Rise of the Gutless Air Force Colonel

When the incentives for obedience and ambition are too strong, everybody loses

I like to occasionally chat with my former self.

I think of all the past versions of myself as ghosts, whispering to me the insight essential to improved judgment and decision making as I (hopefully) grow older. You’ll have to ask those in my personal circle whether it’s actually working.

But some of these interactions are exceptionally enlightening. Someone reminded me of an old article I wrote, and after re-reading it, I had to thank my ghost.

Below, I will share the words I wrote seven years ago. I still agree with them, unfortunately. But my ghost tells me to get beyond reacting to the outwardly exhibited behavior of the system I’m critiquing and pull apart why it continues to decay.

Which leads me to share three thoughts as a preamble.

1. Any system of any kind, no matter how ingeniously constructed, is dying from the moment it is born. The better the design, the more naturally durable it will be. But only via watchful and proactive remediation can its decay be slowed and its useful life extended. This goes for governments and institutions, organizations, and processes of all kinds. The article below unpacks how Air Force colonels have gone from comprising the vanguard of combat aviation to acting as glorified day care attendants whose loss of influence is inversely relative to their need for official approval. The reason I return to the issue after seven years to find it in worse condition is that nothing has been done in the interim to arrest the decay.

2. If colonels are generally gutless, it’s because the Air Force wants them to be. Every colonel started as an open-slate Lieutenant, responding to organizational incentives to build a career and a body of work defining their professional identity. If being operationally obsessed and driven by taking care of airmen got colonels promoted, everyone would exhibit such qualities. Since the Air Force incentivizes fawning minionism, everyone figures out what is politically fashionable and then notoriously flies the approved banner. One way to understand the unfolding DEI backlash is from the perspective of airmen who have been shuttled from pillar to post for 30 years, herded constantly to the next social shaping project. This reflects how military life has become a mirror for the constantly shifting faddishness of electoral politics. The services shift emphasis to maintain political approval, but will dependably go too far, flogging key messages until they collapse as a dead horse, then bludgeoning the horse. Colonels were once the umbrella shielding airmen from as much bullshit as possible. Now, they’re chain-feeding the bullshit cannons trained on the rank-and-file.

3. The excessive intrusion of political behavior into military life is a bug, not a feature. Civilian control of military force is a critical, laudable, stone-tablet-level stricture of our system. But we’ve long since crossed the boundary separating control from over-handling. The services have gone from being extensions of politics to extensions of ideology, changing their stripes as different personas inhabit high office. Politicians have entrenched an incentive structure that rewards military officers for silent fealty. This asks more than obedience. It demands conformity. Not only that, it demands sufficient performative activity to suggest the conformity is intellectual and not “merely” a matter of following orders. This is a huge problem. It’s one thing to insist generals follow civilian orders. Another to insist generals mold their organizations in the image of a political party.

Politics is the professional art of misrepresentation in the service of advancing particular interests.

Military leadership is the professional art of principled stewardship in the service of advancing everyone’s interests.

The two can’t coexist. One will eat the other. Which is why senior officers should act a layer of healthy separation and filtration. At this moment, they’re not just permeable. A pipe for delivering shit rather than a screen for stopping it.

Today, there is disruption afoot. With it comes the legit hope of reform.

But if all we do is shake a box of problems and lay it back down, it’s the same box. Same problems.

If the incentives for military advancement continue to showcase political enshittification, the next version of this article will be discussing the rise of the gutless flag officer.

Such an article could be convincingly written even now.

If the incentives shift, and military leadership once again becomes fashionable, we might start promoting based at least partially on character again. We might see the green chutes of tradition regenerating.

Or, to paraphrase Chairman Mao, it might be darkest just before it goes black.

Enjoy the original. Comments and challenges are welcome, as always.

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The problem with promoting someone to Colonel is that doing so vests in that person a belief that s/he has been invited to the Big Time and is destined for generalship.

Both of these beliefs is almost always mistaken. But in the time Colonels are suspended in these mistaken beliefs, they avoid risk so as to preserve the path forward. They grow cowardly. They self-muzzle, self-censor, and self-limit. All to stay in the good graces of Caesar in the fervent hope he will see through the Duffle-esque veneer of mediocrity and glimpse their hidden genius, thereby finding reason beyond their feckless fealty to reward them with the appropriate tablescrap of a new rank conveyed alongside Earthly deification.

What these loyal mutts don’t understand is that they are nearly always past abeam the final approach fix of their careers. Having not run the numbers or having been wilfully allergic to the conclusions yielded by doing so, they haven’t noticed that only about 5% of the Air Force’s Colonels are promoted to Brigadier General.

This is roughly equivalent to the Below-the-Zone promotion percentages to Lieutenant Colonel and Colonel, and that’s no coincidence. If you’re not early to O-6, you have nearly zero chance of ever being an O-7, and that’s because the Air Force insists it’s Brigadiers have perfectly rounded CVs that will help them compete favorably for senior positions on joint staffs. This is keyed directly to the service’s constant vigilance about the size of its budget and the degree of independent authority it is afforded in conducting the air war. When the US made its air service independent, it created an insecure, self-loathing institution riddled with doubts about its place in the warfighting order.

Seven decades later, that insecurity is still filtering into its culture. It drives Big Blue to create generals who may or may not be good leaders, but will certainly be good bureaucrats capable of maneuvering in support of a bigger budget and greater latitude to spend it. To what end? Who cares. There is no unifying vision. Just a grapple for power, and this is the enduring nature of bureaucracy.

Back to our spineless Colonels. What I’ve noticed in the past two decades is a sharp decline in moral courage. As a first-term airman in the early 1990s, later as an NCO engaged in flightline maintenance, and in the years leading to 9/11/01 as a Lieutenant flying C-17s, I saw many examples of Colonels making courageous decisions to defy headquarters expectations and to do right by airmen.

I saw wing commanders order Enlisted Clubs to ignore underage drinking so airmen would drink on base rather than drive or carouse in the adjacent community. I saw operations group commanders cancel Friday flying when too many jets were limping. Better to give maintenance an extra shift to catch up than make weekend duty a certainty for the sake a few more training squares.

I saw a wing commander preserve full per diem for his deployed airmen because they were getting subpar service at the deployed chow hall. I even saw a deputy commander for maintenance scrub the annual PT run because his airmen had been forced to complete two unscheduled readiness exercises in the prior month, leaving no one any time to work out.

I’ve seen group commanders tell generals “no.” You can’t have that extra mission, because we’re already over-committed and we need to train. No, you can’t force us to pick up a bunch more downrange missions for this week because it will spread experience too thin and spike risk assessments for our new aircraft commanders.

No, you can’t have your pet love child upgraded in special ops to help their career because we only allow the best pilots through that door. And no, you can’t bump a newly arriving family out of billeting to accommodate the bloated coterie coat-tailing you on a visit you don’t even need to make.

But between those days and these days, something has changed.

Colonels don’t take courageous stands anymore. They’re basically latter day Master Sergeants, taking the world as they find it, following orders, and enjoying the comparative serenity of having fewer people outrank them. They’re knowledgeable and wise, but numb to mediocrity and abuse, accepting both to a fault.

Here’s why that’s a problem.

Our system is one of authority. More specifically, an intricate and ornate system of balancing, contending, and counterweighting authority structures where it is expected that those with legal authority will exercise it to the fullest in fulfilling their organizational mandates, sometimes creating marginal skirmishes with others seeking to do the same.

When one node of the system ceases flexing its authority, a vacuum is created and swiftly filled with authority emanating from a competing node in the system. In the present-day Air Force, Colonels have ceded their power to headquarters staffs and the generals who run them. This explains why Air Force bases have devolved into cultural replicas of miserable staffs, complete with the various infections that plague human cubicle farms.

Blind rule-following accompanied by robotic rule recitation devoid of reasoning. Bureaucratic manipulation, posturing, and maneuver for their own sake. Antagonism between two responsible people who work in different offices in the same organization. Terminal shoulder shrugging. Ennui. These are the wages of staff duty. They have now become fixtures of Air Force life at wing level, because our Colonels have permitted it to happen.

This is because they are gutless.

They refuse to risk anything until they realize they have no chance of making Brigadier General, at which point they become more bold and more inspirational. If they would have logically reasoned in the beginning that they had nigh on zero chance in the first place, they might have had minerals all along. What a world that would be.

So here’s my pitch to all you Colonels out there: you’re already dead.

You’re afraid to take risks because you still think there’s a chance you’ll make general, but it’s not going to happen. The sooner you recognize that you have no chance of advancing beyond your current rank, the sooner you’ll start using your authority like a proper Colonel.

(This is, of course, a paraphrase from a scene in Band of Brothers).

The Air Force once had a proud tradition of bold Colonels flipping the bird at the institution in order to guard the flame of combat capability. When it was healthy, the service promoted enough of those renegades to fortify itself at the highest levels. When it stopped doing that, calcified by decades of budget hawking, it lost something important.

It also sent a strong signal to O-6s that they would not pass muster for O-7 unless they proved at every turn they were willing to kneel and kiss the ring. Far too many have conformed to this expectation. Because of this, airmen have been robbed of the base-level leadership necessary to safeguard their interests — chiefly their ability to get the job done free from excessive harassment by the queep enforcers and mattress police.

In today’s Air Force, the spineless are rewarded far more often than renegades. This has led to a bloat of useless “senior” leaders who are far more interested in pleasing their bosses than taking care of their airmen.

We will need to see a reversal of this trend if the service is to have any chance of thriving in the future as anything more than a mediocre human filing cabinet with cool toys.

TC is a retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel. No, he was not passed over for Colonel, but retired before meeting the board. He currently works as an independent writer and voice on leadership, operations, and organizations.