CAS in War, Bureaucratic Machine in Peace: The US Air Force Example

Abstract

The operational art of air power, as articulated by its earliest pioneers (Douhet, Mitchell, and Trenchard) as well as by recent air power theorists (Col. John Warden III, Lt. Col. Stephen McNamara, and others), has increasingly been seen as innately flexible, nonlinear, and adaptive. From the reconnaissance, air supremacy, and strategic bombardment lessons of the First and Second World Wars to recent experiences in the Gulf War and Operation Allied Force with stand-off precision engagement and parallel system-wide attacks on enemy leverage points, the US Air Force has learned to minimize force-on-force encounters by first removing an enemy’s ability to resist. In essence, the enemy and the Air Force are thought of as “complex adaptive systems.” Complex adaptive systems (CAS) are defined here as nonlinear systems made up of multiple interacting agents that are sufficiently different from each other that their behavior will not be exactly the same in all conditions (Brown & Eisenhardt, 1998: 18).

Keywords: US Air Force, Example, Machine, Peace, Machine, Peace