Title: Square Pegs and Round Holes: Air Force Doctrine and the B-2 Bomber
Subject: The place of the B-2 bomber in current Air Force doctrine, based on past doctrinal perspectives on long-range strategic bombers.
Author(s): Terry T Kono; Budd A Jones (Faculty Advisor)
DTIC Keywords: ATTACK BOMBERS, DETERRENCE, DOCTRINE, MILITARY DOCTRINE
Abstract:
AFM 1-1 and the United States Air Force's new vision paper, Global
Engagement: A Vision for the 21st Century Air Force, allow significant
flexibility in the employment of Air Force resources. However, as
doctrine or the core for doctrinal development, both documents intimate
significant flaws in the process of creating guidance from theory, then
applying that guidance to warfighting. An incongruent relationship exists
between the creation of formal Air Force doctrine and the development of
operational weapon systems.
More specifically, the Air Force's inventory of long-range strategic
bombers, although conceived as weapons of nuclear deterrence during
the Cold War, must now fit within the parameters of post-Cold War air
power doctrine. In the B-2 in particular, the Air Force justifies the
existence of a platform not entirely compatible with its overarching
doctrine of global reach, global power, and global attack--an aircraft
whose technological advances belie anachronistic origins. Thus, it
denies or subjugates the application of other possibilities for strategic
attack. The lingering correlation of nuclear deterrence and long-range
strike to the word "strategic" represents a doctrinal parochialism that
resists the development of more effective, appropriate theory and
doctrine--and their accompanying weapons. The extremely focused
remnants of that forty-year-old doctrine must now meet the more varied
demands of post-Cold War hostilities.
Doctrine and technological development should be interrelated. Ideally,
we first develop concepts from ideas and theories. Through experience,
we validate these concepts. The resulting written, published,
authoritative guidance is formal doctrine; we can then derive the
technological means for employing that doctrine. Thus, we start with
ideas, develop the concepts, test those concepts in the crucible of
experience, produce the doctrine, build the weapon system, and enter
the next evolution of the process. What happens when we procure
weapon systems based on obsolete doctrine? Worse yet, what happens
when we build doctrine around existing resources designed from obsolete
ideas?
If the ongoing doctrine process is supposed to maintain the Air Force's
essence and its mission--air power--then allowing the proliferation of
incompatible systems denies coherence among ideas, doctrine, and
practice, and results in dogmatism and pragmatism.