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The Vision of Bill Creech
Following Vietnam, the Air Force was in bad shape, but it was by no means only Vietnam that had caused it. The problems were systemic in nature; they were the consequences of the way the Air Force had been run for many years.
Ever since the heating up of the Cold War, it had been the nuclear mission, and those who were in charge of it, the SAC commanders, who had been running the Air Force. In doing so, the SAC commanders gave every other Air Force mission at best only partial attention. How could dropping a bomb on a bridge compare with destroying the Soviet Union? The SIOP became supreme, and, as Chuck Horner had discovered, other methods of training were either downplayed or forbidden.
Bomber generals like predictability, order, and control, and in World War II, the best guarantee of bombing success had involved sending one’s bombers over the target in a specific line at a specific altitude. When the bomber generals became the SAC generals in the decades that followed, they ran the Air Force the way they already knew and already thought best — with order, centralized control, and intense micromanagement from above.
The authority of the SAC was further enhanced when Robert McNamara became the Secretary of Defense, and instituted the Planning, Programming, Budgeting System (PPBS) used by the Pentagon to build the annual budget submission for Defense. PPBS made the USAF Nuclear Forces — SAC and Air Defense Command — into what were called the Major Force Program 1, MFP-1. Since MFP-1 programs supported the most important part of America’s military strategy, they were to receive more DOD attention, and money, than other programs. Meanwhile, TAC and Conventional Forces were MFP- 2—second class.
The SAC generals took the ball and ran with it. Their methods, their procedures, became the only ones allowable, and they refused to tolerate any deviations. They did their best to standardize everything for which they had responsibility, and manuals and directions became the order of the day.
For instance, Walter Sweeney, a SAC general who commanded TAC in the early sixties, devised a system for rating the wings using what was called “Management Computation System” (MCS). Each wing’s activities were given a monthly score. These included not only measures of combat capability such as bomb scores and aircraft-in- commission rates, but also on-time payment of officers’ club bills, the number of lawns that needed cutting in the base housing area, the number of DUIs (driving under the influence) ticketed to a wing, and the number of contributions to the Air Force Aid Society. From all this a composite score was computed. The wing with the top score was presumably the best wing in the Air Force, while the one with the lowest was the worst. If a wing had a bad record paying its club bills, that counted as much as anything else, and the wing commander would certainly be criticized, and might even lose his job.
It’s no surprise that a system that measured uncut grass alongside bombing skill had no credibility with the troops. No surprise, either, was the result: the troops lied.
Take the case of a range officer at the bombing range at Poinsett, five miles south of Shaw AFB, at Sumter, South Carolina. An F-100 flight from Myrtle Beach was going to be on the range. The flight leader would give the range officer a call to tell him the kind of scores his squadron needed for their MCS points; and the range officer made sure that they got them. Consequently, if a pilot threw a bomb way off target, the score actually reported by the airmen became a no-spot (the smoke charge didn’t function when the bomb struck the ground, so the airmen scoring the bombs couldn’t tell where it hit). In short, there was no failure, and no loss of MCS points.
Another Sweeney game was to call from his office directly down to a squadron. Whoever picked up the phone was put to a test. Procedures that pilots were supposed to commit to memory were printed in the pilots’ handbook in boldface letters, and the hapless man on the phone was asked to parrot the boldface for a given emergency in his type of aircraft. Sweeney, naturally, had the book open before him; and if the pilot on the other end of the phone missed a word, he got a vicious chewing-out. And Sweeney wanted it all exactly as written; it had to be “Throttle — Off,” not “Throttle — Shut Down,” even though they meant the same. The result, first, was that the boldface procedures were soon pasted to the wall over every telephone in every squadron in TAC. Second, when Sweeny asked for the pilot’s name, he got an alias. Some of the names were very creative — Captain John Black, for instance, would become Captain George Suckfinger — yet the SAC general never caught on.
To the pilots, standardization and authority were important, but not this kind of mentality, and so the best of them fought back. They saw a vast gulf between the jobs they were being told to do and the jobs they felt needed to be done, and it seemed to them they had three options: they could crack under the strain, do a half- baked job, or fight by deceiving — lie and do the
They showed in many ways — problems with drugs, alcohol, race, and sex. Too many crashed, too many were lost. They showed in smaller but equally telling ways, too: too many aircraft inoperable because there weren’t enough parts, too many hangar floors filthy, too many NCOs in their offices instead of with their troops, too many troops without clean toilets or clean washrooms.
It wasn’t until 1978 that a general named Bill Creech took command of the TAC, saw what needed doing, and did it, but that was several years in the future. In the meantime, men like Chuck Horner started laying the groundwork for reform.
When Chuck Horner returned from Vietnam in August 1967, he was primarily an operations man: he flew fighter planes, that’s what he did. Now, while continuing his strong operational inclination, he found himself on a steep learning path. He needed to understand how to work the bureaucracy, needed the right kind of mentoring, needed to be shown how to get things done off the field as well as on. It was very lucky for him that his first major job offer after Vietnam put him in the heart of tactics development at Nellis AFB in Nevada.
NELLIS AFB
Nellis has long been, as it calls itself, the “Home of the Fighter Pilot.” Because of the large-scale ranges and the free and open airspace, much of the USAF’s fighter equipment and tactics development has been carried out there, and after Vietnam began to make its presence felt, and money was freed up to develop the new conventional systems needed to fight that war, it was a very busy place.
In the 1960s, two major functions were based at Nellis: a fighter wing that performed F-105 (and later F- 111) qualification training; and the Fighter Weapons School (FWS), where top fighter pilots received (and still receive) advanced training in fighter pilot instruction — at first in the F-100 and F-105, and later in the F-4.
Fighter pilots with a great deal of experience (usually 1,000-plus hours) and credibility were selected both for their flying skills and their ability to instruct, and sent to the FWS for a six-month intensive training course — in effect, a doctoral degree in Fighter Operations. The academics were fiercely difficult, and there was nearly endless flying in which every move was graded in a laboratory environment on the ranges. Beyond that, FWS students learned how to be superb platform instructors, as well as how to work with maintenance to ensure that the bombing systems were working correctly and the munitions being maintained properly.
After leaving the FWS, graduates were called patch wearers: instead of their flying squadron patch, they wore on their right shoulder the FWS patch — gray with yellow circles and a bomb impacting this bull’s-eye. After finishing the course, receiving their patch, and returning to their home base, patch wearers became the promoters of fighter excellence in their squadron or wings.
Graduates additionally received an “S” prefix on their Air Force Specialty code. Thus, AFSC A1115E signified the following: “S” meant FWS grad; “1115” meant pilot; and “E” meant F-105. When personnel people noticed the S on an AFSC, they knew this pilot needed to be handled specially, not only because of his special training, but also because of the Air Force’s huge investment in him. For that reason, patch wearers were more likely to be assigned the good flying jobs.
