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settled on a Combat Brigade, but that could be outdated.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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