AdVictoriam

A buddy pointed out, rightly, that running into a Pred is probably the highest risk of combat aviation right now. When Preds move into the NAS, this won't be just a combat risk but it got me thinking. When I got non-volled, the first guy I met - a B-1 dude and the guy that I think was the best of all of us - told me that he had to give Q-2s and immediate retraining instead of Q-3-FEB to guys who shot inside of danger close w/o initials on sim checks. YGBSM - but with the insatiable demand and the manning shortage, there wasn't anyone in line to replace anyone we kicked out - it was the least worst option. So as a Flt/cc and a warfighting ADO, my nightmare was one of our guys shooting or running into a good guy because of the compromises of being a leper colony. Another buddy, previous Viper driver, described it as Twelve O'Clock High - the island of misfit toys. Going with the analogy - there's four things you can do - 1) give up, which is useless, 2) escape, which is the often right thing to do (family, etc,) but doesn't solve the problem, 3) beat them down more, which continues not to work, or 4) find a way to build some morale and self-respect. The RPA dude doesn't have any skin on the line, but the guys he's flying with do. And the things that actually make him engaged are killing bad-guys and helping good guys. So the best thing I can do is to get him away from thinking about individual risk and get him thinking about corporate risk - I want the other players' risk to be more important to him than his own. So killing=combat, and 'if you screw up your friends die'=combat. At the outset, the loudest shouting was about 'we don't care about medals.'. I agree - but I'll call out the logic. The best point was that people would give up all their medals to see their families grow up. If there's some non-zero chance that defining combat in terms of corporate risk will keep some RPA dude's head in the game enough to not hit another airplane, then I'd absolutely make a piece of blue and yellow fabric a little less exclusive if it has any possibility whatsoever of increasing the chance of the manned guy goes home to see his family. A community that takes itself seriously is safer - if RPA gets the trappings of combat because of killing and life and death responsibility, then RPA gets Q-3-FEBs for not taking those responsibilities seriously. Break break. Re discussion - Beer sounds like the best option.

TAMInated - absolutely. It speaks volumes that we stepped back from that construct, as well as a couple other things we used to do that made good sense, but boiled down in my thinking to risk averse uppers saying 'even though there's no value added for having a guy at the controls, I don't want to have my name on the safety report for authorizing it.'. My $0.02.

Apologies - one more response. Hacker - great point. This goes back to culture, bureaucracy and innovation (and in a way risk aversion.). If RPA were done right, we'd multiplex a number of platforms to a smaller number of crews, and let crews hotlink into whatever platform was doing something requiring control (kin strike, follow, raid support, transit thru manned airspace) and leave the other lines on autopilot, giving the sensor to the intel screener guys. If you had 3 crews running 10 lines (there's logistic and procedural issues to this but they're soluble) then manning wouldn't be nearly a problem. But with a risk averse bureaucracy, and a beat down culture, these sorts of innovation can't happen. Hence RPA cultural problems drag everybody down. Re DeskJockey - great point. I'll step back from that specific line. Any of he ones you propose make sense to me. The question then becomes about power transitions - the Army went through one of these which was unpleasant but didn't turn into civil war. From what little I understand about McPeak, he followed his power transition with genocide toward SAC, it seems that power transitions have not happened well in the service since then - current one was by fiat, incomplete and contested. If every change of dynasty means that we have to burn down the whole kingdom, then we all lose, because we're poached from outside (ie expending all political capital on F22 fight meant we had nothing left to moderate the Army's unending demand for ISR, which meant that we couldn't build RPA right, which meant we still have the problems we have now.). Managing a better power transition would mean that there's space for all the communities afterwards (instead of the winners feeling compelled to destroy anything left of the old regime) and that we don't lose ground in the meantime. Tribalism exists for various reasons, as well pointed out by Vader, some good and some bad, but as people get older and move outside of their tribe, tribalism must give way to cooperation.

Im checking off for a while - I have work to do this weekend. I appreciate the people who have seriously engaged with these arguments (which I think are the majority of people in the thread.). V/r.

Re brevity. Touché. Copy tone down the academic. I'll take that spear. Re Hacker. Good points. I appreciate your experience. I disagree with the idea that an argument is invalid unless experienced firsthand - I trust the Warnings in a Dash one and I have not done most of them myself - though in this case you've seen the substance firsthand. So a better way to make the culture clash argument is the 'logic of deterrence' (risk averse) v the 'logic of combat.' (risk accepting - not just risk to self.). Both fill different roles, but the first one is out of control - queep will kill us all. DeskJockey makes a good point - this has to do with formative experiences. One problem is that tribalism causes those in the logic of combat to squabble over the trappings and 'cool points' of combat, and hence the logic of combat loses out in the institution. Re Restating arguments and slap down fail - flying=dangerous. Already covered. Risk factors are not cosmic, and covered well in safety theory. Combat is not a significant additive risk factor right now, and we still call it combat for manned. It is, but because of using weapons and guarding good guys. Re my main point, Vader says it better than I - RPA are in combat but not at risk. My argument is that combat is more important than risk in the context of our current AF. Re your point on viral name calling - this is tedious and uninteresting. This is an obvious consequence of making this argument - of course it would be met with a hail of spears, I knew that when I pressed send. Would you recommend only making arguments that will make other people think youre cool? This is a useless metric. Re argumentation in general. This is one of the problems we continue to have - poor reasoning based on conventional wisdom and appeals to power. This damaged the service in the F-22 fight - when there was an good argument to be made at the time about recap and deterrence holding off the wars we can't afford to fight, we failed to engage with the arguments from the Joint Community, defense academics, all the people who let us buy these things, and did a lot of what we're doing here - namecalling, shouting down, cherry picking and going after strawmen. While this made good 'look at me I'm cool' play in the little puddle of people who agree, it was rejected out of hand as utterly devoid of content by the people who make these decisions. Similarly, the Navy just did find and replace on Soviet for Chinese on strategies from the 70s (those making the argument weren't in the navy the either - they do well by reasoning from history.) and got a ton of new systems while we're still squabbling for scraps and cutting A-10s we need. It does not concern me that these are the types of arguments leveled at me. It does concern me that these are the default ways of engaging anyone or anything we don't immediately agree with. Hence we lose arguments - and we have to eat things we don't like such as a dwindling fighter fleet, (hence TAMI, etc.) and so on.

@ DeskJockey - Returning to the point you made about how the nature of combat experience shades culture and reasoning. Very important point about gradations in risk, though I think it actually runs deeper than that, and very much includes the role of combat in the institution's hierarchy of values. An academic named John Owen makes an argument about how cultural change happens - an orthodoxy grows up with a set of framing experiences, which informs what they think is important, and hence influences how they structure their culture. When conditions change, the next generation grows up under different conditions, with different values and structures. These values lead to heterodoxies when those values encounter the extant system. Eventually, these frustrations coalesce around a symbol, object or event, and this forces the orthodoxy to engage the heterodoxy and both end up changed - Reformation leads to Counter-Reformation which is different in certain ways from pre-Reformation thought. I think this model applies here, but it's not really about RPA. I would argue that the fundamental cultural fissure is not manned/RPA, fighters/heavies, or even fliers/non-fliers, but ONW/OSW culture vs. OIF/OEF culture. These framing sets of experiences taught very different lessons, which are now fundamentally in conflict. In ONW/OSW, experience teaches one to be highly risk-averse, as the impacts on national policy for losing an aircraft is far higher than the benefit from killing an Iraqi SAM or fighter. Additionally, given the ops tempo relative to later OEF/OIF demands, there is enough surplus time that a good officer would spend that time getting an AAD and doing their PME. These are all right and appropriate in that context. But OEF/OIF is a very different context - many of us have never known a day in the military when we were not at war. The logic of wartime rightly accepts more risk because there's more at stake, and because political leadership is willing to accept more in the way of consequences. With the increase in demands on time, deployments involved less in the way of slack for studying, etc. This is also right and appropriate in context, but these are two very different contexts and we would expect to see Red Flag culture and Balad culture, for lack of better terms, clash. Applying Owen's theory, this explains many of our cultural friction points. Reflective belts replace indulgences in the analogy - as the most visible and often ridiculous symbols of the culture of risk-avoidance, these provide a focal point for friction between these two cultures. The risk-accepting OEF/OIF culture learned, as a function of the innovation required in wartime, to make decisions on their own -- the idea of this cultural value being abrogated is then offensive. This escalates (i.e. defending indulgences until they become ridiculous) to the point where both sides conduct a power struggle over this object as a symbolic struggle over overall cultural values. The escalation of C2 amplified this struggle - new technologies enabled ONW/OSW risk-aversion to extend control deeper into the cockpit ('never let your connectivity exceed your maturity' is a good rule of thumb.) So as we come back home, the space where the OEF/OIF culture cut their teeth begins to collapse, and the ONW/OSW tries to reassert their vision of 'normalcy,' which is contested by the differing 'normalcy' of the OEF/OIF culture. This is parallel in many ways with Gen. Petraeus' reformation-of-sorts in the Army - his constituency was more the junior officers who were muddling through COIN with little help or even comprehension on the part of pre-OEF/OIF seniors. Their reform was quicker, as it was accelerated by the pressing needs of being on the ground in this fight. But as the war has gone on, and the logics of combat ebb and give way to routine, risk-averse behaviors (i.e. started at KAF, then BAF, now everywhere.) A clash over ideas is the result - ref the SWJ argument (makes this look like a flash in the pan) about 'Disruptive Thinkers.' As another example - I think it captures the controversy about AADs. To ONW/OSW logic, a good officer should spend their time bettering themselves (though the rise of degree-for-profit institutions makes this a questionable assertion, ref. Switzer's Degrees as Costly Signals ASPJ piece.) To OEF/OIF logic, the war comes first, and combat is the cache that matters. So the fundamental argument about AADs is about differing cultural valuations - the orthodoxy holds to established structures, whereas the neo-orthodoxy challenges those structures. There is a very strong case to be made on the part of OEF/OIF logic (I am tribal about that) but it can't be made if that group is at war with itself. If the neo-orthodoxy is fractured, the orthodoxy wins by default. Most CAF communities, most MAF communities, SOF, and RPA are all very much part of OEF/OIF thinking. As time goes on, the next generation might revert back to something more ONW/OSW-looking. So the more the OEF/OIF culture keeps combat in its portfolio, the stronger a showing they make. Emerging fronts are mostly RPA right now. Therefore, to move past some of these old logics that tie us to the past, the communities emerging from these wars need to move together. This is well beyond the original scope, so therefore apologies to anyone who is Winchester Attention Span.

DeskJockey - Awesome. Yes. More to follow on this but I think that's exactly right. But first, putting to rest the 'differential risk' piece (flossing a dead horse...) - everybody's right. We're talking past each other. It doesn't affect the paper's core argument about killing=combat. [Warning: Statistics & Probability Theory follows. Feel free to skip.] Conditional probability is the probability of x given y. Absolute probability is the probability of x. Differential probability is the increase in probability of x given y. - The risk claim is that bounding current conflicts, for the sake of argument 2006-present, there is no significant difference in differential probability of general enemy-action-related risk given combat when comparing manned to RPA. - To rephrase Hacker's argument, if we changed the bounds to include the opening phases of OIF, or a hypothetical opening phase of Iran, then this would not be true. This is very likely the case, as Risk(Intact IADS) > Risk(Creech Attack.) However, the institution continues to provide routine costly signals (combat pay, medals, prestige, etc. - albeit at a decreased rate) after the IADS has been INOP for more than half a decade. Absolutely agree with the pucker factor point. But this logic does not justify the current policy. - On the core discussion here's what I mean, bounding to current combat zones: 1) Probability of Harm given Manned Aircraft > Probability of Harm given RPA [Risk from CFIT, Aviation Hazards] > [Risk from crashing due to exhaustion] 2) Probability of Harm given a Manned Aircraft and Combat still > Probability of Harm given an RPA and Combat [Risk from CFIT, Aviation Hazards + MANPADS/SMARMS, CONUS General Terror Attack] > [Risk from crashing due to exhaustion + Creech-specific Terror Attack.] 3) But Increase in Probability of Harm for Manned Aircraft given Combat ~ increase in Probability of Harm for RPA given Combat [Risk for MANPADS/SMARMS, CONUS General Terror Attack] ~ [Risk for Creech-specific Terror Attack.] - I believe most of the controversy is about claim 2, where my argument is about claim 3. Hence talking past each other. - My point with this was to destabilize the conventional wisdom about 'combat risk' - that the reason RPA should not consider themselves in combat is because they do not experience a comparable increase of risk due to combat in current circumstances. This assumes a difference in baseline risk between RPA and manned aircraft. Therefore I need to make a weak but plausible claim. Given that our adversaries have expressed that RPA is their number one threat, and they have had more success with CONUS-based major attacks than downrange attacks, compared to the difficulties of acquiring and achieving a kill with MANPADS/SMARMS, it is plausible that the differential combat risk for being in the population of RPAs is higher than the differential combat risk for being in the population of manned aircraft. - Unless I'm forgetting something, there are no data points for 10k+ aircraft crewmen in this timeframe lost to enemy fire, and no data points for a Creech attack. Therefore we fall back on weak Bayesian priors for risk in both cases, which are insufficient for a strong inference of difference. Accordingly, another definition is required. The fact that there are no data points is in both cases a tremendous credit to OSI (and SF.) - As previously noted, this was unclear in the article, and regrettably detracted from the core argument. I agree with this critique. [End stats.] On the point brought up about losing friends - These are my friends as well and I have mourned them. The only way I know to honor them is to fight all the harder for the things they sacrificed for, and from what little I know, that is best done by fighting smarter and thinking harder about how to do things better. Building a sustainable Pred community provides the tactically proficient operators that will finish dismembering what is left of our enemy's network in this war. It also builds the expertise we will need to ensure that whenever a future manned striker punches through the FEBA, it will do so with a flight of drones alongside - a swarm of robots willing to take a missile to save the crews' lives will bring more of our comrades home. Incentives matter because culture matters. Culture matters because performance matters. Medals may or may not be the right answer. But the status quo with 60% to O-4 at Creech and minimal RPA DOs picked up for command certainly is not. Whether this is due to prior adverse selection or due to present conditions is irrelevant - in the first case we shortchanged the program from the outset, in the latter case we are shortchanging it at present - either way we're behind. For all of the deep problems that remain a decade and a half into this project, its in all of our interests to fix this. If it falls apart, it won't go away - the Joint community and the DoD absolutely won't let that happen, even if it means we bleed out the pilot corps again. Far more importantly, letting RPA flounder because of tribalism (i.e. the 'new navs' comment) lets the mission down and kneecaps capabilities that will ultimately come back around to helping out the manned community.

Thanks for the well-reasoned replies. I do appreciate Ryno's point, even though we do have our disagreements, I think that he has the courage to fight for the things he believes in and fight for them, and I respect that. To engage the 'more at risk' point - the differential risk argument is not so much intended to be persuasive as to be plausible and thereby point out how weak a reed the logic of 'combat risk' is. I believe it is plausible, and thereby supports a more reflective look at how we define combat - killing or directly preventing good guys from being killed is a better overall metric. Following up on DeskJockey's point, which I think is very astute, the marrow of the discussion is 'how do we as a culture adapt to change.' We culturally recognize things we find of value, but the context of those value assessments changes. Consider the Air Medal itself. I do not know what it's like, nor do any of us, to be on a B-17 crew when no crew has yet survived 25 missions. In that case, the Air Medal recognizes the importance the contribution of bomber crews to the mission requiring mostly physical courage. In Vietnam, the definition of physical courage included a set number of landings for a C-130 under fire into a firebase - the contribution to the mission was the same, but the context changed and the understanding of courage was broadened in a way to include different categories. For the majority of OIF/OEF, the air medal for manned aircraft is largely constituted by moral courage, namely the possibility of employing weapons in the context of vast technological superiority, with a small residual element of physical courage. The point of all of this is that every decade or two, we find ourselves in a position where we need to re-assess what we think we know in the face of a changing context (Boyd's Destruction and Creation speaks to this.) I believe that such a re-assessment is overdue and stalled, largely due to tribalism and an inability to see each other as comrades rather than competitors. Therefore, in such a re-assessment, it is possible that the Air Medal (as a symbol of the larger re-assessment) would be constituted as 1) entirely moral courage, therefore about the possibility of shooting, 2) still include an element of physical courage, and therefore find a new means of recognition in order to fit the new context, or 3) delete the element of moral courage, in which case counter medals would go away for all platforms. Any of these are viable options - the important thing is that the re-assessment occurs. As a good friend framed it - tradition is important, and should be preserved if not in conflict with combat effectiveness. We periodically find ourselves in a place where context changes to such a degree that we must decide what to retain and what to update. RPAs have changed this context - our enemies cite RPA as the most effective air asset against them. This should be recognized in meaningful ways - not just words but also the costly markers of cultural value. The current conflicts, combiners with the changes of RPA, bring us to a point where we need to do such a re-assessment. With luck, this might build a new unity amongst the tribes so we could all do our mission better. At the end of the day its not about us - its about the mission and bringing Americans home safe. How we do that has changed. Therefore we need to reassess how we see ourselves.

Up on the net. Argument on the table is that combat is constituted by the life and death duty to friendlies and enemies respectively (with one's own life subsumed in this definition as a 'friendly') vs. combat is constituted solely by risk to one's own life. Standing by for spears. V/r Dave.