The Late Cold War Renaissance in Airpower Thought

As is so often the case following an unsuccessful war, U. S. military lead­ers entered the post-Vietnam era with a strong conviction that they needed to reform their institutions. Morale in the U. S. Army, in particular, was seriously damaged, having fought “a series of battles that were, at best, tactical stale­mates,” and having sunk into “a deep malaise brought about by an unpopu­lar war, an inequitable draft system, a progressive unraveling of small-unit discipline, and a severe questioning of the competence and integrity of its senior leaders.”51 Air Force leaders were also deeply disturbed by the Viet­nam experience. While many of them clung to the belief that Linebacker II demonstrated that the United States could have won the war had President Johnson allowed the Air Force to conduct an intense bombardment of the 94 targets it proposed in the very beginning, others, particularly those in TAC where most of the war’s operational lessons had been learned, were less san­guine that strategic bombing would be the principal war-winning element of all future conflicts.52 But SAC and the bomber pilots still dominated the Air Force. As a result, Air Force doctrine throughout the remainder of the 1970s blandly sought to relate the role of airpower “more directly to national pol­icy and national security strategy,” suggesting that the independent, strategic application of airpower remained the paramount conceptual model in official U. S. Air Force thinking.53

It should not surprise that, as the U. S. Army turned its attention from the jungles of Southeast Asia to the central challenge of defending Western Europe from attack by a large, mechanized, and heavily-armored Soviet Army, it would find U. S. Air Force TAC to be a willing and necessary partner in its doc­trinal reforms. Still the bastard son of a SAC-dominated Air Force, TAC had also refocused on the challenges of fighting a war in Europe. During the Viet­nam War the Army and TAC had relearned the World War II lesson that they needed to cooperate with each other to be effective. So, following a series of exploratory meetings in late 1973, TAC and the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) opened a joint office to study integration issues—the Directorate of Air-Land Force Application (ALFA)—at Langley Air Force Base, Virginia, in July 1975.54 It marked the beginning of a resurgence of thought about the use of airpower at the operational level of war.

During the next 15 years, the TAC-TRADOC relationship produced doc­trinal innovations in three phases. In the first, running until 1979, the part­ners worked out ways in which airpower would integrate with ground forces in support of the Army’s newly developed doctrine of Active Defense. However, as Army officers studied the new concept, they began to worry that it was too defensively oriented. Given the successive waves of Soviet formations that could be thrown at North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces, it would only be a matter of time before the defenders were overrun.55 Therefore, in the sec­ond phase of doctrine development starting about 1980, Army planners began considering ways to extend the battlefield to engage second – and third-eche­lon Soviet forces before they could be brought to bear. As the primary means available for delivering firepower in the deep battle area would be airpower, this required developing procedures to closely coordinate air interdiction strikes with those from Army deep fire assets, such as Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS), and with closer fires from artillery and Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS), while also providing CAS to U. S. and Allied troops in con­tact with Soviet forces. The Army called the new concept “AirLand Battle Doc­trine.” Further development over the next several years led to the third phase of innovation emerging in the mid-1980s: the evolution of AirLand Battle Doc­trine into an offensive, deep-battle concept emphasizing close integration of air – power with high-speed ground maneuver operations.56

While all of this was happening, the U. S. Air Force was undergoing a transition in leadership—fighter pilots were beginning to outnumber bomber pilots in the highest ranks of the service. Due to the fact that more fighter pilots had seen combat in Korea and Vietnam than had bomber pilots, the majority of rated officers favored by promotion boards in succeeding years hailed from the tactical air forces. By the 1960s the effects of these pressures were beginning to be felt in the lower general officer ranks, and by the 1970s a growing num­ber of three – and four-star generals had come from fighter cockpits. Yet even as late as when the ALFA stood up in 1975, “bomber generals still outnumbered fighter generals on the Air Staff by two to one, and the major (four-star) com­mand positions by four to three.”57 But that ratio was finally about to change. By 1982, fighter generals outnumbered bomber generals in the major com­mands and no bomber generals remained in Air Staff positions. The transi­tion culminated that year when a fighter pilot, General Charles A. Gabriel, was appointed Air Force Chief of Staff.58