Foundation Forum
General Michael J. Dugan, USAF (Ret)
Former, U.S. Air Force Chief of Staff
AFA Air Warfare Symposium (Orlando, FL)
February 5, 1999
"Forgotten,
But Not Gone…Thinking About Air & Space Power"
I would thank my long and deep professional friend, John Shaud, for
the gracious introduction. When I showed up at West Point in 1954 and
was assigned to I-2, John Shaud had been assigned to I-2 two years ahead
of me, and he has been one of my mentors, one of my leaders, one of my
role models, and one of my highly respected associates ever since. Thank
you for your very gracious remarks, and thanks, too, to all the members
of the Air Force Association and friends that are here.
The last time I was on a formal AFA agenda was the convention in
1990, and before I got to the podium, I was rudely interrupted by a
couple of my former acquaintances from Washington, so I'm pleased to be
here this time.
And while my thoughts on air power have matured somewhat, the vector
is still pretty constant, and I'd like to talk to you about a couple of
things that I see from a ten-year-old perspective.
How many of you are members of USAA? How many buy your insurance from
USAA? Do you remember the annual report that came out in '91? It had a
fold-out cover so there were three panels. It had a very beige tint to
it. There were tens of thousands of largely infantrymen walking west in
the desert. It was a great picture.
The title on that picture could, and should have been, "Air and
Space Superiority." And I put that in contrast to the picture
called, "The Highway of Death," which was available in various
publications back in that time frame. That picture, "The Highway of
Death," and Khafji, is in the January 1999 issue of Air Force
Magazine. "The Highway of Death" and the Khafji picture
should have a title called, "Air and Space Inferiority."
We're a group here, the Air Force Association, whose mission in life
is to proclaim and celebrate air and space power, and we need to
remember, and we need to tell stories like that in public. We need to
encourage our friends and neighbors to go see "Saving Private
Ryan."
"Saving Private Ryan" is a great story about air power.
It's the story about the absence of air power in many cases, but it's a
great example of what happens when air power is not available, and
there's a couple of seconds that shows what happens when it is.
Let me move on to what I'm supposed to talk about, which is not
related to what the program says I'm supposed to talk about. I'm
supposed to talk about global engagement operations with 21st
century aerospace forces.
This is a different Air Force than John Shaud and I were in. I
remember the first chart that Mike Ryan put up yesterday that shows the
Air Force Program and the trend and the vector on the Air Force Program.
I came into the United States Air Force in 1958: 1958 was the last
year that the Air Force did not have enough money to buy fuel to fly out
its program the last month or two of the fiscal year. It was the
Eisenhower Administration. We were into more bang for the buck, we were
into trying to balance the budget, and a number of things disruptive to
military forces, similar to what's going on today, were going on.
In any event, from '58 until when I left the Air Force, the vector
was just the opposite from what Mike Ryan showed you yesterday. The
vector was so much in the opposite direction that when commanders heard
a complaint from the troops, and said, "We're going to fix the dorm
next year," they could be assured they were going to be able to fix
it. Now it's entirely different -- and I'm not walking in the shoes of
the people that are there today -- and there's a lot of things that I'm
missing.
The vector was very healthy with the exception of a little dip when
President Carter was president and another in '86-'87 as the programs
leveled off and started to decline. As a matter of fact, John Shaud
mentioned that I was Air Force PR for a while. It was 1987. We were
working on the Six Year Defense Program. I guess that's '89 to '94.
In 1987, I had led a team that took $100 billion out of the Air Force
Program, and I got not one letter, or one phone call from any of the
major commanders around the countryside, or any of their vice
commanders, or any of the people in the middle of the staff -- $100
billion, at the level where we were at the time, was not an issue. And
they were not bashful men, Duane Cassady Pete Piotrowski, Bob Russ, that
mix of individuals. This is a different Air Force, and there's a lot of
different problems that guys with 10-year-old information are not up to.
I'm going to talk about the 21st century Air Force. I'm
not going to spend a lot of time on global engagement operations. I'm
not because the half-life of global engagement operations is not very
many months. The next administration, whatever it is, is likely not to
pick on engagement as its foreign policy buzz word, and so global
engagement operations is on the right path. It's being handled well by a
group of people that understands it and can manage it well.
Let me talk a nickel's worth about the 21st century
aerospace force. One of our very successful industrial partners, in
speaking of business organizations attempting to deal with a myriad of
problems that they face, claims that -- and I quote -- "The single
biggest problem dealing with today's environment, the single biggest
problem, is staying with your previously successful business model one
year too long." The leadership challenge in a big organization is
getting out and keeping out in front.
So how should we think about the 21st century aerospace
power in that light? Well, today the United States, as a nation, stands,
flies, or orbits, in some regards, as the only aerospace power in the
world. Yours is the only air force thinking about global engagement
operations. In terms of the breadth and depth and the scope of its
capabilities, there are no peers as we enter the 21st
century.
And this is, I assert, an invaluable position for the United States
to hold. It is a position for the United States to keep or lose as a
matter of choice. No nation will seize this position from the United
States. We can only lose it by policy choices, as the label says, made
in the U.S.A. No nation will drive the United States from its position
of aerospace preeminence in the lifetime of anyone in this room. The
only way for us to be surpassed is through ill-advised policy,
ill-considered options, careless decisions, and half-baked and
short-range thinking about air and space power.
Having said that, it's also my view that the golden age of air and
space power has not yet arrived. We're only 95 years and a couple of
weeks into the air age, and less than half that into the space age. The
conceptual, technical, and operational progress that each of you has
witnessed in your lifetime is extraordinary, and the potential for
further development is virtually unlimited -- virtually unlimited.
The limits in my view -- and there are some -- are primarily
intellectual limits. They're not primarily economic, programmatic,
political, or budgetary. The real limits on further progress in the
development of aerospace power will be imposed and intensified by the
failure of our thinking, and they will be expanded and broadened by the
quality of our thinking, by hard, careful, creative, global, and
non-parochial thinking.
I've long believed that air power, space power, and now aerospace
power, are more about thinking and about ideas than they are about
technology or hardware or systems or platforms or programs. Aerospace
power is a state of mind.
Aerospace power is about nontraditional applications of military and,
yes, naval power to the problems of national security. Traditional
applications of military power are largely linear, sequential, frontal,
indirect, input-oriented, ponderous in deployment, costly in employment,
self-sacrificing, and based on attrition, brute force attrition. That's
an echo of what I heard somebody say yesterday, brute force attrition.
We're not into brute force.
Airmen have been willing to seek out and accept new ways to achieve
military and political objectives in nontraditional ways, to perform old
tasks and to conceive of new tasks in the pursuit of the national
interest.
The new ways depend on a willingness to pursue not only lessons from
history, but also new scientific discoveries, and to accept the
consequences of rigorous scientific and historical analyses. In some
cases, the consequences led to new operational methods or new analytical
tools, or new uses of knowledge, such as information warfare. In some
cases, the consequences led to engineering applications that flow from
scientific discovery, a term we frequently call "new
technology." Technology, operational methods, analytical tools,
strategic planning, information processing, and decision-making are each
intellectual undertakings. They do not depend on brute force. They
depend on careful thinking.
Development of aerospace power has not been easy. The reality of
world events, the pace of change, the evolution of technology demanded
new and difficult choices. Many times, the choices challenged the
conventional wisdom. They challenged the conventional order.
Conventional wisdom is not known for pushing the limits. Conventional
wisdom is not known for advancing the flow of history. Conventional
wisdom is not known for promoting the kinds of progress that you've
witnessed in air and space in your lifetime. Conventional wisdom is
known for promoting the status quo, for protecting rice bowls, for
upholding traditional cultures. Conventional wisdom frequently supports
cherished professional preferences, and even job security interests.
And yet for air and space men and women, careful thinking, the logic
of national need, and the promise of improved capability for the nation
regularly, if not easily, won the day. Escort fighters, strategic
airlift, intercontinental ballistic missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles,
and air and space equivalence, each were embraced after careful thinking
and lively debate, because they offered significantly improved
capability, because they build a central capacity for the nation.
There's a wonderful book, a short paperback. It's out of print now,
but a determined individual could find it. It consists of a number of
essays about the introduction of new ideas and new technology in
business, industry, and the uniformed Services. Men, Machines, and
Modern Times was written by the distinguished naval historian,
Samuel Eliot Morrison. The book is worth a few minutes of your valuable
time if you're interested in some historical perspective on the
difficulty in getting large organizations or institutions to adapt to
modern times, to adopt the new business model. In my view it's
invaluable.
Railroads fought steel rails. Navies fought steam power and rifling
in their gun barrels. Steel companies fought the oxygen Bessemer
process. Armies fought rapid fire rifles. Ill-advised policy,
ill-considered options, careless decision-making, over-emphasis on near
term problems, and half-baked thinking regularly cost these institutions
one or two decades of reduced capability before they accept new ideas,
before they move on to new thinking, before they adopt the new business
model.
Several of you in this room have been abused in the past by the story
I'm about to tell, and those will be again, and some may be abused for
the first time, but I'm going to tell it anyway.
Over the years when I would meet people, particularly in a civilian
setting, one of the early questions that I'd get onto, "And what do
you do?" If I happened to meet an officer with experience in the
United States Army, invariably the answer would get down to, "I
served my country in the Army," and sometimes, "and I've
commanded a battalion," or a "company in combat."
And if I happened to run into a naval officer and asked the same
questions, I'd get a similar answer, and it would get down to
"served my country," sometimes at sea, sometimes ashore.
If I happened to ask an individual who'd been a Marine -- of course,
no people were Marines, they all are Marines forever -- I got a much
more extensive answer, but it always included the idea about service to
country and probably service to the Corps.
If I happened to ask a member of the United States Air Force,
particularly an individual whom we call an operator, the reply I got
turned early to hardware, "I'm a C-141 copilot," "I'm a
GLCM (Ground Launched Cruise Missile) -- do you remember GLCM? If you
remember a C-7, you should remember GLCM. "I'm an F-16-C Block
42-B, X, Q officer," "I'm a launch control officer."
Now the point of this story is many people in leadership -- and in
senior leadership tracks for the aerospace forces of this nation think
of themselves -- thought of themselves in my time -- in relationship to
their equipment. They thought of themselves, in many cases, as heavy
equipment operators, and it just irritated the hell out of them when I
told them that.
They had an equipment orientation, rather than a national or a
Service or an institutional orientation. Now they were very, very good
at what they did -- competent, professional, reliable, courageous. And I
continue to be thrilled to be in the company of valiant men and women of
the United States Air Force, heavy equipment operators or others, who
regularly accept the risks and rigors of service life. And global
engagement operations will be well managed and well effected by these
men and women.
They are very good at what they do, very good at the here and now, at
exploiting the capability inherent in the tools and equipment at their
disposal.
Their linkages to the larger whole, to the longer term, however, were
frequently invisible, and sometimes they were invisible to heavy
equipment operators.
Even heavy equipment operators benefit from the vision and the
coherence and the integration provided by a skilled architect, and one
of the failures of my brief administration and one of the opportunities
I never got to work on -- but meant to -- was an effort to shape and
reshape the way air and space men and women view themselves, and then,
of course, to grow a few more skilled architects.
This is a cultural issue. It affects the whole institution, and over
a long period of time it will diminish the capacity of the institution
to think about and to prepare for the longer term future.
In some regards the Air Force did address this situation. It had a
plan and a program and a place to do longer range and deeper thinking
about air and space power. In some regards the Air Force functionalized
its responsibility for forward thinking. It organized around the
inclinations of heavy equipment operators. Of course, the organization
may have contributed, however, to the larger problem.
The Air Force created and used Systems Command to institutionalize
thinking about the future potential of air and space power. For some 40
years the Air Force depended on the linkages, the connections, the
relationships that Systems Command created between the requirements of
the operational Air Force and the skills and insights of industry,
academia, and laboratories, tinkerers and cranks, internal and external.
This is not criticism of General George Babbitt and of the men and
women of Air Force Materiel Command. It is an observation about the
decades of success taken for granted and an observation about human
nature.
Systems Command, in its heyday, had time horizons that were 15, 35,
and 50 years into the future. Sure, there were day-to-day developmental
efforts that required immediate attention, but the strategic focus of
the organization as a whole was on thinking about the future
exploitation of the aerospace medium for the conduct of more effective
military operations. Material resources and intellectual clout
sufficient to the task were organized and nurtured in this environment.
And one of the significant changes during the 1990s has been the
apparent decline in the Air Force institutional structure for thinking
about the future of air and space power, for thinking about vital
aerospace contributions to the nation as a whole.
Our ability 10 years ago, by the way, was not perfect, but it was
visible and it was vigorous. In my view, the impact of this change is
apparent, but that's another whole speech, and I'm not going to cover it
here today.
Well, what can we do about this situation? How do we start? Where are
the work-arounds, however inadequate, that may be available? One place
to start is on common ground. You Air Force Association members here
today are on common ground, or perhaps I should better say, we're in the
same orbit.
The Air Force Association provides a common orbit for thinking about
issues of mutual concern. The people that come to this and to other AFA
events have a common purpose. We, civilian and military, aspirant,
retired, and veteran, come together here because we mean to support the
preeminence of U.S. aerospace power.
In many cases in the past, and even more so today, long range
thinking about future capabilities, about advancing aerospace thinking,
comes from industry represented here today. But a curious thing happened
on the way to the 21st century. It, too, has had a disrupting
effect, and I believe a continued effect on the development of air and
space thinking.
A little over 20 years ago a new administration showed up in
Washington. In its zeal for good government, it set up a series of
strict new rules on ethical behavior for government employees.
Successive administrations have each worked hard at being holier than
the previous one, and so the rules today have become even more rigid.
One result of that, after all the stuff rolled downhill, as it
usually does, is that industry representatives are routinely being
dissed by many in the Air Force, military and civilian -- by many that
desperately need the knowledge, the experience, the expertise, the
historical perspective that can only come from industry.
Air Force officials in various grades act as though industry
representatives have a serious communicable disease. A willingness to
engage industry representatives in serious conversation and
collaborative thinking about the future has, I believe, diminished
rather than grown, and the United States is in danger of losing its grip
on one of its principal lifelines.
Industry, in many cases, is where the long-range thinkers have
roosted. Industry is the source of many of the innovations that heavy
equipment operators love to exploit. I did. Industry is an essential
element of aerospace power in the aerospace team. Industry is not the
enemy. American aerospace industry is the best ally some of us in this
room will ever have.
The military industrial complex has added to the United States
security immeasurably. Industry is not a substitute for a well-defined,
well-ordered process to develop operational requirements, but it can be
a helpful resource, a helpful source of broad thinking about the limits
of operational possibilities. And I think that the Air Force Association
has an opportunity and a responsibility to facilitate broader and deeper
communication on the future of aerospace power. And the Air Force has an
opportunity and responsibility for reaching out to industry and to
others to help grapple with the future.
Let me wind this up. I think that aerospace power is more about
thinking and ideas, than about technology or hardware or systems or
platforms. I do believe the golden age of air power and space power has
not yet arrived, and the potential for the future is virtually
unlimited. I believe that the heavy equipment operator syndrome can and
must be converted into a spirit of service. And I heard that from the
stage this morning, "All warriors are created equal." There's
been a shift in 10 years, and a very healthy shift, and I salute the Air
Force leadership for bringing this about.
I believe there's a disconnect between the state of Air Force
thinking and the promise of 21st century air power. I believe
the disconnect jeopardizes the continued pace of development in its
contribution to the nation. I believe the Air Force needs to more fully
exploit the available intellectual resources, wherever they are.
And so it seems to me that two courses of action suggest themselves.
One is a forward-looking, forward-thinking, broadly engaged Air Force
looking at mission inputs and operational outputs from the application
of air power. One is building on the notion of all warriors are created
equal, rather than a cult of the warrior kind of concept that I saw in
other places, in other times.
And secondly, a broad-based and determined effort to open and develop
communications broadly and continuously between users in industry and
all of those external resources to help think about the future. The
future is what the Air Force is all about and has been all about. The
future is about our children and our grandchildren, and aerospace power
has an unlimited ability to influence that for the best.
I'm honored to be with you. Thank you very much for the invitation. I
await your questions.
Gen. Shaud: Sir, a lot of these questions do, in fact, relate
to the future, and in terms of current problems.
The first one: are our current retention problems tied to the fact
that we tend to associate ourselves with our equipment rather than our
Air Force? Is there confusion with our loyalties?
Gen. Dugan: You know, the short and honest answer to that is,
I don't know, and any answer I'd have for you would be 10 years old and
out of date. I do think that equipment loyalty is short term and easier
to lose focus on when the demands of service life become difficult. And
I do believe that there is a better and longer, more vibrant and more
persistent loyalty to the organization, to the institution, to the
nation when one builds on a different set of values, values of service.
Now to the extent to which impacts are today, I'm behind. I heard
some people that are not behind, that have a good finger on that pulse,
and I'm glad that they're in charge.
Gen. Shaud: The next question: it is often said that we only
learn from failures. What should we have learned from our successes in
the Gulf War concerning joint operations, and have we seized those
successes?
Gen. Dugan: I think that it's much easier to learn from
successes. I remember somebody, years ago, telling me that if you're
going to get to be a commander, what you want to do is you want to
inherit one of these organizations, a squadron, wing, whatever, that's
really down in the dumps and, you know, you can rebuild it and you can
be a hero. I tried one or two of those, and I tried one or two that I
inherited that were top notch organizations that were ready to be
polished. I assure you that it is a lot more fun for the troops, it's a
lot more productive for the country, it's a lot less painful for the
commander to take one of those good ones and polish it and continue to
work on successes.
I think we have learned, and I think airmen that I know have worked
hard at learning from successes in the Gulf War. I think that one of the
areas that we haven't exploited that is under-developed is continuously
telling our story in public.
The debates about priorities among important national needs, the
debates about the contributions of air power in comparison with other
elements of national security power, are best presented in public. They
are certainly not best argued in the Pentagon. The votes don't come out
in the Pentagon, no matter how good your argument is. And the votes in
Congress come out and reflect the touch and the tone and the feeling in
the country, and we need to work very hard and, in my view, harder, at
telling our story more broadly in public.
When the next big dust-up comes, the American people are going to
expect the United States Air Force to be every bit as good and
successful as it was in the desert, and they will be seriously
disappointed if we can't deliver that. It may not affect it the way the
budget is cut up these days, it may not affect it the way resource
allocation debates are going, but the man and woman on the street have
high expectations of what the U.S. Air Force will do in the future.
Gen. Shaud: One of the AEF concepts is reach-back, and we will
reach back to something you and I lived through called Goldwater-Nichols,
that seems to have sustained itself. The question is this: Goldwater-Nichols
dramatically changed the roles and responsibilities and authority in DoD.
From your perspective, what has evolved from this change, for better or
for worse?
Gen. Dugan: I remember meeting Admiral Ike Kidd in the middle
of the 70's. Ike Kidd was a senior naval officer, a full admiral. His
father had been an admiral before him. His father won the Medal of Honor
at Pearl Harbor and, in fact, was killed in the attack.
At any rate, Ike Kidd was the Commander-in-Chief of Atlantic --
whatever we called it in those days. And I don't think Ike Kidd ever
knew that he didn't have all the authority he knew he needed to be CINC
and to make Atlantic Command function however it needed to be
functioning to pursue all the missions that he had.
And as I've watched the evolution of Goldwater-Nichols activity --
and I watched it at close-hand the first couple of years. Immediately,
the Service staffs in the Pentagon were cut out of the joint planning
environment almost entirely. General Ryan is current on what's happening
today, but my sensing of the activity of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is
that the Joint Staff, the great Joint Staff does all the analysis that
in the past was done by each of the Services and the Joint Staff, and
then there was a broad debate. There was a huge debate, but there ought
to be debates on important issues. The problem was that we debated on
whether the paper was going to say "happy" or
"glad," and Goldwater-Nichols was good at eliminating how we
wrote up the decision.
It was not good at how we restructured the forces, because in many
cases, in my view, we have made the function of joint activities less
joint. Only the people that are on the joint staffs are involved in
joint planning activities these days. I think that that has diminished
our perspective, it has diminished the capacity of the nation, it has
diminished the number of people with an investment in whatever the
answer is. I hope that we don't have to live through a disaster before
we relook at Goldwater-Nichols and look at Service interactions in
significant joint planning activities.
Gen. Shaud: Mike, the last question. From the phrase coined
today, "All warriors are created equal," what key
characteristics would you look for in selecting the right next
generation of aerospace leaders?
Gen. Dugan: One thing that I think that we could have done to
face the flaws that I put up with 10 years ago is to make full members
of the team those individuals who bring intellectual power to our
debate. So I heard General Jumper say, he can't use the words
"intelligence puke" anymore, and that's a move in the right
direction. "All warriors are created equal" is a wonderful
war-fighting concept. It makes everybody play on the team.
I was in the Tactical Air Command in the '70s and '80s, and I worked
for General Bill Creech. For some 20 years the Air Force and Tactical
Air Command, at the time, had never flown out the flying hour program.
At the end of the year, we took the money that was left over and paved
the parking lots.
We did things that needed to be done, but we didn't get that
systematic training in that affected the air crews, that affected the
maintenance crews, that affected the bomb loaders, that affected the
whole system back to the depots that kept us at a high level of
readiness and a high pace of training activity.
And General Creech thought about that for a couple of months -- it
might have been a year -- and he decided that, well, each of you is
supposed to fly out your flying hour program, and I tell you what, “if
you fly it out by the end of the month, give the troops the last day of
the month off.” Now every two-striper on the base, not just on the
flight line, understood the difference between having Friday off or
working Friday and Saturday and Sunday at the end of the month to get
the flying hour program done.
And magically, within essentially a couple of months, with no
increase in resources, no new spare parts, no different programatics or
budgetary impacts, the troops all pulled together because they
understood the incentives of being on the same team, and they understood
the fact that all warriors are created equal.
We need to really give emphasis to this idea that everybody on the
team counts. Michael Jordan would not be a hero without the rest of the
team. There are no second rate citizens. I loved flying jet fighter
airplanes. I loved the opportunity to go supersonic. That did not make
me in any regard think that I was better, smarter, a more deserving
individual, it just made me work harder because I was blessed with being
a marvelous heavy equipment operator.
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