The Icarus Syndrome: the Role of Air Power Theory in the Evolution and Fate of the U.S. Air Force

Joint Force Quarterly, Spring-Summer, 2001 by John D. Sherwood

by Carl H. Builder New Brunswick: Transaction Press, 1998 299 pp. $44.95 [ISBN: 1-56000-141-0]

America's Pursuit of Precision Bombing, 1910-1945 by Stephen L. McFarland Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997. 312 pp. $19.95 [ISBN: 1-56098-784-7]

Over Lord: General Pete Quesada and the Triumph of Tactical Air Power in World War II by Thomas Alexander Hughes New York: Free Press, 1995. 380 pp. $27.00 [ISBN: 0-02915-351-4]

To Hanoi and Back: The U.S. Air Force and North Vietnam, 1966-1973 by Wayne Thompson Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000. 360 pp. $31.95 [ISBN: 1-56098-877-0]

Tail of the Storm by Alan Cockrell Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995. 231 pp. $24.95 [ISBN: 0-81730-772-9]

In 1990, the Air University commissioned Carl Builder, an analyst with RAND, to study the institutional Air Force culture. The president, Lieutenant General Charles Boyd, and the commandant of the Air Command and Staff College, Brigadier General Phillip Ford, believed that careerism amongst occupational specialties had eroded the military professionalism of their service. In particular, both officers decried stovepiping, by which specialists looked to their own profession rather than the operational chain of command and allowed their loyalties to follow their professional needs rather than the operational mission. Boyd and Ford surmised that careerism was linked to the confusion over the Air Force mission. Builder concurred, and The Icarus Syndrome: The Role of Air Power Theory in the Evolution and Fate of the U.S. Air Force resulted from his study.

Builder argues that the cause of careerist malaise is service abandonment of an overarching theory of airpower in the early 1960s. The Vietnam War shattered the myth inspired by Strategic Air Command (SAC) that bombers could win wars by striking deep at the heart of an enemy, and no follow-on theory has replaced that concept, leaving the Air Force without a clear sense of purpose. Builder's solution is for the service to develop a new theory of airpower that encompasses all Air Force missions and activities.

Historians and other realists may shudder at the notion that every service problem can be solved by theory alone. Still, Builder's analysis of airpower theory and its role in shaping service culture is sharp and insightful. His discussion of how the all-sufficiency of strategic bombing came to shape the service and then how the myth was dismantled also correlates with much of the new history being written.

America's Pursuit of Precision Bombing, 1910-1945 by Stephen McFarland, for example, examines the thinking on precision bombing in World War II through the lens of the Norden bombsight and arrives at many of the same conclusions about strategic bombing as Builder. The Norden Mark XV bombsight, first tested in 1931, promised to provide the Army Air Corps with a means of destroying precision targets such as canal locks, oil refineries, bridges, rail terminals, and power plants. Air Corps leaders grasped its significance immediately and made it the centerpiece of planning. The Norden, they reasoned, would allow them to realize the goals originally established by airpower theorists in the 1920s and 1930s. Even before the technology existed to prove their ideas, these theorists had long argued that the Army Air Corps could paralyze a nation's ability to wage war by striking industrial choke points. The marriage of the bombsight with the B-17 and B-29 pushed bombing technology forward and gave life to ideas percolating in the minds of airpower advocates since World War I.

World War II, however, would prove both the theorists and Air Corps leaders wrong. While tests of the bombsight in perfect weather and at low attitudes assured planners that American bombers could achieve a circle error probable of 150 feet, in war conditions only 32 percent of Eighth Air Force sight-aimed bombs fell within 1,000 feet of targets. Not only did the Norden not hit the proverbial pickle barrel, but it rarely hit the broad side of a barn, or for that matter the farm itself. General Curtis LeMay, commander of 305th Bombardment Group, attempted to compensate by salvo bombing "on the leader." Following this technique bombers flew in tight formations at high altitude and salvoed their entire bomb load on the command of the lead bombardier. Salvo bombing improved performance marginally by allowing the best bombardiers to drop the bombs of a formation and creating larger patterns over a target. Nevertheless, according to the postwar Strategic Bombing Survey, only a few bombs hit small targets while "the rest spilled over on adjacent plants, or built up areas, or in open fields." In the case of the air campaign against Japan, high winds and poor weather rendered the Norden completely useless and the Army Air Forces turned instead to low level night fire bombing of cities--the antithesis of precision bombing.

Despite the utter failure of precision bombing in both Europe and Japan, the myth of strategic bombing as a war winning weapon endured. According to Builder, "the theory Was accepted as validated beyond question because of the atomic bomb." Airpower leaders held to the theory tenaciously because it helped justify their plans for a postwar Air Force independent of Army control. These bureaucratic imperatives caused airpower leaders to plan to fight the next war with weapons and techniques proven largely ineffective in World War II. Tragically, these same imperatives also convinced them to ignore the technique which saved American lives and helped this country prevail in World War II: close air support with tactical fighters.