Developing Air Force Operational Planners for Enhanced Air-to-Ground Integration

The United States military is unquestionably the most dominant fighting force in the world today and the Air Force is a critical aspect of that power. Our adversaries recognize these facts and are shifting the nature of war away from force-on-force conflict, turning instead to more asymmetric forms of conflict. To adjust, the United States Army is pushing planning and execution authority to lower echelons, and the Air Force should follow suit. Reviews of counterinsurgency actions in Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom highlight the opportunity for increased flexibility when supporting ground forces and show how the Air Force should develop airpower expertise and planning capability to align with Army organizations. To make this change, the Air Force should develop airpower experts and modular, scalable planning teams capable of operational-level planning across the full spectrum of Air Force capabilities, and integrate those experts into Army divisions, brigades and battalions to maximize joint air, ground and space effectiveness. To demonstrate these points, this paper describes the current integration structure and builds upon lessons learned reports and analysis of current operations to propose this new planning construct aimed to improve the integration of joint air, ground and space capabilities.