Eliminating air support specialist’s risks Indo-Pacific conflict preparation

The Air Force is cutting its Tactical Air Control Party billets by nearly half, portending an increased dependence on hardware and losing critical integration.

Ethan Brown

The Air Force has announced its intent to reduce its Tactical Air Command and Control experts—TACPs—by a staggering 44% over the next three years.

TACPs, one of the Air Force’s Special Warfare tribes, are the premier experts in planning and controlling close air support, or the “application of aerial-delivered fires in close proximity to friendly forces, requiring detailed planning and integration”; in short, these are the experts who direct airstrikes in support of ground forces.

Should the Air Force succeed in divesting nearly half of this critical community—a decision pending congressional approval as part of the Pentagons budget request for this year—the service risks losing its most effective Joint Force integration capability which no amount of hardware and technology can replace.

The modern TACP legacy

The Global War on Terror proved to be the high-water mark of the forward air controller community—nearly every pivotal battle and gunfight of the war in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria had TACPs deeply embedded in the ground forces, from the “Horse Soldiers” in October of 2001 to the final traumatic days in August of 2021—TACPs are as deeply woven into the fabric of the DoDs GWOT legacy as any community of the armed forces. [Forthcoming in the next year will be the book one of the “Visual Friendlies, Tally Target” trilogy by Ethan Brown, which will cover these critical stories across the entire GWOT timeline.]

TACPs (and other Terminal Air Control-qualified personnel like Combat Control Teams, and Army, Navy, and Marine Special Operations Fires specialists) fundamentally underwrote the war effort, as close air support came to define America’s longest war, both the singularly outsized-impact of close air support on the battlefield, as well as the occasional and tragic mishap involving fratricides and civilian casualties. But those were few and far between in the total volume of air support missions conducted over twenty years (though one is too many and every instance resulted in specific functional evolutions of tactics, techniques and procedures across the joint force).

But that is only the narrowest and most publicly recognizable summary of what TACPs provide to the joint force. As the Air Force and DoD writ large are pivoting to the challenges of the Pacific region—countering Chinese aggression and operating across extreme distances being paramount—TACPs provide unique capabilities which such divestments will severely constrain.

TACPs, all of whom are qualified and specially trained to coordinate and control airstrikes, are also, most importantly, situational awareness sensors that understand the components of both the land battle—ground force and ground commander priorities—and the air battle—capabilities, limitations, and integration—and how to fuse those capabilities. That situational awareness capability is one that no other sensor or network of sensors and systems can possibly replace, not at a time when threats are peers and equal competitors, and no longer overmatched terror groups in dominated battlespaces.

There are two components to this decision by the Air Force, which must be taken in equal measure: first and foremost, the risk of losing the integration and Joint Force capabilities which TACPs provide. Second, the reasonable necessity in ensuring that the force does not continue to shape itself for the last war, but in fact arrays itself for the challenges of the next war.

For the former, no other entity of the Joint Force understands interoperability and capabilities integration as does the TACP career field. By Memorandum of Agreement between the Air Force and Army, TACP personnel are sourced to provide and integrate by squadron with ground force units, from the Division level to the Platoon, although manning demands during the GWOT peak often meant TACPs were constrained to the Battalion in order to provide as much air power coverage as possible while still remaining aligned with weapons release authorities.

For the latter, the American military has an unfortunate history of emerging from a war (though not always explicitly as the victor) and quickly forgetting institutional lessons learned. It happened after World War Two when atomic weapons left the newly minted Department of Defense in a deficit for conventional forces during the first years of the Korean War. It happened in Vietnam, when all lessons of a counterinsurgency war and the failures of nation-building were necessarily and ineffectively relearned decades later in GWOT. It happened after the Cold War ended, with the American unipolar moment, the ”end of history”, when overwhelming conventional force was submerged into the era of international terrorism, while authoritarian states bided time and awaited the new century and new forms of competition.

The flip side to this truth is that components of the defense inventory are virulent in their intractability and desire to remain a main effort, when the warfighting paradigm rapidly evolves after conflict into new means of competition. TACPs and other close air support systems—like the vaunted A-10, who’s iconography is nearly as embedded into GWOT lore as the men on the ground who controlled them—continues to remain a controversial topic of air power divestment in advance of the next war. The Air Force’s intent to divest a significant portion of this critical capability aims to “rethink the role of these airmen”, which includes control of non-kinetic missions such as cyber and psychological offensives.

The simple truth is that TACPs are the worlds premier Joint Fires, Joint Command-and-Control (and this means All-domain), and Joint Force integration experts. Calling in airstrikes is only a small part of a very complex whole which the career field itself pursues excellence in.

Divesting TACPs, whose present role is necessarily reduced by the cessation of rotational deployments to Afghanistan (and a considerable reduction in Joint Force troop levels in Iraq and Syria), means that the future fight will attempt to utilize networked systems to replace battlefield situational awareness: sensors, pings, and screen-icons, instead of integrated ground force personnel providing timely and accurate targeting data and ground force composition.

Close Air Support is popularly assumed to be bombs coming off rails, or the iconic “BRRRRT” from the A-10s vaunted GAU-8 Avenger cannon. The truth is those kinetic effects after a lone TACPs “cleared hot” call makes up a small percentage of the integration and force protection which specially trained airmen like TACPs provide. The ability to brief integrated air and maritime assets of friendly disposition, location, readiness and enemy maneuver is the preponderance of capabilities which the community provides to the Joint Force and component commanders.

Affecting the Next War

Extrapolating the proposed changes to the TACP community forces strategic thinkers to consider how the Joint Force will be impacted.

·         First, TACPs will be limited to operating from Tactical Operations Centers (TOCs) and aligned at Brigade levels far from the front lines; in the case of South-Pacific to confront Chinese aggression, this could be more than hundreds of miles—well beyond the horizon.

Over-the-Horizon (OTH) operations became a main effort in the later years of GWOT, with JTAC-qualified personnel directing aerial fires from precision strike platforms across Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, but these were permissive battlespaces and wholly unreasonable to expect in a fight with a peer adversary.

This means that those responsible for directing precision fires in some kind of proximity to friendly forces will be coordinating kinetic effects while depending on electronic signals intelligence: battle tracking friendly positions, as well as reported enemy positions. In a denied environment where adversaries such as China, Russia, Iran and North Korea enjoy a competitive advantage of defense and emphasis on non-traditional combat power such as electronic warfare (EW), reliance on situational awareness tools in this manner is not realistic nor an effective replacement for Joint Force integrators such as TACPs.

·         Second, Tactical Air Control specialists will be required to be highly mobile and decisive in that future conflict, should it occur. Warfare in the future is one of accelerated killchains, not extended or extrapolated ones. Removing TACPs from front-line units—which is an inevitability due to the decreased overall manpower footprint—will push these air power experts deeper into the decision-calculus apparatus: the complex machinations of data assimilation in the proposed all-domain operations construct.

“I believe the future of warfare is going to be fast, deadly and decisive” retired Chief Master Sergeant Tommy Case, a TACP for over twenty years with two Silver Star citations, relayed in a recent interview. “Outside of defending an atoll for Agile Combat Employment (ACE) operations, the [TACP] community needs to shrink, but almost 50% is a little much.” ACE operations is the operational concept for All-Domain Operations, meaning a Joint Force capable of rapidly mobilizing, deploying, and maneuvering in all warfighting domains.

Taking a Joint Force Command-and-control specialist out of that ACE equation is not the answer congress should be considering, especially when the Air Force is trying to “create a force of airmen and guardians with the right mix of skills to meet the mission requirements of today and address future pacing challenges”, as stated by Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Patrick Gargan told media.

Prior to calling in airstrikes, and in every mission setting, regardless of whether CAS is employed, TACPs specialized and mastered the art and science of shortening ground force commanders OODA (observe, orient, decide, act) loops on the battlefield. ACE-capable units are less likely to be agile when the defense enterprises premier data-manager operators are reduced in the equation.

·         Third, there is an inherent quality in embedded, collaborative assets within the Joint Force. GWOT ushered in the “Joint” era and mindset, and no single entity within the defense enterprise embodies this paradigm as the TACP community. As the operational level, exercises between dissimilar units can be conducted and TTPs developed, refined, and stowed as institutional knowledge, but the TACP is a living embodiment of Joint Force tacit knowledge and applicable problem-solving in an agile, adaptive construct.

The Air Force’s theorized consolidation of a reduced TACP inventory would see the preponderance of TACPs relocating to two primary locations under the Air Combat Command (ACC), with the European and Pacific Command TACP cohorts remaining intact within those combatant commands. Those consolidated under ACC would effectively terminate those hard-earned integrated capabilities, which no amount of readiness exercises can replace. That non-technical integration—relationships and trust—built between TACPs and their aligned ground force units would be developed in a sudden-onset crisis deployment.

Ensuring readiness of the force under this construct is not clear in Air Force plans when suggesting the divestment of the TACP inventory; instead, the new alignment—“a larger pool of combat capability in support of Joint Force requirements”—noted by Maj. Gargan in the same statement, is part of the Air Forces broader plan to reduce its overall workforce in favor of higher funding priorities like fifth-generation and NGAD platforms.

Battle Damage Assessment

If congress concurs with the Air Force’s next-year budget proposals and the TACP career field numbers are indeed reduced from approximately 3700 to 2130, as proposed, the service faces the risk of its Joint Force interoperability and readiness being inadequate for contending with the demands of the next war.

TACPs, in no uncertain terms, augment the command-and-control architecture, enable the Joint Force through both kinetic and non-kinetic means, and ensure safe delivery of lethal effects on the battlefield. While the career field is overmanned when considered in the rotational GWOT-construct, the demands of the next war will only increase when Joint Fires could once again prove decisive against peer adversaries.

Evolving DoD professional development

Professional Military Education has enabled military toxic leadership

Ethan Brown

The need to develop middle-tier leaders is paramount for every organization, and doubly so for the national defense enterprise. The United States military achieves this through the enrollment of promotable individuals into Professional Military Education (PME) curricula, iterated by rank tiers (such as Non-commissioned Officer Academy, Captains Career Course), special positions (Senior Enlisted Joint-PME, First Sergeant Academy), and strategic planning (Staff and War Colleges).

While these institutions of learning have benefited the force by developing service members to perform administrative and putative ‘leadership’ roles, the last twenty years of conflict have created a dynamic where academic development has taken precedence over warfighting prowess. Simply, those methods of professional development have produced a generation of middle-tier and senior leaders whose professional acumen hinges on careerism, resume building, and an environment of toxic leadership. Not the ingredients necessary to build a force that is ready to address the compounding threats facing the United States in today's security environment.

Force readiness hinges primarily on personnel retention — retaining the talented people entrusted and needed to fight our wars and safeguard our way of life — and no factor has been more influential in the DoD losing talented personnel than toxic leadership, all of whom ascended in rank and developed as leaders under the current PME construct. The Air Force has a well-documented endemic of toxic leadership, the Navy has no shortage of leadership failures where “networking and politics are the best means of promotion” and ditto the Marines and Army.

A flawed and misguided Professional Military Education system is not the sole cause or singular contributing factor to the proliferation of toxic leadership in the military. But academic leadership development from the past two decades is certainly one area where DoD senior leaders can make a change that refocuses the force on its primary function — national defense — and does a better job of creating leaders who junior officers and enlisted personnel can follow into combat.

Professional Military Education needs to refocus on making leaders for future warfare, pivoting away from corporatized management and process efficiency, and instead investing in human capital. And most importantly, developing curricula which focuses on leading men and women into the crucible of combat. Therein lies the single most significant facet of how PME has changed, and failed, to produce effective leaders in the military.

The Global War on Terror created two camps across the force, the ones who deployed into combat zones and saw PME as a necessary inconvenience (admittedly a smaller percentage than the force writ large), and those who relied on professional development accolades in order to advance careers. The resulting “careerism” spread, succinctly defined in a McConnell AFB blog entry by former Chief Master Sergeant Kevin Brooks as “[an] overwhelming desire to advance one's own career or social status, usually at the expense of other personal interests or social growth”. That blog entry by a senior enlisted member was written in 2007, at the early peak of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, when the two camps in career progression truly began to divide. The problem has scarcely improved, although the focus on professional development has certainly proliferated among the forces.

Where PME and careerism have left the military

I can think back to when I completed NCOA in 2018 at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida, I was the last class to complete the curriculum at that institution before Hurricane Michael destroyed the entire facility. There, the doctrinal syllabus spent the entirety of the program focusing on writing and the psychology of being a manager — not a leader, a manager — and navigating the uncomfortable ‘what ifs’ in a manager’s day as expected of a E-6/E-7 in the Air Force.

Simulations included uncomfortable circumstances where errant junior enlisted needed help with issues like physical fitness or financial health — ‘how do you manage your airman in this case’? My efforts to constantly shift the focus of the discussion forums and written assignments back to a combat application, while patiently understood by the faculty, did not always produce the ‘book answer’ derived from the tortuous Course 15 leadership manual. That manual, which was the supposed standard for ‘how to be an NCO’, was hundreds of pages of subjective scenarios and self-discovery guided readings that had absolutely zero relevance to combat or national defense.

It may have worked perfectly well for a section manager at Google or Bank of America, but for an airman with an E-7 line number and yet another combat deployment to Afghanistan on the calendar, this school was a poorly timed career progression necessity. It was five weeks that wasn’t spent with my Joint Special Operations team in preparation for that rotation, and again, those who deploy to actual combat make up a smaller percentage of the force, but the point stands. And for those who do not see the flashes of the enemy guns, PME is potentially the only leadership development forum these future leaders might engage in.

This is no critique on the instructor cadre either, those who understood well that they curriculum was driven by institutional policy. They made their best effort to extrapolate the suppositions into reality, or at least analogous to literal leadership challenges, but they were indeed constrained by the mandatory curriculum.

Lessons learned in warfare are lessons in leadership…no environment separates ‘leadership’ and ‘management’ more ruthlessly. Retired Chief Master Sergeant Kevin Laliberte, whose 20+ year career spanned the full breadth of the special operations enterprise and senior positions in the new Space Force, fought the service's obsessive compulsive PME requirements to the very end. During a recent interview, he recounted a specific chapter in his career, one where he was deeply integrated into a highly compartmentalized special operations reconnaissance element. Administratively, he was for all intents and purposes shadowed out of Air Force purview. It was during this time when the Air Force ecosystem demanded that he attend non-commissioned officer academy. This would have taken him out of training which was utterly critical for upcoming deployments. Lalibertes squadron leadership team managed to defer his requirements to attend PME, which ultimately had no impact on his promotion to the senior enlisted ranks in later years.

Towards the end of his career, the same issue returned: “I had made Chief Master Sergeant, with an opportunity to deploy as a Command Chief. By this time, I had already completed SEJ-PME, the Sergeant Majors Academy, and had studied at the National War College for a semester — the only enlisted member at that particular cohort — but the command tabbed me to attend the Chief Leadership Course to learn how to be an E-9”. The challenge to the Air Force command leadership was what CLC would teach a senior enlisted member who had already promoted and led troops into combat. Ultimately, Laliberte would see the CLC requirement waived from his record to no adverse effect, an administrative decision that speaks for itself.

During another interview with a Senior Enlisted member in the Air Force Special Operations Command, who remains on active duty and requested anonymity due to their position, the problem of careerism and flagging professional development is endemic across the DoD and intelligence services. “Back in 2016, three Green Beret’s had been killed in Jordan who were part of the Inter-Agency Timber Sycamore program, working with the CIA to train moderate Syrian rebels to fight ISIS. I’ve spent time working with both camps, and as this article from SOFREP recalled:

“Much like the issue of tick marks and product generation, the agency has a careerist culture in which numbers have to be met in order for their officers to be eligible for promotion, therefore the mission takes second place’. It’s an issue that is not unique to the DoD, but something we should have more control over.”

It reflects the prioritization of process efficiency and numbers management over investing in people and human development.

How to refocus the PME enterprise

First, the DoD needs to revise how it values PME. and build curricula that creates proficient warfighters, which inherently requires leadership as a tangible value. A series of articles published by an Air Force officer in the Military Times a few years ago addressed this issue succinctly:

“Some people should never be in charge of another human being. The power that comes with rank and command is inherently corrupting, and we must guard against those who fall prey. We owe it to our airmen to ensure that they are better off with their leadership than without. We are finding smart officers, but we must do more to find good leaders and sideline the bad; Professional military education [for Air Force officers] is lacking in leadership”.

This writer and veteran would argue that a great deal of these problems stems from an overemphasis on corporatized PME curricula which has forgotten about the warfighting part of wearing the uniform. This critique is by no means an endorsement of the ludicrous assertions by hyper-partisan commentary on the need for “a military full of type A men who want to sit on a throne of Chinese skulls”. But there is a point that the leadership development of today's military has forgotten its charge of being readying leaders to engage in the potential total war of the future. Rather, PME and leadership grooming has had little clarity on what it is supposed to produce and has bred a generation of careerists who learned how to promote while the actual warfighters were busy deploying over and over to Afghanistan and Iraq.

Revitalizing leadership development for the military does not involve better writing skills or adopting project management methodologies to increase productivity (the core of PME as it stands). Certainly, those are necessary components to administrative management, and genuine leaders will find a way to execute that necessity. The DoD’s best course for revitalizing PME involves readying soon-to-be and rising leaders for taking their fellow servicemen and women into harm's way. It must create a training environment where dynamic thinking is fostered, not dependency on ‘what the/a book says’. It needs to be a place where ideas are exchanged across operational backgrounds and assumptions are challenged to foster growth and camaraderie between diverse individuals whose only similarity might be the uniform they wear.

Ethan Brown is the founder and Editor-in-chief for the NextGenWarBlog. He also serves as a senior fellow for defense studies at the Mike Rogers Center for Intelligence and Global Affairs (Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress), and a contributor to Task & Purpose, WarontheRocks, the Diplomatic Courier, and Modern War Institute (West Point). As a U.S. Air Force Special Warfare veteran, he spent 11 years as a special operations joint terminal attack controller and air advisor. He is on Twitter @LibertyStoic.