Ah, The Great Eagle Eats Its Young
The high priests of the Church of the Air Force find anything that requires free thinking and stomps it into the ground. The high priests of the Church of the Air Force take anything they find as a threat to themselves and the future of the Church that they have tasked themselves to protect and create a regulation for it. Going by the regulation is not thinking. It is complying. For some, sadly, if there is not a rule or regulation that has been shoved down their throats for a certain situation than....[fill in the blank].
Example: The Air Force is stilling feeling its way around SOF ever since Reagan's Rapid Deployment Force. Most have not realized that allowing an airman to break certain rules and substitute them with something else in certain situations is actually a good thing and not a threat to the organization but instead a means to an end. This story about blocking blogs is just the tip of the ice berg.
Getting off topic... a little!
Although I guess I am talking about Info War - the AF's info war on it's own folks thru PME? Just kidding.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Steve Blair
I'd be interested in seeing their spin here. Given the structure of the NVN effort, AF doctrine as it existed in the 1960s couldn't have worked. But then again if the Marines have Stalin's PR team (to paraphrase Truman), I've always felt that the AF has his command historians....:)
Which of course is semi-hijacking this thread. Apologies to all.
Quick summary: The gist of it was that the doctrine in Vietnam was so far skewed towards strategic bombing - which had morphed into meaning solely a general nuclear war. It ignored the more balanced traditional air doctrine in conventional war in favor of SAC and the SIOP. That got us away from interdiction, CAS, etc. They also talked a lot about the focus on nukes meaning we spent too little money on the tech for conventional war - true when you consider that the first guided bombs were used in WWII, but then it took us till the 70's to make them useable...
Anyway, my point in bringing it up is that the AF does indeed acknowledge and air its mistakes... blocking blogs, agree with it or not, is for security reasons and not for managing dissent.
The art/culture of the debrief has been taken to a high level by the USAF Weapons School, and it is routine for a young LT to openly point out and critique a superior's mistakes in the debrief... even if the superior is the General or Colonel. Not something that could happen a lot if the culture was to repress dissent or critique... and it is definitely why in spite of not having the edge in machines we used to have we still have the best Air Force in the world (not that I am biased!).
V/R,
Cliff