The USAF has announced its next Commander for PACAF: Lt. Gen. Lori Robinson. She’s currently the Vice-Commander for Air Combat Command.
Lt. Gen. Robinson won’t be the first woman to command one of the Air Component Commands. And she won’t be the USAF’s first female 4-star, either.
But I do have to admit one thing about the announcement gives me pause. And it’s not the general’s gender.
It’s also not her leadership ability. It’s exceptionally rare for someone to get to the O-9 level without being a good leader.
It’s the fact that she’s not a pilot. She’s an air battle manager.
Call me old fashioned, but I think someone who commands an organization with a mission of flying in combat simply needs to be someone who’s been a pilot themselves. (The previous female Air Combat Component commander – at AFRICOM – reputedly was a longtime transport aircraft pilot.)
But I’m neither an aviator nor a zoomie. Maybe I’m wrong.
Comments?
Hondo,
I agree on the pilot qual ticket being punched.
However, she has an impressive resume as a “air battle commander” already.
Hey, I wish her luck.
She good looking too … That always helps!
Carry on!
I’ve worked with AF bubbas a lot. There is a huge network and lots of dick waving among the pilot community. Of course, you MUST be a fighter pilot or you suck. But what kind of jet makes a huge difference be it Eagles, Lawn Darts, Hogs, etc. And well, trash haulers suck as do bomber guys. Crew Dogs (folks in the back of AWACS and JSTARS), well, they’re right there with missile toads.
Whenever a new 4 star was named it harkens back to to the old Kremlin watching to see what cult is in power. If the new CSAF is an Eagle guy….oh hell no say the Lawn Dart drivers…the world is at the end. I think, but not sure, that it was a bomber guy one time and the fighter guys almost mutinied.
I wish the Crew Dog General well. She’s had crap thrown at her before so she’s used to it. I hope she got the job for her quals, not her gender.
At this level of command, being a pilot is more tradition than necessity. Once you get beyond Wing level a bit, the need for pilot wings is just not necessary because the job is much more about management of assets than any one technical job. There are plenty of pilots to command flying squadrons and technically trained personnel for every other type of squadron, like docs to command medical ops, for instance.
Whatever career fields the numbered AF and other large commands draw from for senior leadership, it behooves them to place persons there with experience in more than a single area. The major commands deal with all the personnel and assets ranging far beyond aircraft. While pilots may be able to fairly easily acquire those additional skills, they are not the only ones who have them.
No, I don’t see this as a problem. I also don’t see it becoming a particular trend either. Pretty much all activity in the Air Force centers around flying, so folks who fly will likely always be well represented in senior leadership positions.
OWB: I am well aware that a GO/FO in command deals with all functions their command performs – internal and external. And I fully agree that the individual selected needs to be experienced in multiple aspects of their job.
What I see as a problem with your position is that an individual who’s never actually performed the jobs he/she is asking their troops to perform has at best only academic knowledge of what he/she is asking their troops to do. And academic experience, no matter how good, is not a substitute for the visceral knowledge that comes with actually doing that job for a period of time yourself.
In Army terms, this would be equivalent to giving a combat support or combat service support officer command of a field Army. Could they do the job? Perhaps. And perhaps they’d do it well. But unless they’ve been a prior combat arms officer who transferred to the combat support or combat service support side as an O3 or O4, they simply won’t have the experience base that someone who’s actually “been there and done that” down in the trenches. And I see that as a problem – maybe small, maybe big.
For everyone’s sake, I hope this selection was indeed made solely on merit. And perhaps it was – maybe this Lt. Gen. is simply the best qualified officer in the USAF to serve as PACAF Commander.
But I have to say I find it a bit hard to believe there wasn’t a similarly qualified and successful pilot with the same level of expertise. Just the way that I’d find it hard to believe that a career logistician or signal officer of either gender was the best qualified commander for the Army Component of CENTCOM, ARCENT.
I hear ya, Hondo! It does seem rather odd. But, my point is that the higher up the food chain one goes, the less need there is for individual technical knowledge of specific jobs, to include doctoring, engineering, piloting, and every other job specialty.
Does a commander need to know anything about doctoring to command a medical squadron? Probably. But that doc reports to someone who is not a doc. When that commander needs info to properly manage the medical squadron, there are plenty of experts from whom to seek advice.
Same principle applies all the way up the chain of command, with commanders at each level being responsible for areas beyond their personal area of expertise. But, they also have experts at their disposal in each of those areas.
At some point in the chain, it becomes how well the managers can manage people, equipment, and facilities not how much they know about flying.
OWB: again, we differ. Military commanders are IMO not primarily managers. If they were, we could make the position a civilian one, hire the “best and brightest” from civilian industry to fill it, and give them a military deputy and operations manager and be just as well off. Unfortunately, we pretty much tried that during McNamara’s days at the Pentagon (see “whiz kids”, AKA “McNamara’s happy little hot dogs”). That didn’t exactly work out too well. Rather, senior military leaders are leaders first, and managers second. Knowing something about those jobs from having been there personally is quite worthwhile (I would hold essential) – particularly when leading troops in combat. Managing assets and technical capabilities is a large part of any senior leader’s job; ditto long-range planning. But in a military senior leader, managing is – and always will remain – the second most important thing they do. The most important thing they do is – and will always remain – leading and inspiring their people. In peacetime, one can get by with those performing senior leadership roles being essentially managers vice leaders. However, that rapidly leads to disaster in wartime. One example: consider Lloyd Fredenhall, US Army II Corps commander in North Africa in 1942-early 1943. He was an exemplary peacetime soldier and manager of troops and assets. He was one of Marshall’s favorites, which led to Eisenhower selecting him for a critical role in North Africa. But Fredenhall was not a particularly good leader. His lack of leadership and inability to inspire his troops – as well as his lack of knowledge of front-line conditions – led directly to the US debacle at Kasserine Pass. He was later transferred back to CONUS and given a training command. He did fairly well there – in a role that was primarily managerial. About Fredenhall, the most telling phrase was uttered by Walter “Beetle” Smith: “He was a good Colonel before the war.” Fredenhall’s case is the most jarring. But he’s hardly the sole example. In many respects, IMO Westmoreland was much the same in Vietnam. The only essential differences I… Read more »
We actually do not entirely disagree, Hondo. Management of military assets means something quite different to me than the management of civilian assets, for instance. While all leaders, whether military or civilian must be able to lead, only those civilian jobs such as police and firefighting approach the military need, especially in combat, for leaders able to make instant life and death decisions while inspiring others to follow them into those situations.
Perhaps my slightly different perspective comes from knowing so many, perhaps a much larger percentage than in other branches of service (I really don’t know that for sure), more USAF people are directly involved in making those life and death decisions from those safe, secure non-combat positions. The guys who maintain the transport aircraft that deliver the paratroopers, for instance. All the enlisted folks who develop the schedules, send the planes out, and all that stuff. Always got the impression that we in USAF were much more into that functional authority thing without respect to rank than are the other services.
Point being that a very large percentage of us, especially on the ANG side, were directly involved in placing others in harms way in our day-to-day jobs whether we were wearing a couple of stripes or a few stars. Perhaps that is why I, maybe others as well, are not alarmed by this appointment. At least some of us are accustomed to getting the information we need from whoever has that information and taking charge when we are required to do so even when it means telling folks with much more rank than we have what to do and where to go.
Excellent read of the points of view. I feel that she must be qualified or would have never gotten as far as she did. Further more, I disagree with the rhetoric that she would serve the position better if she were a pilot. That idea is outdated and archaic. She is a versatile leader, her 32 years of various assignments more than qualifies her for the command position.
Back in the early 90s, the AF Times published an article asking why 8 of the 9 Major Commands were headed by fighter pilots. In tru AF “Crimes” fashion, they splashed it across the cover. In the Vice Chief of Staff’s office, there was a copy of the article on his desk. If you turned the paper over, the answer to the question was right there. It said “Because we didn’t want the ninth.”
As one of the resident zoomies, I don’t see an issue. At this level it would be battle and asset management anyway. Hard to be a good Air Battle Manager with out knowing the capabilities of the air assets in the AOR. I agree with others, at this stage in the game being a pilot is more traditional, as long as she has experience/success in managing large numbers of people/air assets she should be OK.
Well said. AWACS Bubbas and Bubettes know the capabilities of their flock and have bailed many of the jets out of trouble.
I recall one story about a Crew Dog that saved a Saudi jet and the royalty wanted to honor the crew member on the ramp when the E3 landed but were shocked when they saw that the crew member was female.
SJ: I have no doubt they know the capabilities of the platforms. But that’s not the key question.
The key question is whether they can lead those operating those platforms as well as someone who’s actually “been there and done that” themselves.
Well since she already has experiance telling the fighter jocks ‘where to go’ amd ‘what to do’ as a battle manager, I think she’ll do fine. 🙂
Glad she got the job and I’m sure she deserves it, but what the fuck is an “air battle manager.” Sorry, ignorant Army grunt here.
The short version: they manage the air campaign, directing sorties to on call targets/re-hits, flight paths, air intercepts, refuling reprioritization the whole smash. At the tacticle level its usually from the back of an AWACS and other air craft. At the strategic level from the AOC.
She went to the school.
Maybe just a tad bit more complicated than that.
If by “the school” you’re talking the USAFA, MCPO – that would be a “no”. Lt. Gen. Robinson is a UNH ROTC grad.
I thought MCPO meant the Fighter Weapons School at Nellis which includes, reluctantly, other than fighter folks. It is the Holy Grail. You gotta have that patch and I bet the General does.
OT: I, an Army guy, was in the Nellis O’Club on a Fri night after a stint at Irwin. There was a contingent of fighter pilots, male and female, smoking cigars. One of the females was wearing a name tag that said “Mounds”. I commented to an AF bud that I could see how she got that call sign even in a flight suit. He said, el wrongo…she got it because Almond Joys have nuts and Mounds do not.
1986 distinguished graduate of USAF FWS.
Wow! I now see she also commanded the 552 ACW at Tinker and is the Vice at Langley. She’s earned her spurs, I’d say. Her bio is at http://www.af.mil/AboutUs/Biographies/Display/tabid/225/Article/108119/lieutenant-general-lori-j-robinson.aspx
Fighter pilots becoming dinosaurs? Fmr Secy Def Robert Gates I think started the ball rolling on putting fighter pilots on notice that they are no longer slam dunks for high command. The previous CSAF Gen Norton Schwartz was the first transport pilot ever to be assigned chief & first non fighter pilot since early 1970s. The current AF Vice Chief is a career comptroller.
GEN Janet Wolfenbarger (not a pilot) took over AFMC a couple yrs ago…normally assigned to pilots.
OK, FPs are still the alpha dogs in USAF, but their stranglehold on major commands appear to be slipping.
Interestingly, the Navy hasn’t had a aviator as CNO or VCNO in several yrs. The newly installed VCNO ADM Michelle Howard isn’t one either. The last time an aviator was CNO was way back in 2000.
Where actual fighter air craft are conserned the biggest limitation on what thechnology and the bird can do is the physiological limitations of the on board pilot. I.e. we can build air craft today that can handel speeds and manuvers that would be impossible it there were a living body onboard. So it makes sence to start breeding out the have to be a ‘fighter pilot’ ego out now.
Well, lemme just throw on my nomex Underoos, and then I’ll just drop this right here:
Any fool with a dick and a stick can fly an airplane. Most people not Oregon “lawers” can even keep them in the air.
But how to USE those planes? That takes a bit of doing.
And that’s exactly what we train the ABMs to do.
Zinger +10
Fox 4
So, NHSparky – would you have been perfectly OK with serving on a sub with a CO who’d never previously served on a submarine before commanding one? Or serving under a SUBRON CO or COMSUBPACFLT who’d spent their entire career as an aviator or surface sailor, never having a sub assignment?
For some jobs, having been there yourself matters – greatly. And commanding a combat force at any level is IMO one such job.
And, for the record: no, not just any “Joe Blow off the street” can become proficient at flying a military aircraft – any more than any guy/gal off the street can learn how to “keep the rock hot”. The skills required are different, but the skills required to do either proficiently and reliably are not universal. That’s true of all military specialties, including the combat arms.
Ah, and there is the rub, Hondo. I completely agree that a technical job needs to be supervised/commanded by someone with that specific technical knowledge. Where we seem to diverge in our opinions is at what point the transition occurs from technician to manager.
The situation may well be exactly as you describe for the Army – a commander of boots on the ground should have experience being boots on the ground himself. Makes sense to me. In the USAF, however, most jobs tend to be observing condition X, therefore plan 123 is implemented. The decision to implement plan 123 is made by whoever observes the existence of condition X. Doesn’t matter if the airman making the observation is a pilot, maintainer, or finance officer.
Something else about USAF about which you may not be aware is that almost everyone wears multiple hats. For instance, a finance guy may be a load planner during mobility operations. A squadron training NCO may be giving final mission briefings to pilots. Those additional duties are assigned with little regard for rank/current assignment but solely upon technical expertise in the field. (It makes for some interesting passenger assignments on transport aircraft when the briefers and others involved in the mobilization are being deployed themselves.)
OWB, your comment about dual-hatting is true – up to perhaps the O6 level of command. Above that level it’s been my experience that the various functions become specialized, with each function having their own staff section performing those roles as primary duties. Those sections are also in general headed by individuals who have become functional experts in those areas. But I will not claim that’s universally the case at senior levels of command. I think the difference between our two positions is more fundamental than you allude to above. And I also think it reflects a basic philosophical difference between your service (USAF/USAFR/ANG). At least, that’s been my impression of the other 3 armed services over a continuing and continuous professional association with DoD spanning in excess of 39 years now. You keep referring to senior military leaders as “managers” and implying that’s the primary role of a senior military leader. Frankly, it also seems to me that you are equating management and leadership. From what I’ve seen over my career, I believe that both of those statements accurately reflect the USAF’s true institutional thinking in this area – potential doctrinal statements from the LeMay Center to the contrary notwithstanding. IMO, both of those positions are incorrect. Senior military leaders are most properly leaders first – and managers second. Further, management and leadership are not equivalent. They require related, but different, skills; they have related, but different, aims. Management concerns itself with using organizational resources appropriately and wisely. Leadership concerns itself with influencing human behavior to achieve a desired end. Yes, it is true that people are often thought of as an “organizational resource”. However, that statement is somewhat misleading. One can manage activities or objects. People are neither activities nor objects; they are individuals with free will, and react in a broad range of ways to a given situation. People cannot be managed like aircraft or trucks or the processing of supply requisitions; they must be inspired to do their job well, in spite of personal inconvenience or danger. In short – they must be led, not merely… Read more »
Won’t argue with your analysis, although one point does need to be made. Yes, senior leaders are expected to be both good managers and good leaders because senior leaders simply cannot do all the parts of their jobs without both.
Management can be delegated. Leadership cannot. Management can be performed by a committee. Leadership cannot. Management skills can be taught. Leadership skills, while they can be improved, tweaked, encouraged, nurtured, developed, or however one would wish to characterize it, cannot be taught to an individual who lacks the moral clarity, intuitive and analytical skills in appropriate balance, and all those other things that good leaders bring with them. You either have it or you do not have it.
To bring it back to the discussion at hand, a pilot can be taught to be a good manager, but is no more likely than anyone other airman to be a good leader.
I think the higher up one goes, the less one thinks tactically and more strategically.
While I would have a problem having a CO with no submarine experience, I would have less trouble with, say, an SSBN CO with only SSN or SSGN experience, or vice versa, even though that doesn’t happen often.
We have more/varied commands in the Navy, so it really doesn’t bother me when PACFLT is a skimmer, submariner, or Airedale, so long as they have enough knowledge of each branch and the staffs to assist in using those forces.
YMMV.
Perhaps I used the wrong Naval acronyms above, NHSparky.
I wasn’t talking about the Commander, Pacific Fleet not being a submariner – from what I understand, that’s generally the case. Rather, I was talking about a scenario where the commander of your Submarine squadron or the Commander, Submarine Forces Pacific, had zero career submarine experience prior to assuming command of those organizations.
Sorry for any confusion. Thought I had been clear enough, but apparently not.
Sorry Hondo you’re off track on this one I am afraid. I am biased because I chose not to go the fighter route, but as a zoomie and someone who has been in since 2003, I can tell you that you will find better leadership and more applicability to todays wars outside of the pilot corps than inside it.
The reality is that manned Air Force pilots have been marginally relevant during the last decade of war. This is largely our own doing in that our airpower is so overwhelming that there is little to do from a combat perspective. Yes, we do CAS and re-supply in high demand, but largely in a support role to Marines and Soldiers. There is almost no interdiction in the world and A/A is a dream.
Beyond that, “leadership” from the flying corps doesn’t truly start until about the mid-level captain level when you have a handful of mostly peers to account for. Even at the Squadron and Group level the bulk of the leadership is in the form of managing non-flyers. This is not WWII or Vietnam where you are losing lots of people doing very hairy runs.
Where you are finding leadership is with Civil Engineering (includes EOD), Security Forces, Intelligence and Logistics airmen who are actually out there with their joint bretheren on the ground doing the job. We had about 8 years where we we did tens of thousands of individual mobilizations to army/marine units and were filling gaps in ground support roles.
That is who we should have running the Air Force. That said, increasingly the Air Force’s role looks like it will be in Space and Cyberspace – so that is probably where we will continue to excel in the coming decades and as a result our leadership should reflect that.
Hat tip Capt K. You give us old timers a new perspective. Well done.
It the USAF wants to go down the route of allowing non-pilots to command numbered air forces and/or Air Component Commands, that is the USAF’s prerogative. I personally think that policy is ill-advised, but I’m not the one making the decision. I wish Lt. Gen. Robinson well in her coming command, and I certainly hope she’s successful.
I also hope the US Army has the good sense to retain its current de facto policy of limiting command of warfighting commands (Divisions/Corps/Field Armies/Army Component Commands) to combat-arms officers. Knowing from personal experience what you are asking your front-line troops do because you’ve been there yourself IMO should be a precondition for such a command. Some things you only learn by being there.
Even if Lt. Gen. Robinson and others are successful, my opinion on this matter won’t change. Experience matters. And for certain jobs, IMO some experiences matter far more than others.
But Hondo, we have a president with no experience and…. oh wait, that helps your point
Kind of a different and special case, SJ. The President is elected, not selected based on demonstrated competence and ability. And the US electorate often gets fooled, sometimes selecting style over substance.
Good leaders, in the public and the private sectors, will lead well, whether or not they are qualified to do the jobs of those they lead. I am trying to appreciate that military leadership is quite different but, thus far, I have not been able to do so. The only issue I see with Robinson’s situation is that if her office is, say, in a Lightning or other aircraft, she may be absent from work a great deal.
If you have drones that can carry a payload, driven by remote operators or self-directed, why do you need pilots?
Um . . . to fly the RPVs (“drones”), maybe?
I’m also skeptical of the ability of RPVs ever replacing all manned aircraft, or the advisability of same. Unless RPVs are truly autonomous, they’re vulnerable to comm disruption. Loss of control of something operating over the battlefield that’s armed and full of fuel is NOT a good scenario. (The reasons should be obvious.)
We’re also nowhere near developing the reliable AI necessary for truly autonomous, reliable armed vehicles w/o a human on board/in control to make targeting decisions. If we’re smart, we never will do that. For the reason, look up an old Harlan Ellison short story called “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.”
RPVs may reduce the number of manned aircraft substantially in the future. But I simply don’t see them replacing manned aircraft completely any time soon.
The tools of war change with time. Advances in technology lead to new tools of war, but they are just that – tools. War remains at it’s core a very human endeavor, regardless of era, weapons, or technology.
I read that story a LONG time ago, Hondo. AI creating its own victims for playtoys. Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics failed in ‘I, Robot’ (the story, NOT that godawful movie). If you read Philip Dick’s ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’, the story is more in-depth on AI than the movie based on it.
The point behind ‘Terminator’ was AI becoming self-aware and destructive, which was the origin of the BORG from ST:Next Gen. Dammit, all they had to do was pull the CPU out of BORG central. You have to figure out how far you want to take it with cybernetic lifeforms before the ‘safe’ line has been crossed.
But in regard to self-directed vehicles such as trucks and airborne, we’ve already seen the rolling convoy being tested and the successful landings of SD aircraft on carrier decks. I think it’s only a matter of time before the use of SD aircraft is tested in war games. All ground troops can wear embedded RFID dogtags that make them non-targets.
As for armed and full of fuel, armed and fully-fueld planes were shot down during the Vietnam war repeatedly, as also happened in Korea, WWII and WWI.
Skynet didn’t go active on time in 1997. I just think it’s not all that far off.
I agree that warfare is a human endeavor and we don’t want the machines turning against us EVER. But the advances that are going on are inevitable, and frankly, I don’t like some of it, either.
Creating a system that works under ideal test conditions is not the same as creating one that works under realistic conditions simulating combat. The former is difficult enough. The latter is at least an order of magnitude more difficult.
Don’t get me wrong; for some applications not involving the necessity for immediate response to unforeseen conditions or enemy actions, RPVs are indeed a preferable solution. Make them cheap enough to be expendable and incorporate a reliable self-destruct mechanism and they’d be perfect for another group of uses.
But even then, that’s not all military aviation does.
By the way, RFID doesn’t typically work very well from 5,000-10,000 feet away – the battery powered ones today are typically only good at ranges of 300′ or less, and unpowered RFID chips typically have ranges of 3 to 30 feet (the latter for UHF under ideal conditions). Other systems are being considered that would do much the same in terms of providing battlefield location, but frankly I’m rather skeptical that they’ll work all that well in practice at the individual soldier level during the next 20-30 years.
Not disagreeing, Hondo, but self-driven automobiles are expected to hit the auto market in the next two or three years. So you can text and drive all you want to. That’s the result of those self-directed convoy vehicles we saw in a video a few months ago. It translates to commercial use very quickly.
The self-directed drone aircraft doing carrier landing tests are smaller and lighter than conventional warplanes. I agree completely that they all need a self-destruct command if shot down, but they are coming and that’s that. They can also be programmed to reach a selected target, drop the payload and return to origin. I don’t see them being used as attack aircraft yet, like CYLON drones, but rather as ordinance delivery.
RFID chips can be improved to be picked up at greater distances.
Remember, Thomas Edison went through 1500 different materials tests before he settled on tungsten as the ideal material for light bulb filaments.
It’s just a matter of time.
I’m sure passive (unpowered) RFID chips can be improved – to a point. But IMO, barring a breakthrough in basic physics good luck in improving them to the point they can be picked up from 10,000′ or so. Little things like the inverse square law and background clutter start getting in the way.
And I’ll believe fully autonomous, self-driving vehicles are good enough for general battlefield use when I see them approved for unrestricted use on all US roads and highways – including city streets at rush hour – not just selected areas that have been specially equipped to support them.
For some selected applications, yes – perhaps in a few years driverless vehicles will be ready for military use. As an across-the-board replacement for military vehicles driven by humans? Um, I’ll have to see that one demonstrated before I buy it.
On highways? Geez, Hondo, do you really want to freak out Joshua Wilcox and his pals that much?
I feel in my one humble opinion, it is important in tense situations where that level of command is called upon to intervene and act, that it is of great value for the person to be able to think, “I’ve been there and done that and I understand the situation they are in and what needs to happen next”. Just MHO.
RPD’s, SDV’s, etc. And to think how impressed I was with the advanced communications technology back in 1966 in Tuy Hoa, Phu Yen Province when a young captain asked to use a field telephone in our battalion operations tent to call the Pentagon. I grinned at his foolish idealism and replied, “Knock yourself out Sir.”
Was this young sergeant ever surprised when an hour or so later that persistent young captain was talking to an assignments officer in Washington.