Abstract
In an effort not to lose sight of the long-term perspective while dealing with short-term problems, Arnold decided to create his own informal group of advisors to help him in long-range thinking. He had found that he was swamped with short-term problem-solving — or putting out brushfires. As he described it:
My office organization in Washington contained an Advisory Council, a group of young men, the brightest I could get, who sat in an office close to me, and whose instructions were: “Don’t get mixed up with any routine business. What I want you to do is sit down and think. Think of the problems confronting us. Think of the solutions to those problems. Bring in new ideas. If you bring in one new idea every two or three days I will be satisfied. But don’t get mixed up with the routine operations of this office. Think! Think of the future of the Air Force!”
That Advisory Council, made up changeably of anywhere from three to five officers, was invaluable to me. They brought me new ideas; kept me up-to-date, and best of all, made certain that I was very seldom caught off base by higher authority with any new problem before I had been able to give some thought to it.2
A leader should look for ways to increase the velocity of innovation.1
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Notes
Perry M. Smith, Taking Charge: A Practical Guide for Leaders (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1986), p. 123.
H.H. Arnold, Global Mission (New York: Harper and Brothers, Publishers, 1949), pp. 356–357.
Recounted in Thomas M. Coffey, Hap: The Story of the U.S. Air Force and the Man Who Built It, General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold (New York: Viking Press, 1982), pp. 254–255. Cabell, one of Norstad’s closest friends, was a B-17 command pilot in World War II and became director of plans for the U.S. Strategic Air Forces in Europe, planning the air support for the invasion of Normandy. After the war, he was appointed Director of Intelligence, Headquarters USAF, and later, Director of the Joint Staff, OJCS. He was selected in 1953 as Deputy Director of the CIA. General Cabell retired in 1962.
Richard G. Davis, HAP: Henry H. Arnold, Military Aviator (Washington, D.C.: Air Force History and Museums Program, 1997), p. 1.
On the Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee, see Hastings Ismay, The Memoirs of General Lord Ismay (New York: The Viking Press, 1960).
For more on Ismay, see Robert S. Jordan, The NATO International Staff/Secretariat, 1952–1957: A Study in International Administration (London: Oxford University Press, 1967).
A glance at the list of the first five NATO SACEURS — other than Eisenhower — stretching from 1950 to 1968, makes this point. They all had served together with distinction during the war. See Robert S. Jordan, ed., Generals in International Politics: NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, Europe (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1987).
Quoted in Ronald Schaffer, Wings of Judgment: American Bombing in World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 17. Schaffer cites several examples of how constant exposure to death “hardens” flyers.
Phillip S. Meilinger, Hoyt S. Vandenberg: The Life of a General (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 86.
See Robert Frank Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine: Basic thinking in the United States Air Force, 1907–1960 (Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 1989).
Haywood S. Hansell, Jr., The Strategic Air War against Germany and Japan: A Memoir (Washington, D.C.: Office of Air Force History, USAF Warrior Studies, 1986), p. 10.
John Newhouse, War and Peace in the Nuclear Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), p. 42. See also Schaffer, Wings.
Michael S. Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 208. Sherry quotes several sources, from public information officers to social psychologists, affirming how the airmen’s preoccupation with the intricacies of modern technological air warfare — and its attendant detached destruction — helped to remove much concern about the feelings of the enemy, whether civilian or military.
Quoted in Christopher Harvie, “Technological Change and Military Power in Historical Perspective,” George Edward Thibault, ed., The Art and Practice of Military Strategy (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University, 1984), p. 510.
Curtis LeMay, Mission with LeMay: My Story (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1965), p. 347.
For more on this point, see Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995; also Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986).
See Daniel R. Mortensen, A Pattern for Joint Operations: World War II Close Air Support North Africa, Historical Analysis Series (Washington, D.C.: Office of Air Force History and U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1987), Ch. 2. I am grateful for the support of Dr. Mortensen in the early stages of preparing this manuscript.
Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate, The Army Air Forces in World War II: Europe: Torch to Pointblank August 1942 to December 1943, Vol. II (Washington, D.C.: Office of Air Force History, New Imprint, 1983), pp. 52–53.
James H. Doolittle, I Could Never Be So Lucky Again: An Autobiography (New York: Bantam Books, 1991), p. 304.
Norstad, Oral History, p. 509. See also Lowell Thomas and Edward Jablonski, Doolittle: A Biography (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1976), pp. 209–210.
For a full account of the political-military circumstances of North Africa at this time, see Robert Murphy, Diplomat Among Warriors (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1964).
David Syrett, “The Tunisian Campaign, 1942–1943,” in Benjamin Franklin Cooling, ed., Case Studies in the Development of Close Air Support (Washington, D.C.: Office of Air Force History, 1990), pp. 184–185. Arnold had copies sent to every Air Force officer.
Walter J. Boyne, Beyond the Wild Blue: A History of the U.S. Air Force, 1947–1997 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), p. 23.
Quoted E.K.G. Sixsmith, Eisenhower as Military Commander (New York: Stein and Day, Publishers, 1983), p. 65.
Norstad, Oral History, p. 519. See also Diane T. Putney, ed., ULTRA and the Army Air Forces in World War II: An Interview with Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Lewis F. Powell, Jr. (Washington, D.C.: Office of Air Force History, 1987), pp. 12–13.
R.J. Overy, The Air War, 1939–1945 (New York: Stein and Day, 1981), p. 17. Overy goes on to discuss the influence of air power doctrine on grand strategy. (See pp. 18–25.)
George C. Kenney, General Kenney Reports: A Personal History of the Pacific War (Washington, D.C.: Office of Air Force History, USAF Warrior Studies, 1987), p. 526. (The book was originally published by Duell, Sloan, and Pearce of New York in 1949.)
Quoted in Ronald H. Spector, Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), pp. 489–490. For Hansell’s version of events, see Hansell, Strategic Air War Against Germany and Japan, supra.
Craven and Cate, Army, p. 567. Hansell had been: “Arnold’s top planner for awhile, and something of a protégé, and Arnold was not without a streak of sentiment for his ‘boys.’” (p. 566.) For a good short summary of the role of the Twentieth Air Force in the surrender of Japan, see Herman S. Wolk, “General Arnold, the Atomic Bomb, and the Surrender of Japan,” in Gunter Bischof and Robert L. Dupont, eds., The Pacific War Revisited (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), pp. 163–178.
Spector, Eagle, p. 491. The description first appeared in St. Clair McKelway, “A Reporter with the B-29s,” New Yorker, dtd 6/16/45, p. 32. See Sherry, Rise, pp. 408–409, notes 113–130 for further sources concerning Norstad’s and McKelway’s roles and the various published reactions to the change in bombing tactics of senior American officials. See also Thomas M. Coffey, Iron Eagle: The Turbulent Life of General Curtis LeMay (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1986), p. 163.
Thomas S. Power, Design for Survival (New York: Coward-McCann, 1964), p. 28 (quoted in Schaffer, Wings, p. 132).
See Major James F. Sunderman, USAF, ed., World War II in the Air: The Pacific (New York: Franklin Watts, Inc., 1962), p. 261.
For a discussion of Churchill’s rationale for area bombing, see Christopher C. Harmon, “Are We Beasts?”: Churchill and the Moral Question of World War II “Area Bombing” (Newport, RI: Naval War College, The Newport Papers, #1, December 1991).
Quoted in Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (New York: Vintage Books Edition, 1996), pp. 322–323, Alperovitz’s bracketed comments. The debate over whether the bomb was needed to end the war is still going on. See, for example, Newsletter of The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, Vol. 29, No. 3 (September 1998).
Quoted in Jeffrey Barlow, Revolt of the Admirals: The Fight for Naval Aviation, 1945–1950 (Washington D.C.: Naval Historical Center, 1994), p. 19.
Norstad, Oral History, p. 106. See also Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1969), p. 218.
Solly Zuckerman, Monkeys, Men, and Missiles: An Autobiography 1946–1988 (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1988), p. 283.
Quoted in Alice Kimball Smith, A Peril and A Hope: The Scientists’ Movement in America: 1945–47 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 53.
Zuckerman, Monkeys, p. 186. Zuckerman also criticizes the USSBS in his review, “The Silver Fox,” in The New York Review of Books, dtd 1/19/89. He reviewed Strobe Talbot, The Master of the Game: Paul Nitze and the Nuclear Peace (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1988).
See Rhodes, Dark, p. 224; also Marc Trachtenberg, History and Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
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Jordan, R.S. (2000). Applying Planning and Operational Skills in North Africa and the Pacific. In: Norstad: Cold War NATO Supreme Commander. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62477-5_2
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