Monday, May 28, 2018

Organizational Needs versus Organizational Structure.


This is a question about the Air Force, the youngest of our military services which appears to be going through its mid-life crisis, brought on by a long war that offers no end.  It is, for me at least, a fundamental question upon which all other choices must ultimately rest.  What is the smallest force capable of sustained combat operations, the unit with the necessary operational personnel, maintenance personnel, logistics support, communications, and command and control to deploy and sustain combat operations for at least six months?  Whatever that is shouldn’t that be the type of unit we build our Air Force around.
The Army has wrestled with this same question for as long as I remember, and every time I think they have an answer some new General has a great idea and they reorganize.  Since we come from the Army maybe it is in our DNA that we would do the same thing.  At one point it was a regiment, then a division, and I think they’ve now settled on a Combat Brigade, but that could be outdated.
When I first came into the Air Force, just at the end of the Vietnam conflict, I was taught the wing was that unit, although our history in WW2 would suggest Groups were certainly capable of independent operations, but then Groups in WW2 were bigger than most wings in the post-Vietnam era.
It seems the consideration of sustainable combat capability always takes a back seat to the political, economic, or personnel considerations the CSAF and his staff find so much more interesting inside the beltway.
In the 90’s the CSAF, the SECAF and their staffs said Wing Commanders should be Brigadiers -- so they did away with the longstanding concept of Wing/DO and MA and created various groups so there were promotable O-6 billets who could justify promotion to BG and ultimately Wing/CC.  We did this with the knowledge we would be getting smaller as a service, although I doubt we knew how much smaller.  As we began to downsize and as much as we resisted eventually we ran out of Captains to RIF and ended up getting rid of O-6s and losing some of the O-7 billets they had worked so hard to justify.  So, we ended up going back to O-6 Wing Commanders, with a few high-vis and notable exceptions, but we retained all the Groups that had been created.
Somewhere along the line the AF came up with the belief that subordinate Commanders could only work for superior Commanders, unlike how it had been before we ran out of uniforms to change and began changing the wing organizational structure.  I imagine it was about the same time we came out with the “Commander Badge” that mimicked what the USN had.
As we move to this new “no Groups” concept – it will, I believe, create a real span of control issue for the Wing Commander.  What is their role now?  Do they focus on the air base and its infrastructure or do they spend their days in arbitration as the various squadrons compete for attention and endorsement?  His or her ability to actually know who a good commander is and who is toxic will be further masked as the squadron’s become more independent in their ability to disregard the wing staff, and the Wing Commander has to manage the Air Base as a whole.
The question then becomes does that squadron commander have all the resources necessary to accomplish their mission?  Will they “own” the aircraft, control the maintenance and have the logistics infrastructure necessary or will they have to negotiate for them with peer squadron commanders who have perhaps conflicting priorities?  When those inevitable conflicts arise will the Wing/CC be forced into the role of arbitrator?
Maybe this all isn’t a big deal, but as long as the exodus of officers of all ranks continues the number of qualified senior officers will dwindle and perhaps this is just a response to shrinking pyramid of qualified personnel.

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