Throughout the brief history of military aviation and the United States Air Force, there have been many great leaders. Several, such as Mitchell, Foulois, Spaatz, and Arnold, built the foundation for military aviation and championed an independent air force. Others, such as LeMay, Quesada, and Schriever, shaped the Air Force and developed specific elements of air and space power.1 While these leaders tend to be revered and studied by military professionals attending Air Force advanced education programs, Lt Gen William H. Tunner and his contributions to the airlift element of airpower do not receive similar attention and are typically underappreciated. Thus, a question arises: Was Tunner a successful Air Force leader? This question is answered using a framework that builds upon current Air Force leadership doctrine to examine and critique Tunner's military career during the interwar years, World War II, and early Cold War. Gen Curtis LeMay described Tunner as “the transportation expert to end transportation experts.”2 As a graduate of the US Military Academy in 1928, Tunner pursued a career in aviation and gained valuable experience as an Army Air Corps pilot, leader, and staff officer during the interwar period. In 1941, this experience landed him a job on the staff of the newly formed Ferrying Command, which held the critical responsibility of moving aircraft from US factories to American and Allied combat units overseas. A year later, when Ferrying Command was expanded and reorganized into Air Transport Command (ATC), Tunner was chosen to command Ferrying Division. These early experiences and leadership opportunities provided Tunner with a strong foundation in air mobility.
Airpower for Strategic Effect is intended to contribute to the understanding of airpower-what it is, what it does, why it does it, and what the consequences are. This is the plot: airpower generates strategic effect. Airpower's product is strategic effect on the course of strategic history. Everything about military airpower is instrumental to the purpose of securing strategic effect.
Since the mid-1940s, when Vannevar Bush and Theodore von Karman wrote Science, the Endless Frontier and Toward New Horizons, respectively, there has been a consensus that strong Department of Defense support of science and technology (S&T) is important to the security of the United States. During the Cold War, as it faced technologically capable adversaries whose forces potentially outnumbered U.S. forces, the United States relied on a strong defense S&T program to support the development of technologically superior weapons and systems that would enable it to prevail in the event of conflict. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has relied on its technological superiority to maintain a military advantage while at the same time reducing the size of its forces. Over the past half-century, creating and maintaining a technologically superior military capability have become fundamental to U.S. national security strategy, and investment in S&T has become a basic component of the defense budget. In late 1998, Congress asked the Secretary of Defense to conduct a study, in cooperation with the National Research Council (NRC), on the S&T base of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). Congress was particularly concerned about areas of the S&T program related to air systems, space systems, and supporting information systems. Its concern was based on the Air Force's reduction of its S&T program from the largest of the three military service programs to the smallest. Congress also wanted to ensure that the Air Force maintained an appropriately sized S&T workforce. In late 1999, the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Science and Technology asked the NRC to conduct a study to explore these issues.
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