We Need Different Generals

Top airmen are locked in a status quo which is placing American defense at risk

There’s a saying in pilot world. “You don’t know you’ve lost situational awareness until you regain it. And sometimes, it’s too late.”

America’s Air Force has been led for three decades by generals raised and housed in a paradigm that is bureaucratic, unprincipled, and padlocked on budgets rather than people.

As a result, our Air Force is in deep shit. And as a result of that, so too is our defense.

The season of change in our politics creates opportunity, and therein flickers faint optimism. I believe certain reforms will matter more in this moment than others. I suggest one such reform here.

---

Not everything about the current shakeup in American public administration is sweetness and light. But one encouraging aspect is disruption of the defense establishment.

I encourage Pete Hegseth and his team to review how our most senior generals, admirals, and enlisted advisors are selected, and how they are developed in the years leading to selection.

This will mean wrestling with law and policy, to include the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act, routinely cited by rule-clutching human safety cones who keep us locked in a cycle of entropy.

We’ll also have to put Goldwater-Nichols on the table. But we should. We passed it four decades ago to force the services to work together. That part worked. But it’s since been weaponized by various trough-feeding or bureaucracy-protecting interests.

The mixed results of our defense activity since the 1990s tell us it’s time for a bottom-up review.

And if we seek to establish a continuing advantage over our adversaries, we desperately need a step change in the quality of leadership in the senior ranks.

---

I've watched USAF closely for 35 years. The generals who have led our service since Ron Fogleman resigned in 1997 have been strikingly similar. All cut from more or less the same cloth.

• They know the budget process to an atomic level.

• They're good at PR and image maintenance, which makes them allergic to public extemporizing.

• They’re adept at bureaucracy.

• They spend their influence on equipment and organizations with people as an afterthought. Which is exactly backwards. And they limit themselves to influence. When what we sometimes need is advocacy.

• They struggle to hear and act on feedback from the field, partially because they surround themselves with hyper-loyalist horse holders who create an insular distortion field preventing the intrusion of unsettling truth.

• They favor centralized control *and* centralized execution, because their nostalgia and status-driven arrogance trap them into thinking today's airmen are less capable than they were in their heyday. Which is exactly backwards.

Digression.

Gen. Ray Johns is a perfect example. He ran Air Mobility Command back in ‘11 when I was running a squadron. I led a 3-ship night combat mission to a first-ever drop zone using a novel airdrop method in the Middle East while he was in Illinois steeping a tea bag in the comfort of his leather-adorned command suite.

The radio and data links connecting us were severed, so he was unable to control me from standoff. He bitched and moaned to anyone who would listen as it unfolded beyond his grasp. He was busily constructing the gallows, presuming I’d screw it all up without his molecular involvement.

Except we did just fine. In fact, I believe his involvement would have caused us to fail, because success that night required a dash of expertise-fueled boldness and dynamic risk assessment. Skills excluded from his grooming, to make room for more assignments learning about bureaucracy, budgets, and horse holding.

In exhibiting a mentality preferring asphyxiating control to the development and trust of warfighting commanders, Johns fits perfectly with the USAF general officer archetype that has taken hold in the past three decades.

• They struggle holding senior officers accountable for reasons of both cronyism and corporate image protection.

• They tend to be politically maladroit and ill-connected compared to sister service counterparts.

Perhaps more than anything, they are drawn too easily into small issues, creating the perception among airmen that they prefer inconsequential details and distractions to the major challenges confronting the service.

These approaches have eroded trust and confidence within and beyond the service over generations. The Air Force we have now is as banged up as ever.

Which brings me to Gen. David Allvin, our 23rd Chief of Staff.

He's written an OpEd recently in Breaking Defense. Read it here.

In it, he is clear in laying out the argument that his service is underfunded. He says America needs more Air Force.

I agree with him. Moreover, I give Allvin credit for being more vocal and forceful than his predecessors in sounding the readiness alarm.

If those who held his role a decade ago had shown as much resolve, Allvin’s argument might not have been necessary. There was still time to prevent and minimize the impacts of systemic under-funding back then.

But service leaders at that time lacked the courage to bare its warts. If it admitted it needed more people to reduce mission overstretch and more infrastructure investment to slow down black mold, funding might get diverted to those issues at the expense of the F-35 program. Not only that, the generals might look bad.

So, Mark Welsh went to Congress for budget hearings, and when asked about morale, replied that it was “pretty darn good.”

That gutless moment ruined him with most of his airmen. It also preserved a gangrenous status quo, the effects of which are obvious today.

Which brings us back to Gen. Allvin’s OpEd.

While I appreciate that he’s at least being honest in conclusory fashion, his overall message is more whimper than yawp. Far from breaking the norm of public constraint, he situates his message squarely within it.

• Allvin rests his entire argument on a coming war with China. This is a favored corporate tactic for the Air Force, because fear of a big war pries wallets loose and buying the weapons to fight it creates political and budgetary allies. But it’s also a strategic and budgetary cul-de-sac. If our strategic thinking changes, this foundation is gone and the argument collapses.

• He's focused, as ever, on modernization. What about needing tens of thousands more people and tens of billions more in funding to train and develop them? He gestures toward these things, but they’re not prominent in what he conveys. There’s no explicit mention that pilot training has been lopped in half.

• He doesn’t mention the service is short of pilots. That’s a fact likely to stir appropriate shit-curdling fear in Americans and their legislators. Why is it missing from this argument? Is this another example of burying the lede to protect service image? Has pilot retention been “pretty darn good?”

• Interestingly, Allvin admits what previous generals have denied, which is that readiness has been deliberately eroded by leaders to pay for other imperatives without as many “political consequences.”

This gets high marks for honesty. It’s the boldest statement in the entire piece. But it admits that we’ve been telling a lie of omission for years at the expense of an air service ready to do its job.

Is that even forgivable? I suggest that it is for now, but only because we haven’t had our drawers yanked down by an enemy. Yet.

What we should notice is a pile of generals, stacked like cord wood, laying in the ditch, their careers ended after their vehement, vocal, public, persistent protest against a funding level leaving the nation’s defense compromised. We don’t notice that.

Which brings me to the last glaring omission.

In his article, where Allvin admirably attempts to paint a picture of the Air Force digestible by stakeholders both empowered and ordinary, he makes no mention of the most important cultural element of the service: its core values.

Integrity. Service. Excellence.

These values define what it means to serve in an Air Force uniform. Or they did. And they must again.

The omission of integrity as a north star in Allvin’s thought process aligns with an excessively political and bureaucratic paradigm. One driven by budgetary interest rather than the cultivation of aerial expertise fueled by fighting spirit.

---

When Ron Fogleman retired early in 1997 rather than be complicit in the scapegoating of one of his leaders over the Khobar Towers bombing, he was modeling something of paramount importance to our defense.

That a military force's lifeblood is a unifying set of principles that serve as a ballast. They keep everyone in the same place as the forces of strategy and policy and budget and politics and combat try to pull them hither and yon.

These principles are more important than any individual or career. They’re not to be rationalized away or compromised. They’re to be preserved, even at personal expense.

The Air Force seems to have taken the wrong lesson, calculating the key to its future was to look and act and conform more to bureaucratic politics.

That approach is antithetical to principles. Politics melts principle in a foundry of galloping interest. Which pretty much describes the service’s fate since 1997.

Gen. Allvin ultimately situates himself comfortably within the mold of the past 30 years. Chiefs of Staff have become so pliably timid in the public square that Allvin’s OpEd will have seemed bold to him.

He thinks he’s thumping his chest. And by the rules of the existing paradigm, he is.

But by the rules of the paradigm we need, he actually understates his case. He downplays or softens key points.

The Air Force needs a lot more airmen, a lot more training, and a lot more capacity. If we don’t have those things, we will grow more vulnerable to a cataclysmic breach of our interests, and perhaps even our safety, by the day.

That’s the message I think he was looking for.

---

But there’s another problem with the existing paradigm I’m bleating about. Because it frames everything bureaucratically, it’s crawling with waste, mis-prioritization, and nonsense.

Before I would give the service a dime, I would ask Allvin to demonstrate that it's doing all it can do with the budget it already gets.

There’s evidence that despite the service’s predicament, it continues to obsess over distracting minutiae and the rearrangement of deck chairs. And there’s evidence Allvin and his gang are complicit in making this tendency worse.

He’s been in his role for over a year now. He’s traveled the world, talking to airmen directly. He’s had time to study the issues. And he seems to have landed in the same spot as always: uniforms.

Every few years, airmen get a new Chief of Staff. They wait with nervous anticipation to understand the focus and orientation of their 4-star leadership team, understanding the profound impact it’ll have on daily service life.

And every time, with watch-synchronizing regularity, the generals emerge from their star chamber with the same tired, unimaginative priority: dress and appearance standards.

In June of last year, Gen. Ken Wilsbach sent a memo to the planet’s premier tactical warfighting command. The subject: dress and appearance standards.

Ken asserted there was a problem. A “noticeable decline” in standards. He didn’t provide any evidence or data to support himself. He just issued some commandments.

The approach makes him a great fit to become CEO of Amazon after he retires.

Solution in Search of a Problem

It was unpopular with airmen. It seemed like a dubious if not absurd focus area in a service teeming with massive issues. Such as declining readiness, reduced training budgets, persistent high tempo with its lowest-ever manpower. A suicide rate that continues to set grim new records. Declining airmanship and flying expertise, officially noted after the total loss of a B-1 bomber in a training accident.

Fast forward six months. Allvin is focused on arguing for more budget, right?

Yes, but he’s also evidently crawling in the weeds with Wilsbach, obsessing over uniforms, uniform inspections, beard waivers, and other “standards.”

He made a video about it.

I give it a 0/4. Would not watch again.

This is not an argument that uniform standards don’t matter. They do.

But the commonly advanced argument that if a thread is permitted to hang from someone’s uniform we will immediately find ourselves bending at the knee to a hopefully merciful victor is just pure bullshit.

Generals love Broken Windows Theory. Because it justifies over-focus on small things. Because, as the theory goes, if we don’t take care of them, the big things will also suffer.

There’s absolutely no evidence supporting that statement. Not in an Air Force context. Some of our best warfighters have looked like a bag of mud in uniform. Robin Olds is our poster model warrior airman, and he routinely pushed the bounds of uniform standards when he wasn’t busy incinerating enemies.

He rolled his sleeves. He wore non-issue gloves. He carried his own personal survival knife because it was better than the one he was issued. His moustache was ridiculous and legendary.

Olds understood what we’ve somehow forgotten. Teaching people how to wear the uniform is accomplished in basic training. It’s the first thing we teach them. It’s something we take for granted. It’s unworthy of senior officer focus in the operational Air Force.

That’s a rebuttable presumption. But the rebuttal requires evidence. Not Ken’s feelings. Not Dave’s impressions.

---

After decades of observation, my take is deeply critical. And it rides on the back of one of the oldest realities of warfare and civilization.

Leaders who can’t do what they should settle for doing what they can.

Generals obsess over uniforms because they feel unable to attack the real issues previously mentioned. The big problems. So they default to issues within their grasp.

This makes them feel consequential even if deep down, in places they don’t talk about at parties, they feel feeble and powerless. Sure, it annoys airmen. Sure, it’s performative. But it’s either that or get busy risking their careers by advocating notoriously for the resources to do what actually needs to be done.

But here’s the problem for taxpayers.

We didn’t develop Gen. Allvin for forty years at the cost of tens of millions of dollars so he could focus on issues we already pay NCOs to handle. If NCOs are unable to handle uniform compliance, then we attack NCO development.

We need generals to do something else: leadership.

---

Leadership includes a noticeable moral identity. Convictions a leader is willing to defend and sacrifice for.

It also includes putting people first, always.

“Machines don't fight wars. Terrain doesn't fight wars. Humans fight wars. You must get into the minds of humans. That's where the battles are won.”

The man who said that wasn’t an infantry soldier. It was Col. John Boyd, a fighter pilot who was forced to trade his career to advance his convictions. A pattern too common in our Air Force. A pattern fed by the political pathology of the current paradigm.

More than ever, we need leaders with the courage and imagination to tackle the big issues instead of defaulting to the same tired crap.

In rock music, there’s a thing called “going for the easy A.” When you hear a band making records with songs that sound more/less the same, they’ve determined what sells. What will hit. What their fans want. And rather than risk themselves like the artists many were in the journey to success, they default to playing it safe.

Our generals are doing the same thing. They are military version of Nickelback.

But it won’t make us more lethal. If we keep doing it, we might learn lethality in a more grim and visceral way.

---

I think we need to start looking beyond the current pool of senior officers for our next leadership team. They were all raised in the wrong paradigm.

Dig deeper down. Find the operators who have education coupled with passion. Pragmatism and moxie together. Those in touch with what’s actually happening.

The best person to run a useless, calcified, cumbersome, inanimate bureaucracy that wants to stay that way is someone who meets one of two criteria.

Either (a) totally incompetent, as in a banjo-strumming pimp someone plucked off the street, or (b) the elder, experienced, pragmatic human equivalent of a bowl of oatmeal. Someone who stopped genuinely caring long ago, but knows how to create appearance to the contrary. A caretaker with dozens of ribbons who is already shopping for a golf cart.

I want us to try someone (c) old enough to know, young enough to care, educated enough to learn, and humble enough to listen. Throw in some gravitas, and you have a persona capable of influence wherever and however needed.

If we keep regarding human purpose, non-linearity, and stridency as bugs rather than features, we will continue providing palliative care to a dying all-volunteer force.

Then we’ll get sucker punched.

Then we’ll resort to conscription to fight and quite possibly lose our next war. Or worse, our weakness will be seen as unacceptable risk and we’ll use weapons invented to never be used as proxies for the human capability our generals were supposedly building all these decades.

It takes precious few dots to connect irresponsible catatonia on defense readiness and pulling the temple down.

Those are the stakes we’re playing with when we tolerate 4-minute videos on eliminating stray uniform threads from our most senior and responsible Air Force general.

You don’t know you’ve lost situational awareness until you regain it. And sometimes, it’s too late. Let’s get someone at the controls who understands the urgency of this moment.

Before it’s too late.

TC is a retired Air Force officer and independent voice on defense issues.