Air Force Leadership

Air Force Leadership. …..  What makes it different from other kind of  Military Leaderships? 

Basically, leadership has the same universal values.    It becomes interesting when one starts to look further at the differences between Air Force leadership and the leaderships of  other military branches such as the Navy and the Army.

There are some fundamental differences that can be seen in  daily activities, work environment and goals to be achieved.    What really stands out in this case is the speed of  decision-making process which is attached to the quality of the goals to be achieved. This decision-making speed has been mentioned by Air Force Commodore  (Ret) A. Andoko, Senior Fighter-Instructor Pilot of the Air Force, who graduated from the United States’ Taloa Flying School Academy: 

“The speed of decisions in the Army is usually related to the speed of tanks (now, the speed of Apache helis); in the Navy,  with the speeds of destroyer ships (or the speeds of their Tomahawks). The Air Force’s speed of decisions are identical with the *speed of  sound* (nowadays: maybe the speed of hypersonic missiles, launched from fighter Jets)”.

With such an anatomy, it is only natural that the aspects in Air Force leadership,  that require certain “background knowledge” and “level of intelligence” factors, will greatly influence the principles of leadership in Air Force.     The decisions also relate to other factors such as the impacts of the damages that can be caused by air strike operations and the speeds and ranges of targets that to be achieved. 

All these things above will be clearly seen as the difference between Air Force leadership and  and the leaderships in other military branches, in terms of implementations. 

Although, once again,  it needs to be underlined that leadership in a broad sense, basically has the same common thread, namely universal values.

Jakarta December 29, 2020

Chappy Hakim

Indonesia Center for Air Power Studies