plus real estate costs for a no-frills air base. To maintain proficiency, your flight crews need to fly at least twenty hours a month, at a couple of thousands of dollars an hour. Don't forget to budget enough for administration, security, medical services, spare parts, practice ammunition, bombs, missiles, targets, and a thousand other details. Still, it isn't money alone that does the job. For starters, building an air force is a multi-generational task, which requires decades of investment in the cultivation of skills that are relatively rare and fragile. The best example of this is the Israeli Air Force, which uses a network of 'talent scouts' with sophisticated psychological profiles to identify its future aircrews (and thus its future leaders) on the soccer fields and elementary schools while they are still pre-teen kids.
While such a system of selection may work for small countries with a few hundred aircraft and strong social cohesion, it would not be practical for a country of the size and diversity of the United States. America has an air force (actually several if you count the Navy, Marine, Army, and Coast Guard) with thousands of aircraft. Because of its worldwide responsibilities and interests, the U.S. has to reach deep to build its military forces, calling upon a wider range of skills and cultures than any other nation on earth. Backing up the selection of the right people is a massive industrial commitment, for only nations with a viable airframe industry can hope to avoid crippling dependence on one or two major powers for weapons, spare parts, and training.
There is a saying that goes, 'If you think training is expensive, try ignorance!' Consider an example from the Vietnam War. Prior to the 1968 bombing halt over North Vietnam, both the Navy and Air Force suffered severely in air-to-air combat with the wily and agile MiG interceptors of the North Vietnamese Air Force. In fact, the critical kill/loss ratio was going decidedly against the Americans — only 3:1 (three MiGs shot down for every U.S. aircraft lost in air-to-air combat. Now, this doesn't sound bad until you consider that the MiGs and their pilots cost the North Vietnamese almost nothing to replace, and that fighting over friendly territory, a MiG pilot who ejected often lived to fight another day, while American aircrews who ejected stood a good chance of dying in a POW camp. In World War II, by way of contrast, the average kill/loss ratio was something like 8:1; and in Korea it was 13:1.
To improve the odds, the Navy launched a program of adversary flight training, flying practice missions against aircraft more agile than the F-4, including a few real MiG fighters that had found their way to the United States for evaluation and testing. The Navy opened the famous Top Gun school at NAS Miramar near San Diego, California, and a dozen or so classes of crews had cycled through by 1972. Every Navy pilot going to Southeast Asia received thorough intelligence briefings on the enemy aircraft and tactics that he would face.
The results were stunning. When the air war over North Vietnam started up again in 1972, the USAF still took a beating from the North Vietnamese, for a while losing more aircraft than they were shooting down. At one point the kill/loss ratio fell to only.89:1! Only the rapid introduction of electronic warning systems based on real- time intelligence saved the day for the Air Force, bringing the ratio back to a barely acceptable 2:1. But the Navy story was quite different. In a matter of weeks, the Navy fighters drove the North Vietnamese MiGs from the coastal zones; and at one time they had an incredible 31:0 kill/loss ratio. By the time of the cease-fire in early 1973, the ratio was a more realistic 13:1—a massive success compared to the Air Force's dismal performance during the same period. An unpopular war, fought under impossible political restrictions, was bad enough, but being outperformed in the air by the Navy was a burning humiliation for the USAF.
Today's U.S. Air Force is built on a foundation of education and training that only can be understood in terms of the bitter experience of USAF personnel in the skies over Southeast Asia in the 1960s and 1970s. The air force that America sent to the Persian Gulf in 1990 and 1991 was very much the product of the unacceptable cost of the Vietnam War and a twenty-year struggle by a generation of officers to exorcise the ghosts of dead comrades. Over the two decades since the end of that divisive conflict, the USAF has remade itself to ensure that its Vietnam experience will never happen again.
THE AIR FORCE CORPORATION
Like any large organization, the United States Air Force has a corporate culture. That culture is the product of its history and the collective experience of its people. Just like most big American corporations, it's had mergers and take-overs, reorganizations and purges. The Air Force Corporation started small, grew as a result of the vision of its founding members, and came into its own because it had a unique product at a time when it was needed. It has grown and shrunk as a result of competitive market forces in its own very specialized line of business, where the only customer is the U.S. Congress and ultimately the voters, taxpayers, lobbyists, and political interest groups that shape the law-making and budgeting process. Let's look at some of that history.
The Aeronautical Division of the U.S. Army Signal Corps was organized on August 1st, 1907, only four years after the Wright brothers' first powered flight. Commanded by a captain, the unit had one Wright biplane and a few mechanics. By 1914, it had become the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps, under a lieutenant colonel; and by 1918, after the United States entered World War I, it was upgraded to the Air Service, under a major general; and then in 1926, during a period of disarmament, it was downgraded to the Army Air Corps. On June 20th, 1941, with the threat of a new war on the horizon, it became the Army Air Forces, now led by a lieutenant general. By 1944, its strength had peaked at 2.3 million personnel, with tens of thousands of aircraft. Finally, on September 18th, 1947, after a forty-year struggle for identity, the U.S. Air Force was born, under the leadership of General Carl 'Tooey' Spaatz.
Over the next five decades, its strength rose and fell, based on the perceived Soviet threat as well as its overseas commitments (Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, etc.). At the end of 1994, the Air Force consisted of 81,000 officers and 350,000 enlisted personnel; a ratio of one officer to every 4.3 enlisted, compared to an Army/Navy/Marine Corps ratio of about 1 to 10 or 12. More than half the officer corps consists of captains (O-3s) and majors (O-4s), ranks that have been especially hard hit by recent cutbacks. Under present downsizing plans, the active-duty Air Force will bottom out at around 400,000 people by 1996. There will also be about eighty thousand Reserve, 115,000 Air National Guard, and 195,000 civilian Air Force personnel working within the force. The Reserves consist of veterans who have completed their active duty and are available for recall in a national emergency on order of the President. The National Guard units evolved from the state militias of Colonial and Civil War times. Nominally under the command of their respective state governors (or commonwealth in the case of Puerto Rico), they can be called into federal service by a Presidential executive order. Many of the flight crews and maintenance personnel of U.S. commercial airlines serve in Reserve and National Guard units, and a major mobilization would wreak havoc on airline flight schedules, much as it did in 1990 during Operation Desert Shield.
The average age of USAF personnel is thirty-five for officers and twenty-nine for enlisted airmen. There are 66,000 women in the Air Force, some 15 % of the officers and also 15 % of the enlisted force, a proportion that has doubled since 1975. There are about three hundred female pilots and one hundred female navigators. In case you were wondering, an enlisted woman is addressed as 'Airman.' Only 17 % of the officers were commissioned through the Air Force Academy, while 42 % percent are Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) graduates. (The ROTC program is offered by a diminishing number of U.S. colleges and universities; in exchange for a commitment to take military science courses, attend summer training camps, and serve for a stated number of years, graduates receive a small stipend and a commission as a second lieutenant on graduation.) The rest are commissioned through Officer Candidate School (OCS) or other special programs such as the military medical recruiting program. Today's Air Force has approximately sixteen thousand pilots, seven thousand navigators, and 32,000 non-rated line officers in the grades of lieutenant colonel and below. There are almost three hundred generals (O-7s to O-10s) and about four thousand colonels (O-6s). Including National Guard and Reserve units, the Air Force operates about seven thousand aircraft, a number that is rapidly shrinking as entire types are taken out of service.
During World War II, when the U.S. Armed Forces were racially segregated, top Army Air Corps generals resisted the creation of 'colored' flying units, arguing that 'Negroes had no aptitude for flying.' It took the personal intervention of Eleanor Roosevelt to force the creation of a black fighter squadron, which was trained at Tuskeegee, Alabama, and served with distinction in Italy. With major bases and senior officer hometowns heavily concentrated in the Southern states, the Air Force had a poor integration record, and for years the handful of black cadets admitted to the Air Force Academy and other training programs suffered extreme harassment and ostracism with quiet determination. Two of America's first black generals, Benjamin O. Davis and the famous 'Chappie' James, came from the USAF — a tribute to the toughness of the men, and the system that created them. Things are a bit
