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254 22. Messing with Success The Reorganization of Air Mobility Forces after the Gulf War Having ascended to the position of chief of staff in October 1990, General Merrill A. McPeak disassembled the U.S. Air Force and put it back together in unfamiliar ways. To be sure, he was not acting on a whim. The ongoing dissolution of the Soviet Union had created expectations of major changes in U.S. defense policies. The current National Security Strategy of the United States (March 1990) and an air force white paper Global Reach—Global Power (June 1990) set the stage for significant changes in strategy and force structure in response to unfolding events.1 But General McPeak came to his new position with strong views on how air force reorganization should proceed.2 So following discussions with senior air force commanders, he deactivated the Air Force’s core commands—the Strategic Air Command (SAC), the Tactical Air Command (TAC), and the Military Airlift Command (MAC)—on June 1, 1992. He redistributed their people and resources between two new organizations, the Air Combat Command (ACC) and the Air Mobility Command (AMC). ACC got everything that fired or directly supported the firing of weapons: fighters, bombers, ballistic missiles, warning and control aircraft, and the like. AMC got mobility aircraft: long-range transports and all but a few of the Air Force’s tankers. In a reversal of decisions made in the 1970s, C-130s based in the continental United States (CONUS) went into ACC, while those assigned to overseas theaters fell under the theater air forces (TAFs). To say that McPeak’s reforms were controversial would be an understatement . The chief and his supporters saw these changes as logical responses to changing strategic circumstances, tightening budgets, and a matured understanding of airpower.3 For many others, the chief’s action seemed a drastic treatment of an air force structure that had held the Soviet empire at bay for forty years and that had performed so brilliantly during the Gulf War. Some saw the chief’s actions as “messing with success” or maybe just a bald power grab on behalf of the “fighter mafia.” In a pointed and lengthy spoof of McPeak’s vision, an anonymous document circulated the halls of the Pentagon in the summer of 1991 that argued that the whole thing was a plot to increase the pro- 255 Messing with Success motion opportunities of the “meat eaters” (fighter pilots) at the expense of the “herbivores” (everyone else).4 By 1993 the perceptions of many in the Air Force that the new setup disproportionately favored fighter pilots had gained national attention.5 In a vein much more supportive of McPeak, General Russell Dougherty , a former SAC commander, nevertheless captured the tension of the moment in a speech in which he simultaneously advised his air force listeners, “Don’t be grit in the Chief’s machinery” and recounted the bravura of his recently promoted fighter pilot son. On hearing his dad’s advice to learn a little humility , the new lieutenant colonel Dougherty responded, “Dad, you were a bomber and tanker pilot all your life . . . so you’ve got an awful lot to be modest about! But sitting here where I am . . . at the top rung of the fighter pilot ladder . . . it’s hard to be modest when you’re at the top of the world!”6 But whether it was the product of megalomania or a reasoned accommodation of changing realities , McPeak’s plan would be the basis of air force policy, operations, and debate for years to come. Smoke and Mirrors In the realm of air mobility, particularly of airlift, there was little substantive innovation in the reorganization of the Air Force in 1992. Moving tankers from SAC to AMC amounted to shifting their logistics, training, and scheduling from one “big-aircraft” command to another. Even the assignment of tanker squadrons directly to overseas TAFs, like United States Air Forces in Europe (USAFE) and Pacific Air Forces (PACAF), merely changed the chain of command of units that were present in those theaters already. Similarly, giving direct control of theater-assigned airlift squadrons back to the TAFs was little more than returning to patterns of command and control in place before the consolidation of airlift forces in the mid-1970s. In those years, the Air Force and its precursors had assigned theater airlift to tactical air forces and strategic airlift to commands providing common-user air transport services. But the circumstances...

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