Why the Air Force Needs Sam Damon

The Air Force has tried for years to instill a stronger "warrior ethos" in its Airmen. It has instituted longer basic training, a harder physical fitness test, combat "dining ins", and most recently an "Airman's Creed" (which I have strong opinions about, but which I will save for another day). Nothing has really seemed to stick; the Air Force continues to search for ways to instill the warrior ethos. I would like to propose a thesis. The Air Force has struggled to instill a warrior ethos because it does not train warriors; it trains narrowly-focused airpower specialists.

I enjoy browsing reading lists published by the military, because they tell you a lot about what each service believes institutionally, and what the services want their soldiers, sailors or airmen to believe. When you compare the reading lists from the Chief of Staff of the Army and the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, strong cultural distinctions emerge. The Army Reading Program publishes an 18-page brochure with extensive lists broken down by rank. It includes books about military history from The Peloponnesian War to the present, leadership, strategy, and concepts of military officership. Until recently, it also included two works of fiction: "Once an Eagle" by Anton Myrer and "The Killer Angels" by Michael Shaara (I have no idea why these are no longer included). Two of my favorite lists come not from the Army itself, but from counterinsurgency blogs that are widely followed in the Army and Marines: Abu Muqawama and Small Wars Journal. You can tell some cutting-edge thinkers work on these lists, who know how to fight today's wars and who care about what soldiers read.

The Chief of Staff of the Air Force list, on the other hand, fits on a single page. This year it includes three biographies of airpower pioneers, three books on airpower employment, two books on contemporary foreign affairs, and four books on general military history. The intent of the program, according to the website, is "to help each of us become better, more effective advocates of air and space power."

The picture that emerges from these lists squares with my experience so far in the Air Force. Since its inception, the Air Force has defined itself against the Army. It firmly adheres to a historical narrative in which courageous airpower pioneers risked their careers and credibility to advocate airpower, which the majority of the Army "didn't get." In one war after another, airpower advocates had to fight with their sister services and with their civilian leadership to fight an air war "the right way." They finally succeeded in Desert Storm, showcasing the elegance and power of a strategic air campaign. While we must tailor our strategy and models to rapidly evolving threats, the essential tenets of airpower employment are now understood. Airmen must vigorously defend them to ground commanders who do not understand them, and who will try with all their might to dismantle strategic airpower. This is the narrative I was taught in every Professional Military Education (PME) course in the military. It's consistent with the criticism the Air Force leveled against FM3-24 after its publication, and it's consistent with the way the Air Force has approached warfighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.

There is a lot of truth to this narrative. Strategic airpower can be employed in ways far more powerful and creative than just Close Air Support, which is what the Army generally favors. Also, the Air Force has had to fight many battles to carve out a separate identity from the Army. With that said, I believe the Air Force has gone too far. It has divorced itself from pre-airpower military history and from the warrior culture of the Army and Marines. It has focused so intensively on airpower that it has excluded broader questions of strategy. For example, my five-volume Squadron Officer School curriculum includes a single article about Afghanistan. It is a glowing appraisal of airpower's decisive role in the battle for Mazar-e-Sharif. True, this was an operational victory, and the Air Force deserves credit for the vital role it played. But the curriculum gives no discussion to broader strategic questions in Afghanistan. What was our strategy for Afghanistan in 2001? What did we plan to do with the country after the Northern Alliance defeated the Taliban? When I read Bob Woodward's account of the early war planning, I found the absence of clear strategy chilling. Today, our deficit of strategic planning in Afghanistan has caught up to us. It is vital that our next generation of military officers understands these concepts, but Air Force PME gives them no discussion, at least at junior levels--which is when it needs to begin.

The Air Force often complains that it is treated like a mere annex to land power. Air Force leaders leveled this critique at FM3-24, where airpower literally was relegated to a short appendix. If this is is the case, the Air Force largely has itself to blame. In the Army Combined Arms Center and in online think tanks like Small Wars Journal, Army leaders do not simply talk about "landpower"; they debate how to reintegrate Sunni fighters into the Iraqi Army, whether the Taliban can be negotiated with, and how to better integrate Provincial Reconstruction Teams into our military operations in Afghanistan. The Air Force mostly sat out of counterinsurgency discussions until 2007. The word "counterinsurgency" appears in my 800+ page Squadron Officer School correspondence curriculum precisely one time, and I never heard the word at the in-residence school a year ago. A friend of mine just attended the school this summer, and he said the academics are not much better now. Yes, our service exists to employ air and space power. That should be our focus. But officers of any service are entrusted with fighting and winning the nation's wars, which means every one of them--whether they walk the streets of Baghdad, command an Aircraft Carrier, or strap into an F-22--need to understand War in its entirety.

If Air Force PME is short on broader issues of strategy, it could also do better on leadership and the warrior ethos. Sam Damon and Courtney Massengale--the protagonist and antagonist of "One an Eagle"--are household names in the Army, grand archetypes of good and bad officership. "Once an Eagle" is one of the few books I can honestly say changed my life, but most people in the Air Force have never heard of it. Few leaders bother to point our young airmen that direction. The Air Force has plenty of its own leaders who deserve our study and admiration, but it does not need to limit itself. There is nothing wrong with studying leadership in land warfare as well. We do ourselves no favors by excluding centuries of military history because they don't include airplanes.

I'm a fan of Jointness. Period. I'm proud to serve in the Air Force, but I want to make it better, and I want to see Air Force leaders further integrated into the joint team. To do that, we need to change our service culture, by altering the narrative we use to understand our own history. We should not define ourselves against the Army. We're past that now. We exist as an established, separate service. We should have the confidence to fight alongside our ground-pounding brethren as peers. A little Sam Damon might help us.