Air Force-Navy integration in strike warfare: a role model for Seamless Joint-Service Operations

Naval War College Review, Wntr, 2008 by Benjamin S. Lambeth

One of the most remarkable aspects of American joint-force combat capability today is the close harmony that has steadily evolved since the 1991 Persian Gulf War in the integrated conduct of aerial strike operations by the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy, along with the latter's closely associated Marine Corps air assets. This under-recognized and little-appreciated aspect of the nation's war fighting posture stands in marked contrast to the more familiar and contested relationship between the two services in the roles and resources arena, where a fundamentally different incentive structure has tended to prevail and where seemingly zero-sum battles for limited defense dollars have appeared to be the natural order of things from one budget cycle to the next. As a former Air Force three-star general and fighter pilot recently remarked on this important point, although there remains "lots to be done at the budget table, tactically the [two] services are [now] bonded at the hip." (1) Indeed, in the words of a former Navy Fighter Weapons School instructor, now the commander of Second Fleet, such integration "is now a part of the culture" of U.S. fixed-wing combat aircrews, regardless of whether the wings they wear on their uniforms are made of silver or gold. (2)

In this regard, the Air Force and Navy have come a long way since the Vietnam War and its early Cold War aftermath more than three decades ago, when the two services remained cultures apart, operated in wholly separate physical and conceptual worlds, and could claim no significant interoperability features to speak of. Once the unexpected demands of Operation DESERT STORM so starkly dramatized the downside consequences of that absence of interoperability between the two services, however, the Navy, in particular, responded with due alacrity and began implementing the many needed changes in its equipment, doctrine, and operating practices to accommodate the demise of its former open-ocean mission against Soviet naval forces and the emergence of a need to work more closely with its Air Force sister service in the conduct of joint air operations in dealing with littoral combat challenges around the world.

For its part, the Air Force likewise embraced not only the new demand but also the many new opportunities for working more synergistically with its naval-aviator counterparts in both peacetime training and actual contingency operations. From the most tentative initial stirrings of this early move toward greater interoperability between the two services in the late 1970s, the Air Force and Navy registered ever-greater progress toward synchronized air operations throughout the 1990s, to a point where the fruits of that integration were finally realized during Operation ENDURING FREEDOM over Afghanistan in late 2001 and further clinched by the all but seamless joint combat performance of the two services a year later during the three-week period of major combat in Operation IRAQI FREEDOM.

A BACKDROP OF APARTNESS

The integration of the Navy and Air Force in aerial strike warfare is a fairly recent phenomenon in American military experience. For more than two centuries the Navy was proudly accustomed to operating independently on the high seas, with a consequent need to be completely self-reliant and adaptable to rapidly changing circumstances far from the nation's shores, with the fewest possible constraints on its freedom of action. The nation's sea service was forward deployed from the beginning of its existence and, throughout most of the Cold War, was the only service that was "out there," in and above the maritime commons and ready for action. Largely for that reason, operations integration between the Navy and Air Force was not even a remote planning consideration. On the contrary, the main focus was rather on force deconfliction between the two services. Not only figuratively but also literally, the Navy and Air Force conducted their daily routines in separate and distinct operating environments, and no synergies between the two services were produced--or even sought. Not surprisingly, a unique Navy operating culture emerged from this reality that set the Navy clearly apart from the Air Force and its more structured and rule-governed way of conducting its missions.

These widely divergent service approaches to air operations persisted throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, with the final years of the Cold War (after the nation's combat involvement in Vietnam ended in 1973) seeing little significant change from the previous pattern of segregated operations that had been the norm throughout the eight-year air war in Southeast Asia. Throughout those final Cold War years, the Navy's carrier battle groups figured most prominently in a sea-control strategy that was directed against Soviet naval forces, including long-range and highly capable shore-based naval air forces, in open-ocean engagements around the world. Because the Maritime Strategy of the Reagan administration put the focus of American naval force projection more than a thousand miles away from the most likely focus of any Air Force combat operations in both Europe and the Pacific, such geographic separation, in an apt portrayal, "simply ruled out any concern with or interest in cross-service synergies at the operational or tactical levels." (3) Any combat operations against Soviet forces in the northernmost reaches of the Norwegian Sea or off the Kamchatka Peninsula in the western Pacific would have involved solely the U.S. and Soviet navies, with no other force operations in the area. That accordingly freed the Navy to develop long-range fire-and-forget weapons, like the AIM-54 Phoenix air-to-air missile and the AGM-84D Harpoon antishipping missile, that were unconstrained by any need for concern over the risk of fratricide or the possibility of causing unintended collateral damage should they go astray.