Case Studies in the Achievement of Air Superiority - Air Force ...

AIR SUPERIORITY
high price, not least of which is permitting uncoordinated operations in the
absence of an effective central planning authority. Here again the Allies
may have been saved much in World War I1 because their enemy also suffered
from a defective Luftwaffe command structure, providing little or no
coordination below the level of Marshal Goering himself, a notoriously lax
and undisciplined leader, who surrounded himself with a weak staff of
cronies and sycophants.
For the commander bent on attaining air superiority, probably no principle
has greater influence on his quest than the whole matter of logistics.
Yet in no other areas is his power to influence most often indirect and limited.
For example, while it is generally agreed that qualitative superiority
favors victory, it is also true that transitioning to superior late model aircraft
can impose a substantial degradation in combat readiness. Luftwaffe
officers eagerly adopted the new and better models of high performance
aircraft that became available from the German aircraft industry in the late
1930s. The new planes were, however, more difficult to fly, and even experienced
pilots required extensive retraining. Moreover, new planes meant a
new set of spares to be procured and distributed, and aircraft availability
dropped sharply as maintenance crews struggled to master unfamiliar malfunctions.
The Germans were fortunate because their major transition to
a new generation of fighters came in 1938 when they were not at war. On
the other hand, the French Air Force was in the midst of just such a
change-over during the crisis of 1940. Some of the new models being
introduced had outstanding performance characteristics, but with fewer
than half their planes ready for combat at any one time, the French simply
could not generate the sortie rate required to confront the Germans successfully.
Clearly, timing is a critical principle in any such transitioning
but not one over which a commander has much control because so
many external factors such as the managerial skills of the aircraft industry
are involved.
To illustrate the indirect character of a commander’s authority, one has
only to consider the problem of modifying aircraft that are already in production
in order to improve their performance. In the struggle for air superiority,
any technical change that will upgrade the performance of a given
weapon-a significant increment of speed, range, climb, or the like-is
avidly sought by the operational units. But so too are increases in the total
number of planes produced. Therefore, the problem becomes a tradeoff of
more versus better. The ideal, of course, is to get both, but this involves
finding ways to inject modifications into the production line without slowing
down the rate at which finished aircraft are delivered to the units in
combat. Solving this problem is a challenge for the manufacturer, not the
Air Force commander.
There are, however, numerous aspects of aircraft modification that are
within the scope of Air Force commanders. Radical modifications mean
616