ith the demise of the Soviet Union and the ridicule heaped on its Five-Year Plans, you might think long-range planning in general would be in the dustbin of history. Not so. It's alive and well in the Air Force.
This month, Air Force officials are meeting to lay the foundation for the Air Force of 2025-almost three decades into the future. But this is not just some routine bureaucratic exercise whose product is likely to be read by a few Ph.D. candidates. It's different and needs to be taken seriously for at least two reasons:
First, it has the enthusiastic imprimatur of Gen. Ronald R. Fogelman, the Air Force chief of staff.
Second, this is not to result in a report produced by contractors or junior officers on the Air Staff. The options papers are being written by two- and three-star generals from the Air Force's operating commands, and the final positions will be produced by the four-stars who head those commands during a five-day head-banging session.
In other words, this exercise is at the level usually reserved for combat actions like Operation Desert Storm.
Fogelman and the Air Force's four-star generals meet three times a year for a day or two to discuss servicewide issues. For reasons lost in time, these meetings are dubbed CORONA. The October CORONA will be unusual. First, it will be much longer-Oct. 8-12. Second, only one topic is on the agenda: The Air Force of 2025. Third, Gen. Fogelman has cleared his calendar for the preceding week to prepare for this CORONA session.
An Air Force briefing paper says the goal of the new long-range planning effort is to develop "a coherent strategic vision for the Air Force in the 2025 time-frame, shared by senior Air Force leaders, articulating the contributions of air and space power to joint war fighting and to the future defense needs of the nation, and charting actionable courses to that future based upon logical and identifiable transition points."
That's a mouthful, but the key phrases in the statement reveal Fogelman's aim:
- "Coherent strategic vision" indicates he wants to develop a doctrine to which the Air Force can cling and by which the service can guide itself now that the Soviets aren't providing a clear-cut threat.
- "Shared by senior Air Force leaders" emphasizes that this vision will be written by the four-stars themselves.
- "Charting actionable courses" points to Fogelman's insistence that this be an exercise in pragmatism and not science fiction.
- "Identifiable transition points" could be the key phrase determining if this process holds any meaning for the future, because it means the products of this October's meeting must be reviewed at intervals. So if Air Force leaders decide to pursue 20 emerging technologies, at some point in the future that list will have to be pruned and less promising technologies dropped.
No Time to Wait
Fogelman is trying to draw the entire Air Force into his approach, not as the cure for all that ails the service, but as a tool for projecting it into the 21st century when everyone else is simply talking about the approach of the millennium.
"I call this approach, 'looking back to the present,' " says Fogelman. "It's just a common sense way to get the Air Force we need in the next century. . . . We must critically examine when a weapon system, an idea, a concept, is reaching the sunset part of its evolution and not wait for that to occur. In parallel, we must be developing the capability that will replace it. That is very difficult to do standing here and looking forward. I think if we try to project ourselves and look back, it's easier."
A small office under Fogelman oversees the process. It is headed by Maj. Gen. David W. McIlvoy, special assistant to the chief of staff for long-range planning. His deputy is a civilian, Dr. Clark Murdock, a former staffer for the late Les Aspin when Aspin was secretary of Defense and, before that, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. This office manages, but does not drive, the review. That is being done at the three-star level.
This year, the three-star deputies to the four-stars who head the Air Force's major commands have been meeting an average of one day a month to lay the foundation for the crowning week-long planning session. Starting with a list of 150 core issues, they have been winnowing that down to a manageable 16 to 18 topics that will go before the four-stars. The top officials will not get recommendations, but rather a list of options. They are expected to make firm decisions on some but to defer others for future review.
The Air Force won't release the list of topics. Some in the service fear the long-range planners may be out to ax the F-22 or some other favored piece of hardware. But Murdock emphasizes that a long-range planning effort of this nature is actually looking at what the Air Force will be like after the F-22. Hardware, he concedes, must be taken into consideration in that planning. But the question is less about existing hardware than about emerging technologies the Air Force should start investing in now so it can field useful platforms in 2025.
Murdock says the point is not to pick 2025's dominant technology in October 1996, but to earmark a dozen or so areas for research investment, some of which will fail to develop in the years ahead while others leapfrog ahead. Along the road to 2025, Murdock explains, as additional funding is pumped into emerging technologies, current funding will undoubtedly have to be withdrawn from existing systems. That's what Fogelman means when he speaks of a weapon system reaching its "sunset" era.
Murdock insists that long-range planning is not mere crystal-ball gazing. "You can't predict," he says. "But you can think about it in a disciplined way."
Those working on the effort emphasize the challenge posed by "wild cards" that litter efforts at long-term planning. Some would argue that the history of the 20th century has been one wild card after another. Others would say that the more things change, the more they stay the same, noting that this century is starting and ending with conflicts in the Balkans.
The Air Force planners have committed to paper some startling examples of possible 21st century wild cards-"fusion breakthrough . . . asteroid strikes earth . . . appearance of a 'Messiah.' "
Some Surprises
There are some surprises in the planning process.
For one thing, planners have dropped the old Cold War argument against preparing for small-scale challenges. For decades, the services assumed that if they could whip the Soviet military, they could certainly handle minor actions like seizing Grenada or evacuating U.S. nationals from a danger zone.
Now the Air Force's long-range planners are asking whether the service should be planning and assigning resources for a broader range of activities.
Another example: After four years in which the term "two MRCs" ("major regional contingencies," such as simultaneous wars in the Persian Gulf and on the Korean Peninsula) has dominated military discussion, the Air Force long-range planning process doesn't mention MRCs. Murdock explains that the "two MRCs" concept was designed as a base for determining how many planes, tanks and ships the services needed. The current long-range planning effort, he says, is the process of 'shaping more than sizing.' "
That effort involves looking at "strategic indications and warning (I&W)"-the intelligence community's jargon for figuring out what guy is plotting to hit you with what weapon. Looking back, strategic I&W in the Cold War was stunningly simple: The focus of our worries was full-scale war promulgated by Moscow. In 2025, however, we might have cause to fear a large-scale chemical attack spawned by a Middle Eastern terrorist group. Worse still, suppose members of U.S. militia groups got their hands on the nerve gas capabilities that were being developed by the Aum Shinri Kyo cult in Japan.
A Process for a Plan
Of course, there is no shortage of critics who assail the Fogelman initiative, asserting that it's a scheme to justify a mission to justify a budget. They point to vivid tales of mullahs run amok as creations of a too-fervid imagination. But Saddam Hussein's nuclear program was no figment of the imagination. Nor is Moammar Qadhafi's effort to develop chemical weapons. Nor is the vast chemical manufacturing process Aum Shinri Kyo was able to assemble undetected in a state where close police surveillance is accepted.
Some of these threats, however, are far from the type the Air Force would deal with. Presumably, the Air Force will not bomb a clandestine chemical plant some militia has managed to put together in a Denver warehouse. Murdock freely acknowledges that. "The challenge is security," he says, "not who provides it."
All of this may sound a little threatening. "Plans" smell of conspiracies to some. But the briefing documents emphasize, "The value of planning is planning, not the plan." In other words, the purpose is not to commit the Air Force to this weapon system or that mission. It is to think rationally about a future that cannot be discerned clearly, and then think about it some more in a few years, and some more after that-all the time shifting and adjusting as the fog that surrounds the future dissipates a bit and reveals a little more of itself. It is, in other words, a process for eventually producing more informed plans.
"The trick," says one briefing paper, "is knowing how much insurance to buy for what." Another says, "Planning in this realm involves judgment when to bring improbable but plausible events or developments into the range of institutional action." Those sound like more nuanced variants on the classic defense question posed more than three decades ago by Alain Enthoven: "How much is enough?"
We still don't know the answer. The Air Force long-range planning effort won't answer it either. But it is a serious attempt to fashion a process by which we may make a more rational stab at answering it.
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