Page 67 - Renorming of Airpower: The F-35 Enters the Combat Fleet

The Renorming of Airpower: The F-35 Arrives into the Combat Force

shift. The legacy aircraft operate in a strike formation, which is linear and runs from Wild Weasels back to
the AWACS.

The F-22 and F-35 are part of distributed operational systems in which the decision makers are distributed
and a honeycomb structure is created around which ISR, C2, strike, and decision-making can be distributed.

A new style of collaborative operations is shaped but takes away the ability of an adversary to simply
eliminate assets like the AWACs and blind the fleet. Distributed operations is the cultural shift associated with
the fifth-generation aircraft and investments in new weapons, remotely piloted aircraft, and the crafting of
simultaneous rather than sequential operations.

Unfortunately, the debate about fifth-generation aircraft continues as if these are simply aircraft, not nodes
driving significant cultural changes in operational capabilities.

In a fascinating book by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore on the courageous men in the British army who fought the
Germans to allow the escape from Dunkirk, some of these lessons were highlighted. (Hugh Sebag-Montefiore,
Dunkirk: Fight to the Last Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

In writing the book, the author provided significant insight into how the British and French lost to the Germans
in the European forests and battlefields. Comments taken from diaries of the survivors provide significant
insight into lessons learned by not engaging in the cultural revolution that one’s new technology provides.

The British and French had new equipment, which, if properly used and embedded into appropriate concepts
of operations, might well have led to a different outcome at the beginning of the war.

And the first lesson here is simply to develop advanced equipment is not even half the job. First and foremost:
“The campaign showed that politicians must never, even in peacetime, deprive their armed forces of the
equipment they need. Complacently assuming that the equipment can be manufactured once war is declared
is demonstrably unwise.” (Ibid. xiv).

A second lesson learned is that if you do not adapt your command structure to the technology, you will lose. A
theme that the author developed was that although the French had tanks, World War I generals who simply
were not able to adapt to the tactics of armored warfare commanded them. These difficulties were
aggravated a hundred times by the style of French leadership.

The soldier who should have had most influence on the way in which the first counterattack was mounted was X
Corps’ commander General Grandsard, who had direct control over the divisions in the Sedan sector. He was
a Corps’ commander General Grandsard, who had direct control over the divisions in the Sedan sector. He
was a general of the old school, who had not understood that French strategy must change in line with
Guderian’s (the German general in charge of the attack) new mobile tactics. (Ibid, 100).

The author when discussing command style introduced a really key term very relevant to the shift from
sequential to simultaneous air operations:

“The need to refer back to Guderian was, however, limited by the entrepreneurial culture he fostered:
German officers were expected to make up their own minds on how to achieve the objectives Guderian set
and how to act in a crisis” (Ibid, 101.)

A third lesson was the importance of getting inside the enemy’s OODA loop. The French command structure
was too slow to use information and to act on that information on a timely manner. The German commanders

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