Air Force Gen. Bernard Schriever may be the most important military leader that most Americans don’t know. Facing daunting obstacles, including his own service’s entrenched bureaucracy, Schriever helped to conceive, test and develop the first intercontinental ballistic missiles in the 1950s. His dogged pursuit of that goal ensured that the Soviet Union would not have a monopoly on the most lethal nuclear weapons during the second half of the 20th century.
As described in Neil Sheehan’s compelling 2009 book, “A Fiery Peace in a Cold War,” Schriever embodied the qualities our military leaders need more than ever: flexibility, foresight and imagination. Those character traits have served the Air Force well, and as we celebrate our 67th birthday this week, it seems fitting that we are once again striving to walk in the shadow of Schriever and other visionaries.
A few weeks ago, we unveiled a new, long-term strategy that outlines where the Air Force needs to go in the next 30 years, a period in which we envision a flood of rapid and unrelenting technological advancement.
It’s already upon us. Who, 10 years ago, could have envisioned Twitter, the proliferation of cellphones to even the poorest corners of the Earth, the promise of 3D printing or the tsunami of social media that connects people and cultures as never before.
What is painfully obvious to many of the Air Force’s best minds is that we need to do business in a very different way if we hope to remain relevant in this dynamic global village. One bit of good news: Our institutional history offers many useful lessons, from the early days of flying over the trench-filled battlefields of World War I to sending unmanned aircraft to the most remote corners of the world to beam images back to the United States through satellite relays.
The term we use to describe our strategy and our future is “strategic agility,” a nod to those warriors who have found different and better ways to solve seemingly unsolvable problems. What we may really be saying is that the Air Force, and perhaps our military writ large, needs to be nimble enough to keep pace and, better yet, stay ahead of the next great thing. It means developing and buying weapons much differently. It means recruiting, teaching and employing people much more flexibly than standard operating procedures of the military.
As Maj. Gen. David Allvin, the author of “A Call to the Future,” so aptly put it in the New York Times: “We have to behave more like an innovative 21st-century company.” So, what exactly does that mean?
In the post-Vietnam-era, the United States has unquestionably emerged as the world’s finest military force. But we have also grown into a ponderous bureaucracy. Some weapons programs, we know, take 10 to 20 years to bring to market. In contrast, Gen. Schriever and his colleagues were able to develop the ICBM, a complex and untested technology, in just five years. However, our challenges transcend irplanes, satellites and bombs. Our personnel methods are also due for an overhaul – the up-or-out system predicated on a 20-year retirement timeline may not be a great fit in an era in which workers are more mobile and flexible than ever.
A call to the future is in essence a framework that helps the Air Force envision how we might harness emerging technologies much more rapidly while allowing airmen to move more freely between active duty military service and the National Guard and Reserve. Perhaps that future includes hypersonic flight, the ability to fly four to five times the speed of sound. Maybe nano technology or increasingly sophisticated unmanned aircraft will be the game changer.
History teaches us that many predictions fail, and it may be just as important to quickly adapt to new ideas rather than try to predict every possible scenario in an uncertain world. In any case, we will be better served by an institutional ethos that places more bets on more ideas and allows us to move at a speed closer to a tech startup company rather than a corporate behemoth. Sixty years ago, Bernard Schriever saw the future and got it right – in a hurry.
We have taken note.
Deborah Lee James is the Secretary of the U.S. Air Force.
