Squadrons

Some of these units continue to carry emblems originally devised in World War I. Two well-known examples are the 94th Fighter Squadron’s ”Hat in the Ring” and the 95th Reconnaissance Squadron’s “Kicking Mules.” Units claim famous “Great War” crewmen, like the 94th’s Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker. America’s leading World War I ace, or 2d Lt. Frank Luke, who scored more than fifteen victories in seventeen days while serving on the Western Front with the 27th Fighter Squadron’s original ancestor, the 27th Aero Squadron. Some of these senior units had relatively inauspicious beginnings but went on to greater things. The 30th Aero Squadron, for example, spent World War I in France repairing and overhauling aircraft engines. Most readers will more readily recognize the 30th in its present form as the world-famous USAF Air Demonstration Squadron—the Thunderbirds.

Whatever designations they now carry-fighter squadrons, bombardment squadrons, missile squadrons, and so on—these fifty-one units are direct heirs to some of the longest unbroken histories of group achievement in flight.

Vanishing Organizations

With the Air Force expected to shrink from 200 to 150 active-duty, Reserve, and Air National Guard flying and nonflying wings, many organizations will be redesignated, consolidated, or reassigned. Others will simply disappear. The big drawdown has already brought about inactivation of some long-serving units. One is the 48th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron at Langley AFB, Va., organized as the 48th Aero Squadron on August 4. 1917, at Kelly Field, Tex. Others are the 12th and 91st Reconnaissance Squadrons, Bergstrom AFB. Tex. They were organized, respectively, as the 12th Aero Squadron on June 2, 1917, at San Antonio, Tex., and the 91st Aero Squadron on August 21, 1917, at Kelly Field. These units may someday be reactivated, but for now they exist only as entries on the inactive list.

Every organization in the Air Force fits into one of two categories: unit or establishment. Units are the junior of the two, since they are generally assigned to establishments. Units come in three types: headquarters, squadrons, and miscellaneous. Headquarters units contain the command staff personnel of an establishment; squadrons are the basic working components of all establishments: and miscellaneous units include such organizations as hospitals, bands, and so on.

Establishments differ from units in that no personnel are directly assigned to them. Instead, the staff personnel of, say, Air Combat Command (an establishment) are assigned to Headquarters, ACC (a unit). A group is generally the lowest-level establishment. Lower-level establishments are assigned to higher-level ones—for example, groups to wings, wings to numbered air forces, numbered air forces to commands, commands to Headquarters, USAF. This arrangement—units reporting to establishments, subordinate establishments to superior ones—constitutes the chain of command, through which all control and accountability flow.

At any given time, hundreds of organizations are in active service, while many more paper organizations exist only in inactive status. Each unit must be identified in a unique fashion to avoid confusion and preserve historical continuity. This is done through a system of rules and definitions called lineage.

A Complicated Task

Determining a given organization’s lineage requires systematic tracing of all actions that have affected the organization’s status through its entire service, including those times it has been inactive, disbanded, or disestablished. These actions are defined in ways that may seem arcane to the nonspecialist, but each term has a specific meaning [see box at left].

This task can be complicated because definitions have changed over time and because units and establishments have different lineage terminologies. Units are created, or “constituted,” by Headquarters, USAF, and assigned to commands or operating agency establishments for activation. Thereafter, a unit’s existence continues until it is disbanded, even if it is redesignated (given a new number or functional name) or inactivated in the meantime. A disbanded unit may be reconstituted, meaning that it resumes existence with its previous lineage restored intact, or it may be consolidated with another unit, in which case its lineage merges with the receiving unit’s lineage to combine the accomplishments of both.

Establishments, on the other hand, are established by Headquarters, USAF, and they continue to exist until they are disestablished. They may also be redesignated or inactivated; once disestablished, they may be reestablished with a restored lineage. Establishments may be consolidated with other establishments. In such cases, the new organization inherits the combined lineages of the respective headquarters units.

Finally, there is the matter of provisional organizations. These are temporary units or establishments. Though they have many administrative characteristics of permanent organizations, they are intended to exist only so long as a given operation requires. Unit detachments or rotating temporary duty personnel normally are attached, rather than assigned, to provisional establishments, and there is no lineal relationship between a provisional organization and its regular replacement, even if no actual change of personnel or location takes place during the turnover.

When he became Air Force Chief of Staff in October 1990, Gen. Merrill A. McPeak applied his long-standing personal interest in unit history and heraldry to the task of maintaining esprit de corps in the face of major organizational change. General McPeak initiated a revitalization of the unit heraldry program. He renewed the emphasis on unit lineage to underscore his desire that Air Force members see themselves as warriors rather than as technical specialists. By regulation, responsibility for both unit history and heraldry falls to the Air Force Historical Research Agency (AFHRA) at Air University, Maxwell AFB, Ala.

Experts at AFHRA deal with a wide variety of lineage issues. They use a sixty million-page collection of unit histories and other source documents to generate and maintain unit lineage and honors statements-official determinations of the lineage and awards to which each USAF unit is entitled. (ANG lineage issues are resolved by the Air National Guard Bureau.) When a new unit is constituted, or when an inactive unit is reactivated, AFHRA advises the unit of its entitlements. AFHRA also coordinates its lineage determinations with the Air Force Military Personnel Center at Randolph AFB, Tex. AFMPC ensures that units receive formal authorization to display the battle honors and campaign awards they have earned.

The Rules Bend-Sometimes

As the arbiters of USAF lineage matters, AFHRA experts occasionally find themselves at odds with commanders seeking to improve the standing of their organizations by misapplying lineage definitions or by seeking exemptions from certain rules. However, the definitions have become well settled, and most commanders eventually agree that consistent application is vital.

Even so, Air Force officials on occasion have set aside the rules because of policy. In the late 1940s, for example, the Air Force examined various arrangements for restructuring its operations. That reorganization was subject to a mix of politics and economics that, in some ways, resembles today’s circumstances.

The key question was whether the wing or the combat group would be the primary building block of the postwar Air Force. After considerable experimentation (and a few false starts), the existing wings were restructured and redesignated as divisions. These divisions were assigned to the active numbered air forces, and new wings were established and activated to replace them. Gradually, combat squadrons were assigned directly to the new wings. This arrangement was viewed as an efficiency measure. It made combat groups redundant, and USAF began to inactivate them in 1952.

It soon dawned on many, however, that this process had inadvertently created a lineage problem: Strictly speaking, the new wings were not entitled to claim the lineages (and, more important, the accompanying battle honors and campaign streamers) or the famous World War II combat groups they had previously owned. This was unacceptable and USAF’s leadership resolved the matter by decreeing that the honors of combat groups would be assigned to like-numbered wings, regardless of customary practice.

By contrast, the Air Force has often rigorously enforced the rules despite the existence of a good argument that they should be bent. During the Vietnam War, for example, Strategic Air Command’s bomb and refueling wings were required to send large contingents and numerous aircraft overseas to provisional wings controlled by Pacific Air Forces. These contingents conducted Arc Light air strikes over South Vietnam and, later, Operation Linebacker II raids over North Vietnam. It has been said that the numbers involved were such that, in an earlier time, they would have been considered unit deployments. Only a handful of officers and enlisted troops stayed behind to maintain the fiction that the units were still in the United States.

Unfortunately, battle honors that might accrue to a provisional wing cannot be transferred to the permanent units that support it. As a result, SAC’s “heavies” received no battle honors for their participation in the Vietnam War. Given the losses and the scale of effort involved, many believed that an exception to the rules was in order.

Operation Desert Storm also saw some use or in-theater provisional wings. AFMPC has not announced what battle honors wiII be awarded or how they might be apportioned among the organizations that participated. It remains to be seen whether there will be a repeat of the Vietnam War battle honor experience.

Given the likelihood that longstanding units will be caught in the force drawdown, discussions of lineage seniority and ownership have intensified, especially within the fighter community, and various officers have studied ways to quantify a unit’s standing. One concept envisions a seniority value based on factors of varying weight. Included in the calculation would be length of service, battle honors and campaign awards, aerial victory credits, and the like. The idea is, unless overriding factors intervene, to inactivate those wings with the least illustrious histories first, thereby preserving the fame and prestige of the longer-serving outfits. Officers of Tactical Air Command (before it was merged into Air Combat Command on June 1) and US Air Forces in Europe drew up their own seniority lists, but no consensus has emerged on how points or credits should be assigned, especially with regard to comparisons between units with very different backgrounds.

Many Air Force organizations—more than 300 tactical units alone by a recent count—have already been redesignated or realigned, and this process. will continue as more bases close and US forces arc brought home from overseas. The composite wing concept is also affecting the kinds of designations being given to units. The bottom line is that virtually every organization in the Air Force is going to change the way it operates, and most wiII change their name, to reflect that process. ♦

George W. Cully is a recently retired Air Force captain. He is now Senior Research Associate of Aerohistory Associates, based in Montgomery. Ala. This is his first article for Air Force Magazine.