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

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

For the next 10 years, little changed in terms of unity of command/effort for the Air Service except its name, when the air arm became the Air Corps in 1926. By 1942 a series of gradual changes within the Army effected a restructuring in the War Department to accommodate three Army commands--Ground, Service/Supply, and Air. At the same time, naval air remained part of the Department of the Navy. The United States entered World War II with this arrangement, and the unity of command/effort issues that surfaced in each theater would frame the debate over airpower for the next 50 years.

World War II: The Pacific Theater

In the European theater, the organizational problem took the form of creating a CFACC (i.e., learning to work with air forces of other nations), and in the Pacific, was dominated by the problems of creating a JFACC (i.e., getting US air to operate in concert). Of the two theaters, the Pacific provides the richer set of cases for describing the difficulties the United States experienced in achieving the same degree of success in terms of organizational design that the British enjoyed from the outset. The Pacific theater, therefore, serves as a useful basis for examining the organizational change that led to an independent Air Force and, eventually, to the watershed Goldwater-Nichols legislation that codified "jointness."

The United States entered (and exited) World War II--in particular, the Pacific theater--with its services holding three distinct views of airpower. Considering airpower integral to naval operations, the Navy maintained that air should remain under the purview of the fleet commanders. Further, given the mobility of naval forces, naval air should follow suit (i.e., it should not be tied to a particular land campaign or be subjugated to a ground commander). The Army's view of airpower mirrored the Navy's: since air supported ground operations, a ground commander should control it. Within the Navy, the Marine Corps had taken exception to the Navy's concept of operations from the outset; indeed, after the experience at Guadalcanal (see below), the Corps would have a dedicated air arm for the foreseeable future. Members of the Air Corps, of course, took a different view--opting for an air arm independent of land and sea forces, with unity of command determining the unity of effort for the air campaign. In addition to these perspectives, three other factors complicated the use of airpower in the Pacific: (1) the division of forces (air forces in particular) between Adm Chester Nimitz, commander in chief of the US Pacific Fleet and Pacific Ocean Area, and those of Gen Douglas MacArthur, commander in chief of the Southwest Pacific Area; (2) the division of air forces between the Navy and Army; and (3) a lack of either training or doctrine from which one could build a learning curve, leaving joint air operations in the realm of the ad hoc.

Stung badly at Pearl Harbor and short on combat resources, Admiral Nimitz marshaled his forces around the Midway Islands to meet and, hopefully, beat the next wave of Japanese attacks. By coincidence, he controlled two major air organizations--the fleet (at sea) assets under the immediate command of Adm Frank Jack Fletcher (USS Yorktown and USS Enterprise) and a grab bag of Marine, Navy, and Army air assets ashore at Midway under Capt Cyril T. Simard (commanding officer of Naval Air Station Midway). Most of the robust collection of literature on the Battle for Midway indicates that the two air components (land and sea) could not coordinate their efforts. (3) The question of whether or not better organization, planning, and training would have made a difference is moot. The simple fact is that the air assets were in place to achieve some sort of unity of effort, but no mechanism existed for causing the pieces to move together in an orchestrated manner (air and sea-based forces) or even for exploiting relative advantages among the land-based forces. As a result, the three air elements fought as three independent--although deconflicted--forces. On the positive side, deconfliction represented an important first step, and the United States earned a dramatic victory.