We have made some advances in transforming military capabilities and operations. In Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, close coordination between air and land forces allowed the defeat of a large, well-equipped force by a smaller less heavily armed coalition made up of U.S. Special Forces supporting the forces of local warlords. This new model was successfully expanded in Operation Iraqi Freedom, when an airman, Lieutenant General Buzz Mosley, commanded air and land elements used to keep the Iraqi Army off balance in the desert expanses of western Iraq. This broke the tradition—or perhaps myth—that only leaders with experience as soldiers could command land forces.

Elsewhere in Iraq, land commanders with far less experience employing airpower sent a large force of Apache gunships against Iraqi divisions defending the southern approach to Baghdad. Because they did not understand how to employ these elements, the raid was unsuccessful, and all the gun-ships were hit with ground-to-air fire, while inflicting little or no damage on the Iraqi tanks and artillery. Most airmen would have known that the helicopters needed fixed-wing support to suppress the enemy antiaircraft fire and to gain the air superiority needed for the slow-moving helicopters to survive.

This lack of appreciation and understanding underscores the reasons behind the Goldwater-Nichols legislation in the 1980s, and the Rumsfeld Transformation efforts after the turn of the millennium. Transformation took the joint team approach inherent in the Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reform Act to new levels of intensity.

COMMAND AND CONTROL

In every major military operation since the Vietnam War, U.S. forces have operated as a joint force. Yet problems remained, primarily in the areas referred to as command and control. In military terms, “command” often translates to mean ownership; “control” tracks what a force is doing and how commands are relayed. The underlying basis for debates about who has command is that previously noted failure of land, sea, air, or space elements to trust one another.

If I am a land commander and I have command of airpower, then I know it will be there when my land forces need support. Unfortunately, this attitude may actually be shortsighted, for the airpower may be used to destroy the enemy attackers even before they can start to engage the friendly land forces. In Desert Storm the land forces’ surface-to-air radar-guided Patriot missiles were placed under my command as the air-component commander. My job was to make sure no Iraqi aircraft could drop bombs on our Coalition ground forces.