Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force

2. Air Force Independence and Air Force Culture

27 2 Air Force Independence and Air Force Culture The u.S. Air Force was born in a cauldron of organizational infighting. As detailed in later chapters, the rAF and uSAF fought bitter battles for independence against their parent services. This chapter studies the organizational culture that emerged from that long struggle, especially in the uSAF. This culture helped create and sustain the three Clausewitzian misperceptions of airpower theory, misperceptions that persist and continue to distort American national security policy. This chapter begins with a brief discussion of organizational culture, followed by analysis of how airpower theory helps produce three critical misinterpretations (decisive effect, tyranny of technology, and piercing the fog of war) of the Clausewitzian understanding of war. The chapter ends with a discussion of how an independent air force matters for making national security policy. Organizational Culture Military organizations are not simply machines that can be wound up, then let loose on some particular problem. rather, like any other large bureaucracy, they develop procedures for handling particular kinds of problems, and the people within them come to adopt particular attitudes about the world. These attitudes and approaches to problem solving constitute organizational culture.1 organizational culture infuses everything that a military organization does, from war planning to procurement lobbying to recruitment to relations with other bureaucracies. organi- 28 Grounded zational cultures are not static, but they do exhibit long-term continuity. organizational culture affects how a military bureaucracy thinks about and prepares for the future and also characterizes its response to crises. In short, the behavior of military branches cannot be fully understood without an appreciation of organizational culture.2 Military culture stems from multiple sources. national strategic culture , or the lens through which a particular nation understands goals, interests, and threats, affects but does not constitute military culture, through complicated connections dependent on the structure of society.3 For example, the Austro-Hungarian Army found itself riven with ethnic conflict during World War I, while many Arab armies have suffered from class conflict.4 Colin Gray divides strategic culture broadly between “continentalist ” and “maritime” states, with implications for how each handles its military organizations.5 Many military organizations have long histories that help constitute their culture and affect their behavior. other organizations effectively “borrow” culture from historical antecedents or competitors.6 Military organizations learn to approach and identify problems in particular, historically situated ways. Frames help an organization identify and develop answers to problems in their environment. organizational frames include what counts as a problem, how problems are represented, the strategies to be used to solve those problems, and the constraints and requirements placed on possible solutions. As those in organizations engage in problem solving, they allocate organizational attention and resources to develop and draw on expertise inside and outside the organization, in general building organizational capacity to solve certain problems but not others.7 Frames both focus and narrow an organization’s attention. The same cultural frame that makes a military organization effective can also blind it to internal and external problems. Independence and Air Force Culture How does the u.S. Air Force view war, and how did those views come about? every military organization, and indeed every bureaucratic organization , has a culture that characterizes its understanding of and ap- Air Force Independence and Air Force Culture 29 proach to its environment. david Johnson describes the role of doctrine and organizational culture as • prescribing the shared worldview and values as well as the “proper ” methods, tools, techniques, and approaches to problem solving within and among the services; • providing a way in which the services view themselves; • governing how the services deal with each other and with other governmental and nongovernmental agencies; • prescribing the questions and the answers that are considered acceptable within the institution or school of thought covered by the paradigm.8 The organizational culture of the uSAF emerged from larger u.S. military culture but also from its own particular history. The uSAF shares some cultural understandings with other u.S. military services (a commitment to civilian supremacy, for example), some with all military organizations (a hierarchical distribution of authority within the organization ), and some just with other air forces (a belief in the efficacy of airpower to solve military problems). The uSAF has three distinct and enduring cultural tendencies that create political and military problems for the united States. The first is the belief in the uniquely decisive effect of...