Nothing Can Stop the U.S. Air Force

James Samuel Welshans

Like each of America’s military services, the United States Air Force’s senior leadership is a mix of Senior Executive Service civilians and uniformed General Officers. Unique among this group, United States Air Force senior operational level warfighting leaders serve in operational level command assignments, supporting United States Joint Force Commanders worldwide. In this study I define senior operational level warfighting leaders as an elite group among United States Air Force personnel and examine that group’s cultural reproduction. Framing my analytical context, I explore the literature on military culture, elites, leadership, and technology. Using content analysis and social network analysis research methods, I examine publicly accessible career biographies and selected speeches among 69 United States Air Force senior operational level warfighting leaders, serving from 1999-2006. I collected and stored biographical data elements in a single comprehensive data base. Tailored sorting and retrieval functions facilitated data analysis and triangulation as multiple lines of inquiry revealed complementary findings. I analyze institutional constructs, concluding that undergraduate and graduate education specializations and professional military education contribute to senior operational level warfighting leaders’ cultural reproduction. Near-identical career patterns, such as accelerated promotions and prestigious operational pilot assignments, also reinforce this tendency. Social network relationships, most notably mentor-protégé relationships, add to cultural reproduction. Working as senior officers’ executive assistants exemplifies most senior operational level warfighting leaders’ careers. I highlight extensive social networks that reinforce the cultural reproduction theme, focusing on United States Air Force Chiefs of Staff. Senior operational level warfighting leaders’ modes of expression range from uniform wear choices to methods of addressing superiors and subordinates. In this context, I find cultural reproduction tendencies among senior operational level warfighting leaders’ speeches and rhetoric, strategic communications programs, and professional reading lists. United States Air Force senior operational level warfighting leaders constitute a definable and powerful group of individuals who actively shape the service’s culture while simultaneously perpetuating their own. This group’s cohesion was instrumental in creating today’s United States Air Force. But this same solidarity may predispose them toward a unified, collective worldview that tends to misinterpret complex issues that dominate operational warfighting in the twenty-first century.

Nothing Can Stop the U.S. Air Force

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Nothing Can Stop the U.S. Air Force

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Abstract

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