft did not pose a significant threat to U.S. control over the skies, at least in the south. But in an all out shooting match, the Army counted on having the Air Force there to protect from enemy air strikes. In fact, the Army had not been hit from the air since the closing days of the Korean War, leaving them with the assumption the Air Force would secure the

99 Frans Osinga, Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd (Delft: Eburon Academic Publishers, 2005), 42–43.

61 skies over friendly held ground.100

The Air Force was and is a technologically minded service. Because airmen rely on advanced pieces of machinery to wage war, innovation, at least in hardware, is often more readily accepted than it is by civilians or soldiers. The period after Vietnam manifested this trend clearly, as the Air Force stood on the cusp of its next generation of weapons systems. The F-X and A-X programs promised to yield impressive improvements to air superiority and CAS. The Air Force’s belief in these systems was so strong that it willingly abandoned older equipment without immediate replacement, procuring the lowest number of planes in 1971 since 1935. Secretary of the Air Force

Robert C. Seamens Jr. explained: “We are going through an important aircraft development phase in the Air Force with the A-X, with the B-1, with the F-15, and with the AWACS, and feel it is not time to procure large numbers of aircraft.”101 The commitment of the Air Force to new weapons systems showed forethought, as the branch sought to learn the tactical lessons of its use of airpower in Vietnam.

PME and Technology

Acquisitions and procurement officials were not the only ones trying to learn from the lessons of the previous decade. Academics and officers involved in Air Force PME gleaned all that they could about the current state of tactics and technology and what the future held. Papers from Air University conferences, notably the first Airpower

Symposium in 1977, illustrated how the Air Force conceptualized the scale and character of changes in technology. They demonstrate that airmen and civilians involved in the

100 Staff Sgt. Matthew S. Bright, “60-Year Air Superiority Milestone: No U.S. Ground Force Losses from Enemy Aircraft,” Pacific Air Forces, April 19, 2013, http://www.pacaf.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123345247. 101 Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine: Basic Thinking in the United States Air Force - 1961-1984, II:479.

62 discourse on airpower appreciated the wide range of consequences stemming from technological innovation and also understood the environment opening before them.

Thus, S. J. Deitchman assessed the quickly changing TACAIR environment and the massive costs that accompany innovation. He compared metrics of the 1970s to the

Second World War, pointing to the increased effectiveness of weapons systems due to better, as he put it, “eyeballs,” or systems that helped acquire and destroy targets.

Despite the mixed record of the tactical airframes used in the Vietnam War, TACAIR provided the quickest way to assemble massive amounts of firepower in a small area very quickly.102 Deitchman offered a balanced look at TACAIR, considering the costs of aircraft and their vulnerability to ground fire.

Some papers highlighted the role of technology as catalyst for change in tactics and doctrine. Lt Col David T. Macmillan identified technology as an actor that had at times taken on a life of its own. He argued that innovation begets further innovation, ever shortening the time between generations or cycles of technology. Of course,

Macmillan could not have fathomed the end of Cold War defense budgets or the rapid explosion costs that S. J. Deitchman hinted at in his paper. The Air Force needed a thinker on the level of Douhet to fully exploit the burgeoning opportunities of new technology.103 This observation by Deitchman seems to prophesize Col John Warden, the Air Force officer who perhaps is most associated with conceptualizing a new generation of air warfare and technology, with a renewed focus on independence. One paper from the Airpower Symposium assessed the impact of new weapons systems from

102 S. J. Deitchman, “The Implications of Modern Technological Developments for Tactical Air Tactics and Doctrine,” Airpower Symposium (Institute for Defense Analysis, March 1977), 26–27, Maxwell AFHRA: K239.151-32. 103 Lt Col David T. Macmillan, “Technology: The Catalyst for Doctrinal Change,” Airpower Symposium (Maxwell AFB: Air University, March 1977), Maxwell AFHRA: K239.151-37.

63 a tactical perspective. Lt Col Robert R. Rankine Jr., who served as the Fighter Division

Chief in an office for studies and analysis at USAF HQ, analyzed the potential of the F-

15, F-16, AWACS, and A-10 in the tactical arena. Rankine argued that these new aircraft presented a qualitative improvement in TACAIR. Not only did these airframes provide new capabilities, they integrated into a broader information system that augmented their ability. The AWACS promised to provide situational awareness and targeting assistance to the fighters in unprecedented ways. Lt Col Rankine contended that the classic quality versus quantity battle between NATO and the Warsaw Pact would continue, as the U.S. pursued technological advantages.104

Col Kyle D. Barnes Jr. argued that the best offering of airpower in a future conflict would be force interdiction, which engages the enemy outside the bounds of the immediate battle area. This type of interdiction necessitates deep penetration capabilities in a TAF. Most previous air interdiction efforts had centered on attacking enemy supplies, not their forces directly, though Allied Air Forces had done so in Europe during

1943-45 and the Korean War. In the Second World War, Korea, and Vietnam, interdiction operations concentrated on “isolation of the battlefield,” leaving most of the heavy lifting to soldiers or the CAS mission.105 Some TACAIR thinkers conceived of interdiction as blocking enemy ground forces from joining the fight, but this was not explored in the context of the three wars discussed in the paper. TACAIR needed highly effective target acquisition, intelligence, and command and control capabilities to operate beyond the immediate battle area, and to hit enemy assets other than targets of

104 Lt Col Robert R. Rankine Jr., “Quantifying the Impact of Technology on Theater Air Warfare,” Airpower Symposium (Maxwell AFB: Air University, March 1977), Maxwell AFHRA: K239.151-42. 105 Col Kyle D. Barnes, “Force Interdiction: An Enhanced Dimension for Tactical Air Warfare,” Airpower Symposium (Maxwell AFB: Air University, February 1977), 2, Maxwell AFHRA: K239.151-33.

64 opportunity. In Central Europe, the enemy’s “Second Echelon” provided an optimal target for Barnes’s recommendations. He highlighted the need to break the back of this force in order to relieve pressure on NATO ground forces and prevent the consolidation of Soviet gains with reinforcing units. The key requirement for opening this “second front” was the availability of advanced weapons systems that could harness laser-guiding and the Global Positioning System (GPS).106 As real-time (or perhaps realer time) information sharing proliferated in following decades, the blending of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) with other tactical missions vindicated Barnes prediction of murky roles for TACAIR.

Indeed, during the 1960s the Air Force and Navy worked together on developing the F-111 with this sort of mission in mind. The F-111 offered all-weather capabilities and a long range, useful for deep penetration missions in the inclement skies above

Europe.107 Though the F-111 became a case study in expecting too much from a multi- role platform, the approach did have some silver linings. Several “Aardvark” wings were based in the U.K. to provide a time cushion (as in the time to strike the U.K.) and an added layer of survivability in the event of war. They also offered a variety of capability flavors, with some units sporting electronic counter measures and electronic jamming.

These efforts to optimize the F-111’s contributions occurred around the time that Col

Barnes wrote his paper, part of a wider effort to upgrade old detection and targeting systems (such as the Advanced Location and Strike System or ALSS) to newer more advanced versions (like the Precision Emitter Locator Strike System or PELSS). 108

106 Ibid., 12–15. 107 Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine: Basic Thinking in the United States Air Force - 1961-1984, II: 479– 483. 108 Ibid., II: 489–90.

65 Parallel improvement in “smart weapons” like the Maverick bomb offered increased capabilities for the F-111 and other TACAIR offensive airframes.

Perception of the Soviet Threat

An article published during 1978 in the Air University Review (an Air Force professional journal) summarized the American understanding of Soviet air capabilities and their doctrine, highlighting the threads and themes that permeated discussions of the topic. It emphasized the surface-to-air missile (SAM). As author, Col Robert D.

Rasmussen termed SAMs the new , because of their importance and ubiquity. In his case study, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, he argued that the two primary accomplishments of the Arabs were: “(1) the temporary achievement of local air superiority by ground forces and (2) the defeat of an Israeli tank offensive by Arab armed with antitank missiles (ATM).” The Army took ATMs as an indication that Soviet armor could be blunted, but the Air University Review did not look seriously at the war implications for several years. Rasmussen described an article titled “A Call from the Wilderness,” written in 1976, that finally addressed the significance of the Yom

Kippur War on shaping future Air Force “hardware and doctrine.”109 Rasmussen applied these lessons to war in Central Europe. Air doctrine and airframes must address the threat posed by air defenses. If these air defenses could be destroyed, A-10s and other fighter aircraft could join the attack against the armor-heavy mechanized Soviet echelons.110 This assessment blended new weapon systems, the desire for doctrinal reform, and an effort to react to a changing threat posed by the Soviets. The sense that the Air Force and its role were in flux permeated the service, including generals and field

109 Rasmussen, “The Cental European Battlefield,” 2. 110 Ibid., 17–19.

66 and company grade officers.

A year earlier, Air University had hosted the first annual Airpower Symposium, bringing together academics and officers of all ranks. Its agenda illustrates the topics in airpower that interested the powers that be and the students at Air University. The papers presented included:

“Soviet Doctrine and Technology for [sic] Control in the Tactical Environment” “US Military Technology – The Soviet Perspective” “Soviet Tactical Airpower” “Technology: Catalyst for Doctrinal Change” “Implications of Continuous Land Combat on Air Support Doctrine” “Planning the Next Generation Fighter Aircraft” “Flexible Manufacturing Approaches to Produce Low Cost Aircraft”111

Many of the papers addressed technology and the increasing importance of communications for air operations. These talks include many of the most capable of officers of the period. Officers and academics seemed agreed on at least one thing – the

Air Force faced an uncertain future, dominated by the potential fruits or pitfalls of innovation.

Robert P. Berman, of the Brookings Institute, assessed the capabilities and growth of Soviet Frontal Aviation (FA). Soviet FA had atrophied significantly through the 1950s and early 1960s as the Soviets transitioned their nuclear mission to land-borne systems.

During this period, its primary mission had consistently revolved around support of ground forces in Central Europe. FA would have slowed NATO efforts at achieving air superiority, and harried NATO missions operating against the Warsaw Pact advance on the ground. As Berman contended, however, in the late 1960s this role changed in two

111 “Air University Airpower Symposium Agenda” (Maxwell AFB: Air University, March 1977), Maxwell AFHRA: K239.151-22.

67 substantial ways.112 The increasing capabilities of Soviet ground-based ADS removed

FA’s traditional focus, while buildup in size and future composition signaled a shift to more aggressive and offensive operations. As Berman offered:

…Once it is equipped, by the early 1980s, with multipurpose ground attack aircraft… FA will be able to launch conventional strikes at primary NATO airbases and nuclear resources at the onset of a European war – something that could [not] be done effectively before.113

Despite this stern warning, Berman described a number of glaring tensions and friction inherent in Soviet FA, which indicated potential areas of relative advantage to the

Air Force and NATO. The rigidity of Soviet command and control did not hamper its air-to-air, general air support, and deep penetration air strike missions, but it did damage the strength of its CAS. Soviet doctrine was not conducive to the local control of CAS assets, limiting the ability of Soviet FA to hit mobile targets. Instead, its strength lay in targeting hardened and fixed targets.114

Berman projected that the malnourished state of Soviet support and maintenance forces would limit the numbers of their sorties after the first days of war. The strength of

Soviet ADS compensated for the limits of Soviet FA, promising to deny the skies to

American airpower if the Soviets could not control it. Thus, the success of the Israelis in air-to-air combat in 1973 was irrelevant to Berman, because they were unable to use their air superiority in a ground support role for the first days of the war. Ground-based air defense took a heavy toll on the Israeli Air Force, while Israeli ground forces had to operate without air support. Berman credited the U.S. as having far better preparation for electronic warfare and SEAD than the Israelis, but recognized the need for improvements

112 Robert P. Berman, “Soviet Tactical Airpower” (Maxwell AFB: Air University, March 1977), Maxwell AFHRA: K239.151-26. 113 Ibid. 114 Ibid., 3–5.

68 to counter Soviet ADS.115 The Air Force had seen the Yom Kippur War as further confirmation of the importance of these missions, as reflected by Gen Brown in 1974:

You have to gain air superiority. That not only means against enemy fighters, it also means against enemy missiles… We have just got to beat those defenses down. If you ignore the defenses, you are going to pay a terrific price.116

James A. Bean, of the Stanford Research Institute, argued that Soviet air and air defense forces were still fighting the Second World War. During the war, Luftwaffe tactical airpower had devastated Soviet forces without adequate air defense, but not heavily equipped formations. Projecting the role of the Luftwaffe onto NATO and the

U.S., the Soviets invested heavily in air defenses and refused to retire older models, preferring instead to keep everything.117 Overall, Soviet air doctrine was “offensive air defense,” with substantial resources devoted to protecting armored columns of the second echelon, which he considered an innovation the Soviets gleaned from the Vietnam War, watching the U.S. strike moving columns in an effort to stop their progress and form queues.118 Bean provided a list of Soviet airspace control tenets that complemented

Emanski’s list of NATO operational assumptions:

Maintaining an accurate and timely picture of the air situation within the battlespace [sic] and disseminating these data to all command and decision points within the air defense system. Employing an integrated weapons concept that combines ground-based and airborne air defense elements. Maintaining positive control over friendly aircraft in a mixed air battle situation.119

Bean hoped that the Air Force would reassert its dominance. This hope, however,

115 Ibid., 38–43. 116 Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine: Basic Thinking in the United States Air Force - 1961-1984, II:487. 117 James A. Bean, “Soviet Doctrine and Technology for Battlespace Control in the Tactical Environment,” Airpower Symposium (Maxwell AFB: Stanford Research Institute, March 1977), 7–9, Maxwell AFHRA: K239.151. 118 Ibid., 11–16. 119 Ibid., 17.

69 was shrouded amidst the pervasive anxiety and cautious optimism espoused by many officers and academics from this period. The feeling that the U.S. and NATO were losing the Cold War lent a sense of urgency to discussions of reform:

The Soviet tactical air defense threat is real and effective, it will not go away, and expected changes will increase its effectiveness. All indications are that the gap between the capabilities of modern tactical aircraft and the air defenses is narrowing. The U.S. Air Force is challenged to reverse the apparent trend and to widen the gap. This challenge must be met if U.S. forces are to emerge victorious in a future war.120

Military Balance and the Soviets

Technological advances offered the Air Force a means to offset the increasing conventional strength of the Soviets. Newer Soviet equipment upset the perceived balance in Europe, and advanced ADS threatened the survivability of most U.S. airframes. The narrower disparity in force quality drove Air Force and Army planners to reassess their war plans, looking for means to disrupt, harass, and destroy the follow-on waves, or in proper jargon, “echelons” of a Soviet invasion. As was the case with many aspects of the Cold War, the Americans did not understand their enemy’s intentions. The

Soviets saw force as the surest means to achieve power, even if cooperation or peaceful coexistence remained its end, as Brezhnev expressed: “Détente became possible because a new correlation of forces in the world arena has been established.” 121 The Soviets viewed force as a means to enhance their status internationally and secure recognition as a superpower. These desires reflected the Russian psyche more than outright aggression, but regardless of intention they manifested themselves in the form of weaponry.

This development startled American commanders, especially those stationed in

120 Ibid., 38. 121 Robert J. McMahon, The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction, Very Short Introductions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 125–26.

70 Europe. Despite the technical improvements of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the End- of-Tour reports of senior officers revealed anxieties about TACAIR in Europe. Maj Gen

Harold Todd, the Chief of Staff for the Fourth Allied Tactical Air Force (4ATAF) 1982-

5, saw many of the improvements the Air Force had made since reforms began and he assumed his post. The Air Force introduced the F-15 and the A-10. Procurement solutions offered the Air Force more and better power than it had in 1973. Among his comments, Todd offered that the “Chiefs of Staff Coordination Conferences,” held with

Air Force and Army generals in Europe, were “a moderately useful vehicle to sort out problems.”122 This isn’t really a warm endorsement, but the fact that ATAF staff officers could meet with Army Group staff officers via a regular channel improved on the venues that existed during the Vietnam War. Todd described the ability of European allies to contribute to an ALB style campaign as non-existent.123 Not only did NATO not officially adopt ALB, but many members viewed its offensive measures in a Follow-On

Forces Attack (FOFA) as contradictory to the defensive nature of the alliance. Indeed,

ALB was had earned enough of a bad reputation that its success threatened its potential use and exposed a growing capability gap with the Europeans.

Though most Air Force officers felt their lot was improving in Europe, a sense of caution pervaded in the mid-1980s. This seems to be another example of generational lag, as the generals of the 1980s were majors and colonels in 1970s, when things seemed much worse. Maj Gen Lawrence Garrison’s 1984 End-of-Tour report, after serving three years as the Deputy Commander of Allied Air Forces North, in Oslo, highlighted the risks if NATO lost air superiority over Norway or Denmark. That event would likely

122 Maj Gen Harold W. Todd, “End-of-Tour Report - Major General Harold W. Todd” (Maxwell AFB: AFSHRC/HOTI, September 13, 1985), 2, Maxwell AFHRA: K570.131 Todd, Harold. 123 Ibid., 4.

71 cost NATO the whole European war, as the Nordic countries played such an important role in both NATO and Warsaw Pact war plans.124 Despite that warning, Garrison explained: “I am convinced we are in a better position today than we were three years ago, due to those who were willing to listen and flexible enough to think in terms of something beyond a Central European battle only.”125 This comment reflects the effect of new airframes in the Air Force and the embrace of an “operational” approach by the

Army and Air Force. It recognized the role of a battle in Central Europe within a broader context. Better doctrine and a more flexible institution had arrived by the mid-1980s, and even the cautious commanders of the era expressed optimism in their reports that did not exist in the 1970s. The successes of reform demonstrated that changes for the better could occur, giving hope to neglected career fields and commands.

Conclusions

The airframes the Air Force procured during this period of innovation formed the bedrock of American airpower well into the 21st century. New technology excited the

Air Force in a way that made change easier for the service. Even if its old role and identity failed, it could turn to technology as a path forward. Fortunately, Air Force leadership and Congress aligned to bring about the most efficient and effective acquisitions cycle in American history. Whether or not the Americans really were far behind the USSR in conventional strength, the perception of a threat spurred innovation into a new realm of ever more advanced weapons and airframes. The progress made in hardware kept Air Force officers in Europe more confident than their predecessors, because the U.S. was closing the real or imagined gap with Soviets. This development

124 Maj Gen Lawrence D. Garrison, “End-of-Tour Report: Major General Lawrence D. Garrison” (Maxwell AFB: AFSHRC/HOTI, July 19, 1984), 3, Maxwell AFHRA: K570.131 Garrison. 125 Ibid.

72 proved important on a massive scale because U.S. innovations demonstrated the inability of the Soviets to keep up in the 1980s and formed the foundation for the military component of America’s unipolar moment in the 1990s. Major capital investments in

1970 paid dividends even in 2015. Truly, military hardware had reached new heights.

73 Chapter 5: Doctrine and Cooperation

Of all the reforms the U.S. military undertook after the Vietnam War, the shift toward greater service cooperation was perhaps the most consequential. Changes in technology and doctrine were common throughout U.S. history, but joint coordination between the military’s branches frequently failed. The Vietnam War demonstrated the shortcomings of service parochialism. Fortunately, enough officers of all ranks had witnessed the consequences of that failure and desired better coordination in the planning and execution of war. The Army and Air Force Chiefs of Staff, GEN Abrams and Gen

Brown, set a tone of cooperation for their subordinates. They drew upon a well of good will, rooted in the shared experience of combat in Southeast Asia and the realities of the

Soviet threat in Central Europe. These influences shaped the views of the young officers that helped to direct war planning and doctrine creation. The changes these men wrought altered how the Air Force conceived of airpower and its role in future conflicts. In particular, they emphasized the interdependent TACAIR contribution to a campaign in

Central Europe at the “operational level of war.” The Air Force recognized that it needed the Army and saw joint operations as an opportunity that could offer force multiplication.

The Air Force and The Operational Level

Although Air Force missions like airlift were tied to sustaining operations, most of the service’s roles centered on producing sorties counted in hours, not campaigns marked in weeks. As a result, the idea of the “operational level of war,” so central to the thinking and planning of armies, was at best a vaguely familiar concept to airmen. From training to war plans, the Air Force spent too little time considering this matter. Most training for TAC pilots in the 1960s focused on individual sorties. Not until Gen

74 Creech’s time at TAC did exercises begin to include multi-day losses and attrition, in an attempt to mirror the cumulative effects of air war against the Soviets. Again, the prospect of conventional fighting escalating to a nuclear exchange compressed the scale and duration of Air Force (and Army) plans for fighting in Central Europe. These plans assumed that fighting would last only a few weeks. The omnipresent nuclear specter reduced the seriousness and realness with which these plans were considered.126 The feasibility of a long non-nuclear war against Soviet forces remains questionable, still, the

Air Force and the Army had to try to provide that capability. Just as Air Force nuclear capability and plans were not limited by executive policies under the Eisenhower administration, but rather complemented them, so too with workable and well thought out conventional capabilities and plans during the post-Vietnam era. The Air Force needed to place itself within the operational level of war, which required a move toward interdependency with the Army. Only by cooperating with the Army in a campaign could the Air Force find its new role.

Congressional Direction

One of the earliest areas of coordination and de-confliction for the Army and Air

Force was CAS. The issue was so convoluted that Congress became involved directly, eventually forming a CAS panel on the HASC. Long before that happened, however, the

HASC reviewed the findings of the Phase II CAS Study by the Deputy Secretary of

Defense (Dep SECDEF), David Packard, in December 1971. Kenneth Rush, a statesman, diplomat, and Packard’s successor, presented the central conclusions of the study in

January 1973. Some of these observations were worrying. For example, the Army and

126 Emanski Jr., “Implications of Continuous Land Combat on Air Support Doctrine.”

75 Air Force lacked adequate portable means of battlefield communication between CAS pilots and troops on the ground. Training for both CAS pilots and ground commanders was insufficient and haphazard. The study recommended increased joint training for the

Army and Air Force, better command and control procedures and kit, and greater assignment of Air Force Forward Air Controllers (FACs) to Army units of all levels.127

Many of these problems were technological. All the solutions required a much larger degree of autonomy for commanders and troops at lower levels than previously allowed.

In the midst of these discussions, TAC’s staff took note of the creation of the TRADOC and its role as the Army’s workhorse for the creation of new doctrine and preparation of troops for battle.128 The Air Force and the Army finally had a vehicle, through TRADOC and TAC, to begin their war planning together in peacetime, not in the heat of battle.

The Infrastructure of Change

The emergence of TRADOC coincided with massive changes in the Air Force.

Its close location to TAC prompted cooperative efforts beginning in 1973. TRADOC commander, GEN DePuy, and TAC commander, Gen Dixon, directed their organizations to cooperate on de-conflicting doctrine and procurement. They did so, with a clear mandate from their services chiefs. GEN Abrams told DePuy:

I have long believed that since there exists in the Army and Air Force a unique complementary relationship to conduct warfare on the landmass, it is absolutely essential that a close relationship exist, at all levels, between the two Services. The Army’s recent experience in Southeast Asia had further reinforced my belief in the essentiality of close working ties with the Air Force… The problem that George Brown and I both face, is how to carry over this commonality of purpose which existed so clearly in Vietnam, as it has in other operational settings, into the entire fabric of relationships between the two services.129

127 Rush, “Close Air Support Study for Congressman John C. Stennis,” 1–3. 128 Allen, “USAF TAC Memo: U.S. Army Reorganization.” 129 Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine: Basic Thinking in the United States Air Force - 1961-1984, II:540.

76

This move encouraged each command to cooperate. Although that directive might have produced just a well meaning but symbolic effort, officers from both commands embraced the opportunity to align their services’ war plans. Having just witnessed the end of combat operations in Vietnam and the Yom Kippur War, the mutual dependency of the Army and Air Force was clear to these officers.

The greatest organizational product of this joint work was the creation of the

ALFA agency. This office included five Army and five Air Force officers. Leadership rotated between each branch. The primary goal of ALFA was to coordinate areas that concerned both services, such as airbase defense and air defense suppression, primarily in the European context. With ALFA as the vehicle for cooperation and coordination, requests and questions from the HASC CAS panel were disseminated to appropriate destinations. A memo from Lt Col Frank Horton III to Brig Gen Charles Donnelly, the

Air Force Director of Plans, lists ALFA’s response to the Congressional inquiry. The memo emphasized the close cooperation between the Air Force and Army on CAS, as well as the increasing coordination of training and tactics at various levels of command.

Describing ALFA’s purpose:

In regards to improving CAS effectiveness, the establishment of the Tactical Air Command (TAC) and Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) of Air Land Forces Application (ALFA) Agency will insure that the general purpose force cooperation will continue to be an effective means of integrating the requirement and problems associated with CAS and interdiction on modern battlefield. ALFA ongoing projects include:

(1) Airspace Management. (2) Reconnaissance/Surveillance. (3) Air Defense Suppression. (4) Electronic Warfare. (5) Forward Air Controller/Forward Observer.130

130 Lt Col Frank B. Horton, “USAF Information Paper on CAS for HASC,” 1976, Maxwell AFHRA: K168.03- 2342 Part 2.

77 Following this model, the U.S. Air Forces Europe (USAFE) and U.S. Army Europe

(USAREUR) formed an analogous office in 1976 that allowed individual units, like fighter wings or infantry divisions, to train and interact on a daily basis.131 This development not only increased the effectiveness of such combat units, but also forged new ties between the Air Force and Army at all ranks.

One significant and pressing problem facing the Army and Air Force was airspace controlling. That issue presented the services with the logistical challenge of keeping track of not only American aircraft but also allied NATO planes and even enemy bogeys.

In the Vietnam War, the Air Force and Army frequently chafed under the limits that defined control of airspace. This problem stemmed partly from the division of the aviation mission when the Air Force separated from the Army, leaving it primarily with helicopters and light aircraft. A mess of rules defined which service controlled directing and tracking air traffic at various altitudes. The problem was not exclusive to the Army and Air Force. Confusion between individual members of NATO prompted a concerted effort at standardization in 1976.

Published in 1977, NATO ATP-40 established a basic standard for NATO battlefield airspace control. The document “prescribes operational doctrine and basic procedures for airspace control in the combat zone.”132 By identifying and eliminating many previous problems in airspace control, like the responsibility and authority of various commanders, ATP-40 promised a more effective use of airpower over Europe.

Even the choice of “operational doctrine” to describe the document demonstrated the desire of the Air Force to place itself within a broader campaign level operational

131 Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine: Basic Thinking in the United States Air Force - 1961-1984, II:540–41. 132 NATO, ATP 40, “Doctrine and Procedures for Airspace Control in the Combat Zone ATP 40” (NATO, January 1977), 1–1, Maxwell AFHRA: 168.7538-89.

78 framework. Air Force officers began to think beyond their own aircraft and requirements and instead to consider the effect of their actions on the theater level.

ALFA and its sister offices saw such problems as an opportunity to better align procedures across the services, and augment the effectiveness of CAS sorties. The Air

Force planned to create a new strengthened aircraft for the airborne air-controlling mission, the Forward Air Controller - Experimental (FAC-X). A two-seat version of the

A-10 was briefly considered as the FAC-X, because previous observation craft were deemed too vulnerable for the European theater.133 The Air Force abandoned these plans, however, after demonstrations of closer coordination between A-10s and Army attack and scouting helicopters proved effective. So long as information could pass quickly between multiple sources, the U.S. could focus its firepower efficiently and maneuver against enemy vulnerabilities.

Doctrine Gets Popular

Close cooperation was not the only development on the doctrine front. The

Army’s field manuals, which reflected the changing ways it viewed operations in the

Central Europe, began to attract attention. The 1976 version of FM 100-5, the Army’s general field manual for combat operations, solicited controversy and spirited debate. Its colloquial title, “Active Defense,” summed the concerns of the Army officers who feared that it reflected too much timidity in the aftermath of Vietnam. Though the manual included provisions for offensive operations, the pejorative title stuck. Despite criticisms, the manual marked a huge break with its 1971 predecessor. The 1971 manual read about as well as one might expect of . Its organization into numerical

133 Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine: Basic Thinking in the United States Air Force - 1961-1984, II:542–43.

79 subsections imitated legal code or catechism.134 Active Defense, however, offered diagrams of military hardware, maps of the battle space, and small readable sections of text. Though it generated controversy, officers actually were reading it. It opened a conversation that eventually produced perhaps the most famous American military manual of the 20th century – FM 100-5 “AirLand Battle.”

The title “AirLand Battle” evokes images of A-10s flying over the Fulda Gap or

F-15s striking Iraqi armored columns in the desert. This doctrine manual has taken on a life of its own – it even provided the name for a recent Cold War-themed computer game

(“Wargame: AirLand Battle” in 2013).135 GEN Donn A. Starry, who succeeded GEN

DePuy at TRADOC, was the officer most responsible for the doctrine’s implementation.

Starry and Gen Creech built upon the cooperative foundation set by DePuy and Dixon, and TAC and TRADOC entered a bona fide partnership by the late 1970s. They realized that budgetary and battlefield realities necessitated greater jointness, and even reached out to the Navy when preparing to craft the new manual.136 One of Starry’s prime concerns while reforming doctrine was its inherent distance from the reality of the common soldier. Starry said:

The combat development process has a couple of serious pitfalls in it. One of them is that the combat developers, who sit and think all the time, tend to get too far ahead of the guys in the trenches. When they get so far ahead of the guys in the trenches… then the phenomenon of nonrelevance [sic] sets in and the guys in the trenches ignore them.137

To prevent this effect, Starry kept his ideas as a series of slides, refusing to put

134 Army Operations, Field Manual 100-5 (Fort Monroe: TRADOC, 1971). 135 Wargame: AirLand Battle (United States: Eugen Systems, 2013), http://www.wargame- rd.com/en/game-ab.html. 136 GEN Donald A. Starry, U.S. Air Force Oral History Interview: General Donald A. Starry, U.S. Army (RET), interview by Dr. Harold R. Winton, Transcript, May 13, 1995, 1–2, Maxwell AFHRA: K239.0512-2140. 137 Ibid., 2.

80 them into an official Army document. He knew that as soon as doctrine was written, it “gets into the Pentagon and they pour ‘Pentacrete’ around it, the hardest substance.”138 This mode of disseminating doctrine via slides was similar to

Boyd’s means of arguing for the F-16, and his own warfighting ideas.

When Starry finally decided to publish his ideas of the “extended battlefield,” which to him included Air Force and Navy assets, he used the Military Review, the professional journal of the Army, as his outlet, because he believed that working through military academic institutions and PME would keep his ideas from ossifying. Turning to

PME turned a series of slides into the start of a broader conversation that eventually included the whole military, but especially the Air Force. Assisting Starry, Donald

Morelli (later a MAJ GEN), chose the name “AirLand Battle” to make the ideas sound exciting and appealing to the Air Force.139 Starry wanted to include the Navy, but he and his staff had limited experience and contacts with the Navy. They did not have this problem with the Air Force. The Army and Air Force were reaping the rewards of cooperation at all levels dating back to Vietnam and the amiable tone set by leaders of both branches since 1973. Without the foundation of good will in senior ranks, or shared combat experience in the junior ranks, AirLand Battle would not have been possible.

The Army’s doctrine largely was the product of its schools and PME system, which incubated ideas and discussions, though not without a conservative streak. Starry understood that he needed to overcome the system’s tendency toward inertia, in ways that the Air Force did not. As a contemporary example, the greatest doctrinal shock of the last decade, the production of the manual FM 3-24, was the product of

138 Ibid., 3. 139 Ibid., 5–6.

81 the work of GEN David Petraeus and Gen James Mattis (USMC), at one of the Army’s schools at Fort Leavenworth, not TRADOC HQ. The Air Force’s institutions, like Air

University, were in the midst of serious reforms, and had traditionally served as reflective and introspective bodies. They could not set doctrine or inhibit change in the same way as Army institutions. Fortunately, however, other elements within the Air Force were able to handle this responsibility. Much of the doctrinal process was left to the individual commands, and TAC determined most of its own doctrine itself, with some input from the Air Staff in Washington.140 TAC’s commander enjoyed a degree of agency that

TRADOC’s commander did not. Thus, Gen Dixon and Creech largely determined the direction of new doctrine and level of cooperation with the Army. Their strength of personality, and the determination of GEN DePuy in fighting institutional inertia, allowed huge reforms in a short amount of time.

There were limits to the autonomy and authority of TAC’s commander, however.

Whereas TRADOC could speak on behalf of the entire Army on doctrine matters, TAC spoke only for itself. This created an “asymmetry in institutional interface,” as Starry later described it.141 So long as the relationship focused on the Central European battlefield and TACAIR issues, it performed quite well. Dixon and DePuy primarily focused on CAS and controlling the battle airspace. Parochialism had governed this arena since the independence of the Air Force, as the Army fought to retain some aviation capabilities. Necessity and good will prompted Dixon and DePuy’s efforts, resolving an area of tension and establishing the infrastructure of cooperation that Starry and Creech used to seek out further innovations and reforms. The ALFA agency, the determination

140 Ibid., 7–8. 141 Ibid., 8.

82 of senior leaders, the Soviet threat, and Congressional pressure all joined to make obstinacy an untenable position.

AirLand Battle

Although the reform of airspace management was a major victory for the TAC-

TRADOC relationship, much work remained to be done. GEN Starry explained: “…the new thing that General Bill Creech and I had to work on was the deep attack problem.”142

He understood that ballistic missiles had means of navigating to their targets and wondered why that was not so with conventional weapons. Early precision munitions had their debut during the Vietnam War, but the technology was far from perfected.

Looking ahead, to a time when such technology would advance, Starry remembered:

That was the genesis of the deep attack part of the AirLand Battle. It was an attempt to raise the nuclear threshold, in Europe particularly but elsewhere as well, by substituting for what we had originally thought we needed for, conventional weapons…143

This concept had huge implications. It provided the U.S. with a plausible conventional strategy for fighting the Soviets, while also countering the Soviet Second Echelon with a

FOFA. This gave the Air Force a role in stopping the Warsaw Pact offensive, utilizing close coordination operationally and new technology. Starry looked to new platforms like the A-10, the Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS), and the

Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) to resolve many of the challenges facing the

Army and Air Force.

These new systems would have provided little value without adjustments to procedure and tactics. Though ALFA helped to resolve the airspace problem, and progress on CAS continued, SEAD remained tricky. For ADS far behind enemy lines,

142 Ibid., 9. 143 Ibid., 10.

83 the responsibility for destroying such targets lay clearly with the Air Force. Those ADS that stood close to the front, however, could be attacked either by the Air Force or by ground forces. Counter-battery platforms like the ATACMS fit this role perfectly, offering the ability to strike ADS, once spotted from the ground or air.144 Despite this success, Starry recalled a “Mexican standoff with the Air Force guys at Langley,” adding

“we would not have an AirLand Battle had it not been for General Bill Creech.”145

Through sheer strength of will, Creech helped to bridge the gap with the Army and ensure that the Air Force played ball. As the rest of the Air Force pushed back against changes toward interdependency, commanders like Creech insisted on reform.

This reliance on new technology, as well as new procedures, reflected the realization of the challenge posed by the Warsaw Pact. Not only would U.S. and NATO forces have to face a vast first attack, but also the follow-on waves or echelons of the enemy. That was part of the reason for emphasis on new weapons with greater standoff distance. Starry was convinced that with balance of forces during the 1970s, most Army officers did not think they could win a war. Though the Soviets had changed their doctrine and become a more formidable enemy, the answer was an aggressive and active doctrine, not just defense. Starry’s doctrine called for U.S. commanders to “‘delay, disrupt, and destroy’ in that order.”146 The Air Force could aid in each of these tasks, allowing the army to extend the battlefield and hit Warsaw Pact troops before they ever hit the frontline.

GEN Starry’s doctrine also marked a return to a Clausewitzian understanding of war. GEN DePuy, whose personal combat experience left him an ardent believer in

144 Ibid., 19–20. 145 Ibid., 21. 146 Ibid., 24–25.

84 defense and the lethality of armor, heavily influenced Active Defense.147 Starry agreed that defense held advantages, especially in Central Europe, but that defense eventually must yield to offensive operations. This view closely mirrors Clausewitz, who challenged the Jominian assertion that defense is inherently stronger, because of the benefits of internal lines. Clausewitz argued that the benefits of defense should only be embraced until the next opportunity for auspicious offensive operations arose. This understanding of defense, as an overall goal but not a dictate for tactics and operations, complemented Starry’s understanding of the Army’s culture. It also demonstrated an operational understanding of war, in line with the lessons that Starry learned from his friend, Major General Moshe Peled of the IDF. During the Yom Kippur War, Peled’s division utilized maneuver to defeat several Syrian echelons of attack, instead of relying on static defense.148 Starry saw similarities between the Golan Heights and the situation in Europe, both cases in which geography and numbers made defensive operations tempting, but where maneuver provided the surest means of defeating a multi-echelon force. Yet again, the Yom Kippur War echoed loudly in the minds of American military leaders.

Ultimately, Starry created a doctrine that not only built upon the Army’s culture, but also engaged the common soldiers of the Army. The doctrine generated discussion at all rank levels, providing fertile ground for the next generation of war planners and commanders. More importantly, Starry brought the Air Force into the fight, using the determination and commitment of Gen Creech to change the status quo of U.S. doctrine and the climate of cooperation between the services. Despite the initial reluctance of the

147 Ibid., 38. 148 Ibid., 38–39.

85 Air Staff in Washington, ALB quickly spread throughout TAC and the Air Force’s PME institutions, opening discussion of the missions and composition of the Air Force in the future.

Doctrine Conference ’82

The Air Force held a doctrine-oriented conference at Bolling AFB in 1982, which provides a good foil to the 1977 Airpower Symposium at Maxwell AFB. Though the officers at this conference primarily were from the staff of the Doctrine and Plans

Division of Air Force Headquarters, they discussed the cutting edge of Army and Air

Force doctrine. Most of these officers had passed through Air Force PME in the decade since its reforms had begun. Among the topics they discussed were changes to Air Force

Manual (AFM) 1-1 Operations. The point paper for AFM 1-1 underscored the importance of warfighting.149 This shift in rhetoric and tone is reminiscent of Lt Gen

Furlong’s pledge to re-center Air Force PME around war and Gen Creech’s efforts at restoring realism in training.150 Though the Air Force must be ready for a nuclear war that would last only hours, it also needed to be able to fight a campaign of weeks. The duration, pace, and intensity of the experience in Southeast Asia were no model for operations against the Soviets, and a substantial change in language accompanied the transition in war plans and doctrine. Components of this newfound focus in AFM 1-1 included, “Offensive Air Support, Battle Air Interdiction, Counterair [sic] mission and

Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD), Collateral missions as Joint Maritime

149 Col Billy G McCoy, “High Priest of Doctrine: Air Force Doctrine Conference” (Bolling AFB: Doctrine and Concepts Division, April 7, 1982), Maxwell AFHRA: 168.7538-99. 150 Air University Directorate of History, A Short History of The Air University, Maxwell AFB, and the 42nd Air Base Wing; Laslie, The Air Force Way of War, 57–60.

86 Operations.”151 Although these missions all represented interdependence, they were also aggressive and offensive in a way that appealed to soldiers and airmen alike.

The conference’s point paper on “U.S. Army Initiatives” demonstrated the progress that had occurred in cooperation, but also the remaining obstacles to the Army-

Air Force relationship. Maj Ken Hall, who gave the briefing on the Army, explained that

ALB was its accepted and operational doctrine. He highlighted the need for long-range assets to conduct ALB – the sort of assets the Air Force could provide and that the Army lacked.152 The shift to ALB represented the Army’s shift from attrition-based to maneuver-based warfare. Though TRADOC had to overcome a large amount of inertia to carry out this shift, the Army’s bureaucracy was officially bound to accept the conclusions of TRADOC. The point papers listed characteristics of Army doctrine creation: “Fast Process, Dedicated command – TRADOC, TRADOC controls Army schools, Doctrine printed quickly, FMs printed without full Army coordination, Army doctrine may be different in different theaters.”153 In comparison, he identified Air Force doctrine as being the product of a slow process, contingent on the acceptance of four- stars across the Air Force, all under the direction of a doctrine shop that “controls no one.”154 As a member of that doctrine shop, Maj Hall described some of the obstacles which limited the adoption of new doctrine by the Air Force. However, the mere fact that the Air Force was discussing the specifics of ALB months after its release, indicates that the service was more responsive to new doctrine than it had been a decade prior.

Conclusions

151 McCoy, “High Priest of Doctrine: Air Force Doctrine Conference,” iii. 152 Ibid., v-vi. 153 Ibid., vi. 154 Ibid., vi.

87 While CAS was not the only part of the reforms necessary for the Army and Air

Force to conduct ALB, it was a fundamental starting point for the services to bridge their training, acquisitions, and force structure. Without the earliest discussions around CAS, cooperation might have stalled. Instead, pressure from the service chiefs, the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), and oversight from Congress, overcame most reluctance to increased coordination. Additionally, the dogged persistence of officers like Dixon,

DePuy, Creech, and Starry, ensured that petty service interests took a backseat to improving national security. Once these leaders had set a tone for cooperation, and engaged their services with exciting new ideas, they left their subordinates to explore the details. Many of the problems identified for the staffs of each service and by

Congressionally directed inquiry pointed to solutions at a lower level; solutions MGOs could provide. In keeping with GEN George S. Patton’s memorable rule: “Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”155 MGOs had the know-how and experience to do this, tying new capabilities and doctrine to emerging and evolving threats. A combination top-down and bottom-up approaches to challenges drove the Air Force toward effective innovation.

155 Contrails: 2010-2011 (USAF Academy, CO: U.S. Air Force Academy Publication, 2010). A book issued to cadets during their first year at the Air Force Academy to facilitate learning of U.S. military heritage. It includes details about the military inventory, order of battle, and quotations on character and leadership.

88 Chapter 6: Conclusion

Though the process was painful, in the 1970s and 1980s the Air Force succeeded in transforming itself. Though this development came in response to several failures, it could not have happened within the parochial environment that dominated the service and the services during the 1950s and 1960s. Even failures like Operation Eagle Claw demonstrated a desire among the services to work together to provide the government with more options in any situation. The combined efforts of airmen of all ranks and an assertive Congress allowed the Air Force to overcome the inertia of tradition and the status quo. It concluded that success in its mission was possible only through interdependence with the Army against a common enemy in Europe. Fortunately, the

Army also was receptive to new ideas during this period, and the two services became more interdependent. This interdependence started with sorting out very technical problems, but eventually it matured into a valuable and complex partnership. So successful were these efforts that by the mid-1980s even the USN began to justify its naval aviation programs by reference to their alleged ability to assist AirLand Battle.

The collapse of the nuclear-oriented executive policy left the Air Force in urgent need to offer new missions and roles. As nuclear weapons left the center stage of foreign and defense policy, becoming unusable in a military context, the Air Force turned to conventional operations and weapons. Within the conventional realm, it found a new identity and a new reason for greater budgets. This identity pushed it toward interdependence, a posture that previous generations of airmen had resisted. The Air

Force’s position of weakness, along with opportunities for renewed prominence, pushed it to reform and innovate. The influence of the Yom Kippur War and Vietnam War only

89 furthered this agenda, demonstrating to Congress and the military to need to adopt new weapon systems and tactics. Reform-minded Congressmen aided this process, and encouraged cooperation in procurement and doctrine.

The reforms that started in 1973 continued well into the Reagan administration, reaching a crescendo with the Goldwater-Nichols Act in 1986. This act forced the military to clarify its command structure and increase its “jointness,” both in training and operations. While this act did not change the relationship between the services overnight, it started a much-needed process of reform and set a more amiable tone for cooperation.

The Army-Air Force relationship served as a strong foundation for this new era. Military leaders kept a vigil during a period of the American public’s apathy toward the military and foreign events, and ensured that they bequeathed a stronger force to their successors than they had received. The success of the reformers of this period in changing the process of procurement and planning should stand as a guiding light in the era of the F-35 and supportive yet largely disengaged public opinion. Perhaps this process is cyclical and reflects the broader appetite of the public to support military excursions. Even so, if the lessons of the previous cycle are lost, the mistakes seem likely to be repeated.

I stopped my study in 1985, because the Air Force had achieved most of its targets in reform by this period. Its doctrine, identity, leadership, and airframes were very different than they had been in 1973. The changes had advanced so far that a new generation of doctrine and tactics was being developed to augment airframes like the F-

15 and A-10. Officers, like Col John Warden at Checkmate, began to advance theories espousing the use of conventional weapons for strategic results. The period of my thesis marked an interregnum in the independence and strategic focus of the Air Force. In the

90 1950s, the Air Force promised to achieve strategic results with nuclear weapons, breaking the target with a hammer. By 1990s, the Air Force was making the same claim at strategic outcomes, but with conventional weapons, or a scalpel. Only in the period of full interdependence was the Air Force comfortable viewing itself in a supportive tactical/operational role. While this comfort was driven, in many ways, out of necessity, it also marked a firm break with the service’s traditional culture and understanding of warfare, and left interdependence as an acceptable posture for the Air Force, if not the optimum one. Meanwhile, the procurements of that era gave the next generation of airmen the tools with which they could restore both interdependent and independent versions of airpower. The Air Force has never abandoned its interdependent role since the period of reforms, but it also remains wedded to the idea of decisive technologically driven strategic actions. The success of the Air Force, at least in a tactical sense, since the end of the Cold War, spurs airmen to think independently about airpower. Air superiority platforms and fighter-bombers constitute its focus in procurement today, despite to utility and necessity of remotely-piloted aircraft and CAS airframes. The dismay from the Army over the Air Force’s desire to get rid of the A-10 perfectly illustrates the anxieties and tensions that currently define airpower and the Air Force’s identity.

Aside from the change in culture and the move toward joint operations and planning, the most significant lesson of the reform period was in procurement. The airframes procured during this period still form the backbone of the Air Force (and other services) today. In an age of run-away defense projects, like the F-35, the procurement of mission-specific aircraft in the 1970s serves as a strong role model. Fearing a repeat of

91 the F-111 debacle, Congress gave the services enough leeway to ask for what they really needed. The result in CAS airframes alone vindicates the wisdom of Congressional support for multiple programs. And despite the scars of failed efforts in the 1960s, the services cooperated closely, with the Navy selecting the rejected YF-17 and the Army acknowledging the synergistic value of attack helicopters and fixed-wing CAS. The success of this generation of weapon systems coincides with the emergence of the modern U.S. military, and its emphasis on joint offensive action with an elite highly advanced technical force. This military is highly lethal but also overly confident in its ability to technologize its way out of problems or the need for strategy. The reform era produced this ethos.

The reforms of the post-Vietnam War period were tested in the Gulf War. Most civilian and military leaders credited the success of the U.S.-led coalition to the long period of innovations that preceded it. The success of that campaign, at least at an operational level, convinced the U.S. of its ability to project and employ overwhelming force anywhere on Earth. While better tactics and more advanced weapon systems made this belief true, the U.S. never confronted the fundamental strategic weaknesses exposed by the Vietnam War. In this way the reforms of the 1970s and early 1980s solved many of the problems presented by the Yom Kippur War, but not the Vietnam War. The military avoided the hard problems presented by Vietnam – the limits faced in long conflicts, the challenges presented in civil-military relations, and the hazards of nation building. In this way, the victories in reform of the post-Vietnam era were limited. They sowed seeds for the tactical and operational success of the last twenty-five years, but also set the stage for the strategic frustrations that inevitably followed. The new way of war

92 offered “Instant Thunder” instead of “Rolling Thunder,” but this was not necessarily the answer. The U.S. performed well primarily because it chose to fight a different type of war, suited to its strengths, not because it overcame its weaknesses by learning from past failings. As the U.S. and NATO continue to engage in limited wars with low intensity operations today, the value of the high-tech high-intensity force comes into question by the public and Congress.

The U.S. military faces substantial operational and budgetary challenges in the coming decade. Although the Army and Marine Corps did most of the fighting in the last fifteen years, both services are experiencing the greatest reductions in force. The Air

Force and the Navy continue to offer highly technological solutions to most conflicts, solutions that are essential in conventional fighting but supplementary in limited and unconventional wars. A lasting legacy of the reform period and ALB is the recent discussion of an AirSea Battle strategy for defending American interests and allies in the

Pacific. Such a doctrine or philosophy demonstrates the awareness the Navy and Air

Force have about the success and appeal of ALB in its time. It also shows their realization of the critical domain in a strategically vital theater. During the Cold War,

Europe was NATO’s center of gravity, and a strong land force was needed to hold it. In the Pacific, land forces offer limited utility, but range and mobility are crucial. This is good news for the Air Force and Navy, and even offers a role for a more amphibious

Marine Corps. The services that adapt to executive policy and national priorities the most quickly will gain the best portion of the spoils. Sadly, the Army is most likely loser in this situation, as it must always prepare for the widest range of operations and capabilities, and its size makes fast service-wide change a rare thing.

93 More work on the period of reform after the Vietnam War is warranted. An attempt to connect the reforms of this period to later developments in the 1980s and with the Gulf War would be a good start. Critical studies of the idea and practice of precision strike, and of the second generation of independent, or “scalpel,” Air Force officers would also be valuable. Such studies could trace the education of these officers and the influence of reform era on their view of airpower and innovation. Airpower theorists and acolytes could explore the role of Boyd and Warden in exploiting the new potential offered by air forces in this era. Projects could also bridge changes in the Air Force with those happening in other services during the same time. There is no shortage of research for this topic, and as it enters the historical literature my conclusions will likely alter.

Even as historical approaches to this topic increase, strategic or defense based studies will likely also become more common.

Ultimately, the challenges facing the U.S. military and Air Force in 1973 are not dissimilar from those of 2015. A recent article in The Economist discussed the need for a

“Third Offset Strategy” to allow the U.S. to keep its military edge. The article described the “air-atomic age” as the first offset and the period of my thesis as the second.

Although there is room for argument as to the present threat posed to the U.S. by other conventional powers, the erosion of the gains of the second offset is clear when one thinks of remotely piloted vehicles, the ubiquity of cyberspace, and the absolute reliance on satellites for command and control. These new arenas are little like those faced during the interdependent era, but the model of reform used then might serve as a road map.

The coordination of so many resources and the influence of creative minds at every rank served the country well during that period. If the U.S. wants to succeed in reforming its

94 military yet again, it should look to the example of the Air Force from 1973 to 1985.

With such a template, the U.S. could easily secure a position of clear dominance well into this century.

95 Bibliography

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