DefenseNews.com September 24, 2007
Experts Weigh USAF Chief's First Two Years
By Erik Holmes
There’s no denying Gen. Michael Moseley walked into a difficult situation when he became U.S. Air Force chief of staff in September 2005.
Loren Thompson, an analyst at the Lexington Institute and an expert on Air Force issues, is blunt in his assessment.
“He inherited a decrepit Air Force,” Thompson said.
The situation was grim. The service had been in nonstop combat for 14 years, dating back to the first Iraq invasion in 1991. Aircraft were older than ever, with an average age of 23½ years. The new tanker program had hit the skids after a scandal landed a top acquisitions official in prison. And the future of the C-17, F-22 and F-35 were in doubt.
But like football coaches, chiefs of staff aren’t allowed to make excuses. They are judged on performance, no matter what problems they inherit.
Halfway through his tenure, a picture is emerging of what kind of chief Moseley is, and how well he has stepped up to the enormous task he was assigned.
å Leadership. This is what the job is all about, and Moseley earns high marks for leadership style from those who know him and watch him closely.
“I think he has set a very good tone as a leader in terms of being open, in terms of being thoughtful and getting away from the harshness that sometimes characterizes senior officers,” Thompson said. “He’s just a very easy person to like.”
Moseley is also a gifted communicator, Thompson said, and he has established a reputation as a straight shooter.
“He is the most outward-looking, articulate chief of staff they’ve had in at least 20 years,” he said.
Mackenzie Eaglen, senior policy analyst for national security at the Heritage Foundation, said Moseley has put those skills to work by engaging airmen directly.
“I think his strength is internally leading the Air Force,” she said. “He’s instituted and initiated some really useful programs, like the Chief’s Scope.”
The Chief’s Scope is a series of online memos Moseley uses to tell airmen about issues of concern to him.
All chiefs conduct airmen’s calls on bases where they address large groups of airmen, but Moseley said he has placed greater emphasis than his predecessors on meeting with small groups to hear their concerns.
“I don’t remember in the past as much focused interface in those kinds of venues as I’ve tried to do,” he said. “If there’s something they’re on fire about ... there’s nothing better for them than to unload on the chief.”
Moseley said he and his wife recently met with a small group of young airmen and their spouses at Moody Air Force Base, Ga.
“I like talking to the spouses because they’ll tell you exactly what they think,” he said. “It was a great hour and a half or two hours of just being able to have a back-and-forth about the things that bother them.”
But while Moseley excels at connecting with airmen individually, Thompson said, he sometimes does not do as well with the institutional communication required to lead such a large organization.
“He doesn’t seem to have a mechanism for explaining to subordinates in the Air Force precisely where the Air Force stands on key issues on any given day,” Thompson said. “I often find that people even in the [Pentagon] ... aren’t aware that changes are under way in the Air Force policy even though outsiders have been told.”
å Vision. Moseley has launched about 150 initiatives designed to further his plan for reshaping the Air Force, but he hasn’t always succeeded in communicating how those initiatives relate to his larger vision for the service, sources close to him said.
The chief is looking to address that by releasing a series of white papers this fall outlining his strategy and the direction in which he is leading the service.
He also has taken other steps to improve strategic thinking in the Air Force and make sure leaders are thinking about the bigger picture. Those include standing up or reorganizing two groups — the Air University Research Institute and the Chief of Staff’s Strategic Studies Group, also called Checkmate — to focus on strategic thinking, and ordering the preparation of roadmaps detailing the future of the service’s major systems and capabilities.
Thompson said Moseley is, by nature, an intellectual who has more books in his office than almost any other senior military officer. But Moseley’s ability to look at the big picture is hampered by the grim realities the service is facing, he said.
“I think General Moseley’s vision of the future is almost entirely keyed in on the need to replace aging Cold War aircraft,” Thompson said. “He doesn’t get a lot of time to think big thoughts.”
Moseley also earns praise for being one of the few military leaders to look beyond the current fights.
“He gets a lot of credit from me for being the service chief that is most vocal about focusing on more than Iraq,” the Heritage Foundation’s Eaglen said. “He gets an A-plus for making the case to spend more ... on defense.”
But John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, an independent research group in Alexandria, Va., said Moseley’s vision for the future of the Air Force is constrained by the continuing dominance of the fighter culture — a culture out of which Moseley himself emerged.
“There is just this disconnect between the things that their culture celebrates and the way they promote their officers and what it is that they actually do for a living,” Pike said. “It will be very difficult [to change] because so much of their identity ... for so long was focused on the struggle for air supremacy.”
å Managing the force. Shrinking the force by about 40,000 airmen to pay for recapitalization is likely to become Moseley’s most significant legacy among airmen.
Despite the turmoil it has caused in the service, Air Force watchers say it was the right thing to do and that Moseley had little choice given the dire budgetary circumstances and aging aircraft he inherited.
A key to Moseley earning support for the drawdown is to communicate his reasons to airmen, Eaglen said, and he has done that.
“He’s made it clear this drawdown is basically because we cannot afford to maintain this level of personnel and recapitalize,” she said.
The plan is to draw down the force to 316,000 airmen by the end of fiscal 2009, but there are growing indications that Moseley might stop at 328,600 at the end of 2008. It’s now at 334,000.
Moseley has said only that he will reassess the drawdown plan in light of planned growth in the Army and Marine Corps, but Eaglen said she thinks he is having strong doubts.
å Managing the fleet. Moseley said the difficulty of fielding new systems reasonably quickly has been his biggest challenge.
“The time it takes to field the systems has probably been the most frustrating,” he said. “But I suspect ... all of my predecessors ... would say the same thing.”
Some of these delays are just the result of an inherently slow-moving acquisitions process, Thompson said, but the Air Force has made things more difficult on itself because of the scandal over the tanker lease deal in 2003 and, more recently, the acrimonious debate over F-22 purchase decisions.
The fallout has tainted the effort to select a new combat search-and-rescue helicopter, he said.
“The continuous challenges to Air Force acquisitions decisions have undermined confidence in its ability to pick next-generation weap-ons,” Thompson said. “CSAR-X should have been the Air Force’s opportunity to prove that it had gotten its act together on acquisition, and frankly, they blew it.”
Moseley was not involved in the controversial selection of Boeing to build the CSAR-X, but he was in charge when it happened.
But Thompson credits Moseley with rescuing many of the Air Force’s programs from the Pentagon chopping block last year.
“I think General Moseley’s biggest single success has been to prevent [former Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld’s advisers from gutting the Air Force in the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review,” he said. “If they had their way, the F-22 would have been killed, the C-130 would have been killed, and we would have been left with exactly one domestic production line for combat aircraft.”
Pike, of GlobalSecurity.org, said he thinks Moseley’s biggest slip with regard to air platforms has been the highly publicized spat between the Air Force and Army over control of UAV programs.
“It just seemed to me that that was ... a rerun of the Army-Air Force service rivalry from the 20th century,” he said. “The Army had such a firm grip on its UAVs ... that I just didn’t see that it was worth picking that fight.”
å Working with Congress. Congress decides what the Air Force can buy and writes the checks, and Moseley’s relationship with Congress is the area in which he faces the most criticism.
Moseley was the Air Force’s liaison to Congress from 1999 to 2001, so he has ample experience working with the legislative body.
“He is a real political operator,” Thompson said. “He really understands how the political process runs, and he has been able to play that game much more effectively than past Air Force general officers have.”
Moseley said that despite some “blips,” the relationship has remained largely positive and productive.
“I think we’re doing OK with those guys,” Moseley said. “I have an open enough relationship with them that they can call and holler at me about things they like or dislike and I can do the same thing.”
But others are not so sanguine in their assessment.
“There are some serious issues with defense committees and appropriators,” Eaglen said. “They feel like it’s a one-way conversation. ... To have strained relations with [them is] not helping.”
A Senate staff member said many in Congress are frustrated with Moseley and the Air Force because they see the service as out of step with political and fiscal realities.
“I think the sense here on the Hill is that the Air Force has lost its way,” the staffer said. “They are trying to find their true north, and I don’t think they’ve found it.”
The staffer said Moseley has angered the powerful National Guard caucus by making controversial proposals on the Air Guard’s command structure, total force integration and basing.
In an e-mail response, Moseley said: “Nothing we have proposed would take away from supporting the states or their governors, but in fact may actually strengthen the Air National Guard and thus benefit mission accomplishment.”
Congress also remains skeptical of the price tag of Air Force programs, particularly the F-22.
“They want everything gold-plated,” the source said, “but they have to ask the question, is it affordable?”
But Eaglen said the Air Force’s problems with Congress predate Moseley’s term as chief. He came into a climate that had been soured by the tanker scandal and has been focused primarily on the Army and the ground war in Iraq.
“The Air Force doesn’t get credit for being at war essentially for the last 16 years,” she said. “It’s a messaging [and public relations] issue that he inherited.”
© Copyright 2007, Defense News Media Group
