The tale of the C/JFACC: a long and winding road

Air & Space Power Journal, Winter, 2004 by Stephen O. Fought

Editorial Abstract: Although the Royal Air Force and US Air Force followed different paths, the), reached similar conclusions about how best to command and control airpower. The British service settled the issue early, but the American air arm had to resolve internal debates along the way. Dr. Fought describes how both air forces concluded that expeditionary, air forces and a lash-up of the combined/joint force air component commander and combined air operations center provided the right structure.

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THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN the United States and British military forces endures as one of the most visible elements of a long-standing bond between the two countries. Whether this comes from a common heritage, a reasonably common language, or the fact that our two nations have fought alongside each other in all of the major wars of this and the last century, the net result is a well-developed linkage, forged from a number of shared understandings and based on mutual trust and respect. This article explores that linkage with regard to the air forces of each country, especially as manifested in today's concept of the combined/joint force air component commander (C/JFACC).

The question under examination asks how both the British and Americans determined that central command of air was viable and how they made that finding acceptable to associated organizations that possessed air forces. This approach, therefore, looks at problems that arose in managing organizational change during the evolution of service and joint doctrine by focusing on the various pulls and tugs among the players as they sought to bring unity of effort and unity of command to airpower.

Since organizational change serves as the guiding principle of this article, one should briefly discuss that framework. Such change may prove the most difficult task for senior leadership. A mature organization--a bureaucracy with established operational procedures--develops a kind of inertia that causes it to do what it has always done, often without regard to the responsiveness of that behavior to a new situation. A combination of three factors usually precipitates organizational change: (1) looming disaster, especially one accompanied by a shortage of resources (this scenario sometimes forces individuals to set aside organizational [political] differences, albeit only temporarily); (2) abject failure, if it is recognized and admitted internally (unfortunately, all too often those who could influence change from within the organization do not recognize that failure has occurred); and (3) a powerful outside force, capable of forcing internal change by strength of personality, quantity of resources, or other mechanisms. All of these aspects will play out in the long and winding trail that leads to the modern-day C/JFACC.

World War I and the Interwar Years

The tale begins by noting that the US Air Force (USAF) and Royal Air Force (RAF) sprang from different roots and matured on opposite sides of the world under different circumstances. The British had the gift of prescience, and the RAF leadership demonstrated its skill in organizational survival. Their foresight is obvious: the founding of the RAF marked "the first time an Air Force had been created anywhere in the world with the intention of conducting air war without reference or subordination to Army or Navy command." (1) British leadership proved equally impressive: even though the RAF was "created with the aim of the strategic bombing of Germany," Air Marshal Hugh Trenchard, the first RAF chief of staff, brilliantly kept the fledgling service out of an internal squabble with the British Army, holding it tightly to the close air support (CAS) mission while he changed the essence of the organization from a defensive to an offensive force. (2) Because of Trenchard's genius, the RAF could spend its organizational energies and political capital resolving the problems of operating with other nations' air forces--the US Army Air Corps in particular.

On the US side of the pond, the air element of the armed forces remained embedded in the Army as the US Air Service, which performed briefly but well in World War I alongside its British counterparts. During the war, the Air Service found itself attached to lower-level units--a factor that presented a challenge in terms of unity of effort. In 1918 these air units became groups (I Corps Observation Group in April, the 1st Pursuit Group in May, and then a next-higher level called the American Expeditionary Forces [AEF]). By the end of that year, the AEF had 14 groups, including observation, pursuit, and two new bombardment units. Slowly but surely, unity of effort emerged through unity of command under the AEF.

Had the AEF remained extant after the war ended and had the Air Service redeployed to the States, one might have witnessed the genesis of an air organization along the lines of the RAF (i.e., an independent air arm) and, eventually, a full-fledged, unified/consolidated command and control capability. However, US forces demobilized after the war (as did the British); for the Air Service, this process meant reabsorption into the lower ranks of the Army and the partitioning of air assets among the nine standing Army corps.