Meanwhile, two doors down…

Two buildings down from my workplace this morning, Secretary of Defense Gates made some waves during an address to students from some of the schools around our “Academic Circle” (Maxwell AFB hosts the professional military schools that AF members must attend at various points in their careers).

Some points from his speech this morning (full text):

My concern is that our services are still not moving aggressively in wartime to provide resources needed now on the battlefield. I’ve been wrestling for months to get more intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets into the theater.

Because people were stuck in old ways of doing business, it’s been like pulling teeth.

While we’ve doubled this capability in recent months, it is still not good enough.

He mentions Col John Boyd, an officer who apparently rocked the Air Force quite a bit in his day, and developed many military strategic concepts that we still use today. Col Boyd made some remarks that Secretary Gates summarized:

Boyd would say — and I quote — “One day you will take a fork in the road, and you’re going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go. If you go one way, you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises, and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club, and you will get promoted and get good assignments. Or you can go the other way, and you can do something, something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself. If you decide to do something, you may not get promoted, and you may not get good assignments, and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors, but you won’t have to compromise yourself. To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That’s when you have to make a decision: to be or to do.”

For the kinds of challenges America faces and will face, the armed forces will need principled, creative, reform-minded leaders, men and women who, as Boyd put it, want to do something, not be somebody.

And he wrapped things up with another reference to John Boyd, and the spectacular success that the AF has had in fulfilling its mission to date:

No doubt such changes will be difficult for an organization that has been so successful for six decades. The last time a U.S. ground force was attacked from the sky was more than half a century ago, and the last Air Force jet lost to aerial combat was in Vietnam.

Such success is attributable in part to the ways airmen have pushed technology to its outer limits, but it is also attributable to maverick thinkers like John Boyd.

Now, what intrigues me is what the various news articles about this speech picked up on. Most of them reference Secretary Gates “bashing” the Air Force and that he wanted more UAV support for intelligence purposes – valid, but not exactly the keynote of the speech. However, in others, notably this article from Time, they miss the point entirely:

Gates made clear change won’t be easy for the Air Force, whose key victories, he suggested, happened long ago. “The last time a U.S. ground force was attacked from the sky was more than half a century ago,” he noted, “and the last Air Force jet lost to aerial combat was in Vietnam.”

Now how’s that for twisting around success into failure? The fact that the Air Force has such a distinguished record in maintaining air superiority – nay, air dominance (follow the links for distinctions on these terms) – is nothing but an outstanding success on its part. However, because we’ve been so successful, we have, in the words of some of the people I know, “become victim of our own success”. The second that ground troops started being fired upon by enemy air assets they’d start howling for more airpower presence… (I’m wondering if it’s going to take that occurrence for us to remember the importance of the Air Force’s role.)

Anyhow, it was interesting to hear some measured, but overall constructive, criticism of the Air Force from the Secretary of Defense. I’ve heard this before – heck, I’ve said some of it before – but you get the sense that the highest levels of the organization must be taking their guidance from some completely different set of information, from the kind of things that they emphasize. It’s good to hear that they’ve actually got their heads on straight, and they’re trying to resolve some of the problems that large organizations are prone to. Five years of steady warfare have streamlined the Army and Marines to an extent we’re not seeing yet in the Air Force, mainly because our wartime role tends to require less time in the thick of battle… but I’m really seeing the signs of burgeoning change, kick and scream as the organization may in the midst of the process!