With his decision to tap Gen. Norton Schwartz to be the next Air Force chief of staff, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has done two things. First, he has smashed an Air Force culture ceiling by putting into the top job a pilot who does not come out of the fighter or bomber community. Second, Gates has put into place someone who can help heal the rift between the Air Force and the Army, one that has grown in recent years over the Air Force’s heavy-handed move to take ownership of the Joint Cargo Aircraft–originally an Army program–its seeming stinginess in getting to ground commanders badly-needed UAV assets and the service’s lack of interest in sending Airmen to help out on Army missions. “A couple of things about ‘Norty’ Schwartz that a lot of folks didn’t realize [before] – he spent a lot of time in the special ops arena,” said a retired four-star who, like Schwartz, once headed U.S. Transportation Command at Scott Air Force Base, Ill. “And any of our blue suit guys who have spent time in the special ops arena have a tendency to be closer to our Army brethren and others. I think that’s a positive thing.”
I agree, that’s a very positive thing. The old saying goes that you can fly over the land, you can bomb the land, you can render the land uninhabitable, but you don’t own it until you can stand a 17 year old kid with a rifle on top of it. Schwartz wasn’t Gates’s only green-brained nomination. Michael Donley, in line replace Michael Wynne as Secretary of the Air Force, served in the both the Army Airborne and 5th Special Forces Group as a young company-grade officer. This is a cultural change that is long overdue. Despite the spectacular effects that the Air Force brings to the fight, it’s still–at its core–a support organization. Schwartz and Donley both seem to be men who understand that the Air Force exists largely to prop up the infantry, not the other way around.
