The Air Force, once again, is leaving the field of strategic discourse to others

Yesterday I mentioned
that I'd heard that the Air Force had decided to close its Strategic Studies Quarterly. Here is a comment on the possible
institutional implications of that decision.

By "Alejandro Estéban Teixeira Castillo"

Best Defense guest PME columnist

In times of relative fiscal austerity, organizations are
likely to focus on their core competencies, those tasks and processes that
define their essence. The American military services have been directed to
reduce their projected budgets substantially over the next decade and they, in
turn, have been determining where funds have been allocated for nonessential
tasks. The USMC, for instance, has determined
that it will cut five of its 88 general officer positions and that these
billets will be those on the Joint Staff.

As the Services prepare for a peacetime operations tempo,
resting, resetting, and renewing their forces for the next conflict, they ought
to devote more resources to thinking
about how to more effectively and efficiently achieve the political goals of
the nation. While certainly commanders' action groups (CAGs), the Service
staffs, and the Joint Staff will focus on vision statements and meeting budget
caps, they will likely rely on the musings of external thinkers to provide
arguments and justifications for their decisions. But where do these ideas come
from?

One of the key venues for stimulating thought and presenting
arguments to the professional community is the professional journals of the
services. The USAF's Air University started this genre when it published its Review in 1947, coinciding with the
founding of the USAF as an independent service. As General
Muir S. Fairchild's memorandum establishing the Review demonstrated, service leaders at the time realized that a
professional journal was essential to shaping the debate about the profession
of arms so as to make room for air-centric thinking. The Naval War College
followed suit in 1948 with its own Review,
perhaps realizing that strategic thought needed to be encouraged at a time when
nuclear weapons and fiscal austerity threatened the service's budget. The U.S.
Army was a latecomer to this genre, having suffered through being downgraded to
a supporting element of national strategy with President Eisenhower's policy of
Massive Retaliation and the indignities of the loss in Vietnam. It began
publishing Parameters in 1971 so as
to help reinvigorate the professionalism of its force and to shape strategic
thinking amongst the defense establishment. In doing so, it adopted a more
strategic tone than either the Air
University Review of the Naval War
College Review, and quickly set the standard for the profession. [[BREAK]]

On its fortieth anniversary, the USAF unceremoniously
cancelled the Air University Review
and its content was redirected toward the tactically- and
operationally-oriented Airpower Journal
(today Air and Space Power Journal). The
faculty of the schools at Air University regretted this decision, as it left
the field of publishing strategic thought to the Army and Navy. This had a
significant effect on strategic discourse within the profession of arms for a
generation -- to the Air Force's detriment.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, airpower demonstrated its
strategic potential in Operation Desert Storm, Operations Northern and Southern
Watch, Operation Deliberate Force, Operation Allied Force, and Operation
Enduring Freedom. In each of these, the USAF carried the primary burden of
achieving the nation's objectives: ejecting Iraq's forces from Kuwait,
deterring Saddam Hussein from massing his forces at the border of his southern
neighbors, and supporting indigenous and irregular ground forces as they seized
territory with an extremely light American ground force footprint in the
Balkans and Afghanistan. This period was the culmination of all of the USAF's
dreams of demonstrating an independent, strategic impact in the service of the
nation's political objectives. Or so it could have argued.

But it did not because it lacked the venue to make its case.
Where were these conflicts analyzed and the case for airpower made?

In Foreign Affairs,
the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations that sets the conventional
wisdom for the foreign policy establishment, Eliot Cohen warned against the
seductive "mystique"
of airpower, with its promise of cheap and easy victory. Robert Pape,
formerly of the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, likewise argued that
"the
true worth of airpower" was its ability to support ground forces on the
battlefield. He also made this argument in his 1996 Cornell University Press
book Bombing
to Win.

In International
Security, a publication of MIT Press and the primary academic journal in
the field of strategic studies, analysts such as Steve Biddle argued that the
future of warfare still required closing with the enemy on the ground and that
this was beyond airpower's capabilities. RAND's Daniel Byman and Matthew Waxman
argued in "Kosovo
and the Great Airpower Debate" that all components mattered, especially in
Kosovo, and that focusing on only one instrument of military power would skew
the analysis in an era of joint operations. In the same issue, MIT's Barry
Posen argued that
Milosevic's decision calculus was conditioned by the air campaign, but the
proximate cause of his decision to cede the most valuable and sacred part of
Serb sovereign territory was the withdrawal of Russian diplomatic support and
the looming threat that NATO might begin to debate preparations to plan adding
a ground aspect to its coercive campaign within a few month's time.

To its credit, Parameters
did address airpower topics and did publish the work of Air Force school
faculty during this period. Current Air War College Dean Mark Conversino
critiqued Bob Pape's argument in Bombing to Win that "strategic bombing
doesn't matter" in his 1997 article, "The
Changed Nature of Strategic Air Attack." Air War College professor Jeffrey
Record called "Operation Allied Force: Yet Another Wake-Up Call for the Army" in the Winter 1999-2000 issue and argued that it "shed a harsh
spotlight on the Army's intellectual and structural inadequacy in the post-Cold
War international security environment." In his 2002 "Collapsed
Countries, Casualty Dread, and the New American Way of War," Record argued
that "the war in
Afghanistan also shows that modern airpower, under the right conditions,
can achieve decisive strategic effects even against the kind of irregular,
pre-industrial enemy once thought unbreakable by air attack."

These arguments were routinely leavened by those that downplayed
airpower's efficacy, however. Former Air
University Review editor Earl Tilford argued in his "Operation Allied Force and the Role of Air Power" that
Allied Force "looks like a win, but a rather ugly one" given the amount of effort and
length of time that it took. Vincent Goulding's "From Chancellorsville to Kosovo, Forgetting the Art of War" put forth the argument that despite the strategic success of Allied
Force, "precision is insufficient" and combined arms was necessary in such
operations. William Hawkins echoed this argument in his "Imposing Peace: Total vs. Limited Wars, and the Need to Put Boots on the
Ground," and in his "What Not to Learn from Afghanistan."

After a decade of unprecedented and successful
air operations, when airpower had finally met the promise of its early
advocates -- from pickle-barrel accuracy to strategic effects -- the
conventional wisdom reflected at best cautious optimism about its efficacy. This
happened in part because the debate occurred as an away game for the Air Force,
depriving it the ability to take the initiative and shape the collective
strategic consciousness to its liking.

Without the Air
University Review to offer considered arguments about these operations, the
USAF allowed others in the defense establishment to establish the narrative
about airpower, about the value of what the service brought to the fight, about
the relevance of "flying, fighting, and winning in air, space, and cyberspace"
to the conflicts of the recent past, and ultimately found itself at the mercy
of those who "didn't get it." Thus when the Chief of Staff of the Air Force and
the Secretary of the Air Force attempted to make the case that certain
capabilities were vital to the security of the nation, to its ability to
project military power overseas, and to undertake expeditionary operations,
they found themselves fighting an uphill battle. The prevailing strategic
narrative had undervalued airpower and, even though they had the national
interest at heart, their arguments sounded parochial, service-centric, and
unconvincing. The environment of the Washington AOR had not been shaped;
indeed, it had been neglected for a generation.

It was in this environment that Strategic Studies Quarterly was founded. In its five years of
publication, it has addressed strategic issues of interest to the wider defense
establishment but, following the lead of the Naval War College Review, it has given attention to those issues
that particularly interest the USAF: airpower, nuclear deterrence,
cyberwarfare,
the rise of China,
space, regional
security in South
Asia and Africa,
and NATO. It
has also given space for Air Force leaders to present their service's views,
including the Secretary
of the Air Force, the Chief of Staff,
and component commanders.

Yet it has also followed the lead of Parameters in that it has not directly advocated any particular
point of view. The articles on nuclear deterrence for instance, have advocated
and criticized
reductions in nuclear forces. Those on China have argued that it is a rising peer competitor
and that it is a budding
partner for the United States. Those on cyberwarfare have debated
the possibility and value of offense, defense, and deterrence as the basis for
a strategy in this new domain. It has also addressed issues that are broader
interest to the professional community: the relevance of Clausewitz's On War, the value of intervention
to American
grand strategy, the
Weinberger-Powell Doctrine, the relation of international
relations theory to strategic thought, nation building
and counterinsurgency
in Afghanistan
and Iraq, terrorism, and "Don't Ask, Don't
Tell." By publishing quality arguments on topics of interest to the USAF and the defense community writ large but
not explicitly advocating a particular line, it has brought the USAF back to
the table to participate in the strategic dialogue within the profession with a
presence and credibility that it had lacked.

Yet, in Sept. 2011, Air Education and Training Command
decided to discontinue its publication. As with Air University Review before it, its contents will likely be
redirected to Air and Space Power Journal.
In a time of fiscal constraint, the Air Force will once again leave it to
others to shape the national dialogue on strategic matters, roles and missions,
and the problems facing the nation. The editors of Parameters, Naval War College
Review, Foreign Affairs, and
other journals will set the agenda, choose the topics of interest to them, and
put forth the arguments that will form the conventional wisdom. Sadly, the USAF
will be a second string team, its arguments always on the road looking for a
field on which to play, and relying on the good graces of these others to let
them have some play.

Another generation will likely pass before an Air Force
leader realizes that they could have been shaping the conventional wisdom for
years, rather than fighting it, when they press their case to other services,
civilian policy makers, legislators, and the American people. In the meantime,
the service will likely suffer.

"Alejandro Estéban Teixeira Castillo" is a pseudonym.