| "The nation's highest unfilled priority is airlift" states Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General David C. Jones, in a 1982 speech before the Council of Foreign Relations. Yet outside analysts and ample evidence suggest that airlift has been a chronically neglected mission, both before and after Jones' pronouncement, though airlift has at times been the focus of intense interest, ample funding, and significant change in missions and technologies. This dissertation uses the comparative case study method to address the twin puzzles raised by the evolution of U.S. airlift. First, why has airlift been generally neglected? Second, how can we explain the shorter periods of intense interest in U.S. airlift? In other words, this study attempts to account both for the U.S. Air Force's relative neglect of its airlift mobility mission (compared to its combat bomber and fighter missions) and for the innovations that have occurred in the airlift arena despite a continuing condition of neglect. Using the competing independent variables drawn from the literatures on bureaucratic politics and organizational cultures, this study tests ten contradictory hypotheses to explain variation in the dependent variable, the U.S. Air Force airlift mobility mission. To do so, the thesis employs longitudinal research on the U.S. airlift mission in five chronically-ordered case studies spanning fifty years, from 1942 to 1992, including World War II, Berlin, Korea, Vietnam and the Persian Gulf. Change is measured in terms of U.S. Air Force organization, force structure and basic doctrine. In the final analysis, although this study finds little use for the bureaucratic politics paradigm, it finds that a counter theory, organizational culture, does matter. Based on the empirical evidence of the case studies, implications are drawn for the theories' wider applications to the generalized phenomenon of neglected U.S. military missions. A likely related candidate includes the U.S. Navy's sealift mission, while unrelated candidates include minesweeping and the U.S. Army's special operations mission. The findings of this study should shed some new light on how these missions have come to be neglected and the prospects for innovation in these areas. |
