The Force in US Air Force: Fodder for Your Professional Reading on the Implements of Strategy and Tactics for Conventional Air War

Aerospace Power Journal, Fall, 2000 by Dr. David R. Mets

A major change occurred in the Air Force in 1950. Researchers had expressed dissatisfaction with the unification of procurement and research and development functions under Air Materiel Command, arguing that supply people tended to dominate and repress innovation. The dollar value of supply operations, much higher than that of research and development, led to a focus on maximum productivity and, consequently, to incremental change. The researchers had their way in 1950 and got their own major command, the Air Research and Development Command, which focused most of its work on strategic air war, but some went on in the tactical realm as well. [19] One manifestation of that came in the airlift business with the acquisition in the 1950s of hundreds of C-124s and C-130s, both having major Army support functions but neither having much to do with nuclear war. As for conventional weapons, when sputnik went up, an attempt to establish an armament center at Eglin AFB, Florida, quickly aborted to allow the better conc entration of financial and human resources on strategic-missile development. [20]

That did not completely end the development of conventional armament, though, because the Army brought one of the greatest aircraft guns in history--the M-61 Gatling gun--into operation in 1958, installing it as standard equipment in both the F-104 and F-105, both of which came on the line that year. [21] Toward the end of the Eisenhower administration, the Army Ordnance Department, still in charge of bomb development, also brought a new low-drag bomb series on the line: the 750 lb M-117 and the 3,000 lb M-118, both designed for external carriage on fighter bombers. The Navy also brought a low-drag bomb series onto the line at about the same time in the Mk-80 series, with 500 lb and 2,000 lb versions for Air Force use. [22]

Notwithstanding all the focus on strategic attack, air-to-air weapons enjoyed some important progress in the 1950s, the usual rationale pointing out that we would need these new weapons against hordes of enemy bombers coming across the North Pole. But the resulting weapons led the way into the missile age and proved adaptable to tactical air warfare. Ron Westrum has recently published a book on the most legendary of these weapons--the AIM-9 Sidewinder--and the organization that built it--the Naval Ordnance Test Station at China Lake. [23]

A Harvard graduate with a PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago and a professor at Eastern Michigan University, Ron Westrum worked for 13 years on his volume (Sidewinder: Creative Missile Development at China Lake [Annapolis: US Naval Institute Press, 1999]). He has written two other books--one on complex organizations and the other on sociology and society--both of which are out of print and neither of which is in the Air University Library. Westrum has also written a number of articles for periodicals. The Sidewinder volume depends heavily upon interviews, most of them concentrated among the veterans of China Lake. Thus, an oral-history purist might complain that his use of this material is on the uncritical side. Certainly, we cannot expect anyone to have immediate command of the complete literature on science, technology, and innovation--much less cite it in a single book--but Westrum clearly is erudite in his own field.