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

For its part, the Air Force was looking at a very different and more complex operating arena in which friendly and enemy aircraft would be simultaneously airborne and often commingled in the same block of airspace. Unlike the Navy, which was focused literally a thousand miles away--on the open-ocean environment, on NATO's northern flank and the defense of northern Norway, and on Murmansk and the Kola Peninsula of the Soviet Union--the Air Force was preparing itself for joint operations in shared battle space with the Army and with the nation's NATO allies in Central Europe. Given that stark dissimilarity in outlook and mission orientation, the Navy and Air Force, in a fair characterization, "simply thought about and operated within two separate conceptual worlds." (4)

As a result of these widely divergent mind-sets and operating environments, a pronounced culture divide separated the Air Force and naval aviation in the strike-warfare arena. In telling testimony to this divide, Air Force pilots who participated in joint peacetime training exercises with their Navy counterparts during the early post-Vietnam years were often heard to tell horror stories about such (to them) cavalier and undisciplined Navy practices as last-minute unannounced changes in flight schedules, controlling agencies, radio frequencies, operating areas, or even mission profiles. For their parts, Navy pilots who flew in similar joint training exercises routinely complained that overly rigid adherence to maintenance, operation, and crew-rest requirements greatly hampered the Air Force's ability to be fully flexible in executing its assigned missions. One junior naval aviator in 1991 voiced a commonly heard refrain that neatly encapsulated the essence of the cultural divide from the Navy's perspective: "Naval aviators are fond of saying that Air Force pilots may only do something if it is written somewhere that they can, while Navy pilots may do whatever they want as long as it isn't written somewhere that they can't." (5)

THE WATERSHED OF DESERT STORM

Iraq's sudden and unexpected invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 presented naval aviation, in particular, with a new and unfamiliar set of challenges. During the course of the six-week Persian Gulf War that began five and a half months later, the Navy's carrier force found itself obliged to surmount a multitude of new adjustments the need for which came to light for the first time in that campaign. Few of the challenges that were levied on naval aviation by that U.S.-led offensive, code-named Operation DESERT STORM, bore much resemblance to the planning assumptions that underlay the Maritime Strategy, which had been created during the early 1980s to accommodate a very different set of concerns. Although naval aviators had routinely trained for and were wholly proficient at over-the-beach conventional strike operations, the Navy's carrier battle groups during that period had been geared, first and foremost, to doing open-ocean battle against the Soviet Navy. As such, they were not optimally equipped for conducting littoral combat operations. They also were completely unaccustomed to operating within the Air Force's complex air tasking system for managing the large-force operations involving two thousand or more sorties a day that dominated the DESERT STORM air war.