JOINT BASE CHARLESTON, S.C. –
Army Chief Warrant Office 5 John Robinson, United States Central Command CCJ2-JOTI, contributed to this commentary
When was the last time you paused to consider how you and your service to your country truly fit into the "bigger picture?" It is extremely difficult to understand how we fit into an organization until we see who else is on the team, how they view us, and what each team member contributes. I spent the last four years on Joint staffs and at sister-service schools doing just that -listening to the views of combatant commanders and our land and maritime counterparts to understand where I fit in as an Air Force officer. The man who stares back at me in the mirror is no different today than he was four years ago. The difference today is that I can see much more clearly who is on my left and my right and what I contribute to this thing we call a joint Force.
We may be our own service, but we fight as part of a team.
The United States military is organized parochially for a reason. Each service has a set of core competencies, or unique mission sets and capabilities that it can bring to bear. For the Air Force, this means air, space, and information superiority, global attack, precision engagement, rapid global mobility and Agile Combat Support. These distinctive capabilities allow us to fly, fight and win. They also allow our senior service leaders to focus procurement and training on those key areas and mitigate some overlap between the services.
Due in part to capability limitations and federal law, the air, land and sea services are also interdependent. This means they must rely on each others' distinctive capabilities in order to collectively win our nation's wars. No one service can win any war by itself; we need the full package. This collective interdependency is orchestrated not by an Air Force, Army or Navy command, but by a joint combatant commander. The combatant commander is responsible for weaving those capabilities together into a joint force sufficient to meet military and political objectives. The composition of that joint force is dependent upon many factors including existing political context and physical geography, but we don't take turns going to war.
A colleague of mine recently asserted that this was the Army's decade to be deployed. He said that throughout the 1990's, while the Army remained garrisoned, the Air Force maintained a combat posture - and now it was the Army's turn. He argued that the "clear air victory" in Desert Storm set the stage for the primacy of air power for the coming decade, a decade he claimed, that the Army did not deploy. While my friend clearly overlooked critical Army contributions in Somalia, Haiti and the Balkans, what was more troubling was his line of thinking. Considering that services actually take turns in the fight is a very myopic way to view our nation's military contributions.
Each combat operation is different and every service's contribution must be understood within its strategic context. Desert Storm was not just an air war, although some Airmen would like to remember it that way. Despite the significant success achieved by the combined Joint Force Air Component in gaining air superiority and removing the eyes and ears of the enemy regime, that alone did not win the war. Air actions that took place in the opening days of Desert Storm, including more than 100 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles and thousands of Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps sorties, helped set the conditions for coalition land forces to seize ground and defeat enemy land forces. In addition to its air contribution from six aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, the Navy also conducted surface, subsurface, and amphibious operations. While a healthy amount of inter-service rivalry existed, the Air Force could not have "won" Desert Storm without the Army and the seaservices, nor could the Army or seaservices have "won" Desert Storm without the Air Force. It took all three pieces, integrated for a common purpose by the joint force commander, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, to achieve a resounding victory and meet the larger military and political objectives.
Similar troubling arguments have been made about today's fight - somehow the Air Force had won its war (the air campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq) and we are just waiting for the Army to finish its job on the ground. Some take the argument a step further, saying that the Air Force should be back to "Ops Normal" while the Army engages in the tedious, dangerous, but necessary tasks of peace enforcement and nation-building. According to these airpower-"firsters," clearing out insurgents and building schools are not air component tasks because they are not part of our core competency. Yet, saying "that's not my job" is not in the spirit of team play, especially when part of our team is still decisively engaged. We cannot say that as individual Airmen, and we cannot think that as an air service. Aside from their proximity to the sites, the U.S. Army is no more capable of building schools than any other service; we all have engineer capabilities, after all.
We cannot divide war into parochial contributions and consider those independently. As Airmen, we cannot proclaim that we have won our "air war," and now it's time for the other services to win the "ground war." These operations are interdependent and all three services rely on each other to be successful. We are in this together; the air campaign is not won until the war is won.
So I ask again, when was the last time you did a bit of self-reflection and saw more than just you and your aircrew flying around the world? When was the last time you considered your larger role in these conflicts? As we close out the tenth year of this long war, let us not forget that we are part of a bigger team - a team that will fall and rise together.