Review of  Always at War: Organizational Culture in Strategic Air Command, 1946-62  by Melvin G. Deaile

Isinger, Russell

English

Wilfrid Laurier University

Canadian Military HistoryVolume 28 | Issue 2 Article 1110-2-2019Review of "Always at War: Organizational Culturein Strategic Air Command, 1946-62" by Melvin G.DeaileRussell IsingerThis Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in Canadian MilitaryHistory by an authorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.Recommended CitationIsinger, Russell (2019) "Review of "Always at War: Organizational Culture in Strategic Air Command, 1946-62" by Melvin G. Deaile,"Canadian Military History: Vol. 28 : Iss. 2 , Article 11.Available at: https://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol28/iss2/11  33C A N A D I A N  M I L I TA RY  H I S T O RY Melvin G. Deaile. Always at War: Organizational Culture in Strategic Air Command, 1946-62. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2018. Pp. 296.In the classic Hollywood movie about the Strategic Air Command (SAC), Jimmy Stewart plays Robert “Dutch” Holland, a former Second World War bomber commander. Due to a lack of experienced leaders in the United States Air Force (USAF), Lieutenant-Colonel Holland is recalled to active service, but he protests having to leave his wife and career during peacetime, asking his superior: “Where is the fire? I just don’t see the necessity.” The General replies, “You would if you were in my shoes. Do you realize we are the only thing that is keeping the peace? By staying combat ready, we can prevent a war.”1 The film’s message was clear, as it is in Melvin Deaile’s book Always at War—SAC’s motto was “Peace Is Our Profession,” but the price of that peace was a highly-trained and technologically-advanced bomber force held on a constant war footing. Though much has been written on war planning and strategy in this period, Deaile, an associate professor at the US Air Command and Staff College,2 adds a fresh perspective on SAC from its 1946 founding to its 1962 peak. As Deaile notes, “[m]ore than a simple history, [the book] describes how an organization dominated by airmen developed its own unique culture,” one that considered itself to already be at war (p. 3).The book is divided into seven chapters plus an introduction and epilogue. The first three chapters set the stage with an overview of the historical and ideological underpinnings of SAC. Deaile describes how the air force formed both a subculture—derived from its profession of the officer pilot and its technology of the airplane—and a counterculture—stemming from its search for a coherent doctrine that could exploit the potential of the airplane while emancipating 1  Stewart, a veteran of bombing missions over Germany and a postwar reserve USAF officer who rose to the rank of Brigadier-General, flew operationally the SAC bombers featured in the film. See Strategic Air Command, DVD, directed by Anthony Mann (Los Angeles, Paramount Pictures Corp., 1954). For more on SAC’s use of popular culture to advance service interests, see Steve Call, Selling Air Power: Military Aviation and American Popular Culture after World War II (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2009).2  Colonel Deaile is also a former SAC bomber pilot and veteran of the First Gulf War. The book is based on his 2007 doctoral dissertation.1Isinger: Review of "Always at War" by Melvin DeailePublished by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 201934 Book Reviewsit from merely supporting ground forces—within the Army, of which it was a part. Airpower theorists like Billy Mitchell provided the doctrine of strategic bombing which held out the promise of victory in future wars without the need for costly invasions. The Second World War put theory into practice and saw the development of training and tactics that increased the effectiveness of strategic bombing. The postwar Strategic Bombing Survey of Germany and Japan (in the latter case, where bombing was deemed particularly effective) may not have proven that airpower could win wars, but it certainly made a decisive contribution to victory, bolstering arguments for a centralised air force command. The advent of the atomic bomb and the intercontinental bomber presented the opportunity for airpower to deter the new enemy, the Soviet Union. The Truman administration, seeking a cost-effective counter to the Soviet Union’s massive ground forces, shifted the postwar defence budget in favour of airpower and atomic strikes. Consequently, SAC was formed in 1946 as an independent offensive command, and USAF founded in 1947 as a service equal to the Army and Navy. The air force had finally achieved its goal of controlling its own assets, assets which could now devastate an entire city with a single bomb.3   But things did not go well for SAC at first, and Deaile argues this was a function of a critical aspect of organisational culture: leadership. The first commander of SAC, General George Kenny, was a wartime Pacific theatre tactical—not strategic—air commander who mismanaged issues of personnel, force structure, training, and tactics. Kenny was fired in 1948 in favour of the man forever linked with SAC, Lieutenant-General Curtis LeMay. The tough, blunt, cigar-chomping—and innovative and results-oriented—LeMay had a proven record as a bomber commander in both the European and Pacific theatres, and he recruited like-minded commanders with similar combat experience. This command group then set about shaping SAC’s organisational culture around the premise, as succinctly stated by LeMay, that “‘We are at war now!’” (p. 102) According to Deaile, “LeMay and his team of ‘bomber generals’ put 3  On war planning and strategy in this period, see Edward Kaplan, To Kill Nations: American Strategy in the Air-Atomic Age and the Rise of Mutually Assured Destruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015).2Canadian Military History, Vol. 28 [2019], Iss. 2, Art. 11https://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol28/iss2/11  35C A N A D I A N  M I L I TA RY  H I S T O RY SAC on alert; war was not months or weeks away, but hours away. SAC’s daily routines reflected an organization at war” (p. 119).4The next four chapters are the best in the book, and they examine how SAC became the premier command not just within USAF but within the US Armed Forces, a force LeMay envisioned as being “‘so strong and so efficient that no one would dare attack us’” (p. 91). When LeMay took over SAC, he conducted a command-wide bombing exercise, and not one crew finished the mission as briefed. He then set about transforming SAC into an elite force that could deliver on a war plan which required it to destroy the Soviet Union in one mission. He established realistic and routine training procedures and missions so that crews achieved and maintained a high level of readiness and effectiveness; SAC crews joked that every city in the US had been obliterated many times over through simulated bombing runs. Checklists encouraged standardised operating procedures for everything to ensure safety and efficiency. Personnel, who previously cross-trained on roles and rotated between crews which undermined proficiency, now specialised in roles and were kept together to create high performing crews. Crews also competed against each other in terms of proficiency and bombing accuracy; high performing crews became lead crews and could be spot promoted while poorer performing crews were demoted and retrained. And senior officers did not fly a desk; they flew missions so they had the same experience as their crews. Constant competition and evaluation—between and of crews, officers, and units—were key to LeMay’s philosophy of continual improvement, and his annual surprise inspections were legendary and cost many officers their commands. Security was considered equally important, and infiltration teams would try to penetrate the perimeters of SAC bases to test preparedness, a risky business considering guards were instructed to shoot to kill.54  Bomber generals would dominate USAF postwar leadership, and it was 1982 before a fighter general became USAF Chief of Staff. On their rivalry, see Mike Worden, Rise of the Fighter Generals: the Problem of Air Force Leadership, 1945-1982 (Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama: Air University Press, 1998).5  On the formative years of SAC, see Walton S. Moody, Building a Strategic Air Force (Washington, DC: Air Force History and Museums Program, 1996); and a more recent study by Phillip S. Meilinger, Bomber: The Formation and Early Years of Strategic Air Command (Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama: Air University Press, 2012).3Isinger: Review of "Always at War" by Melvin DeailePublished by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 201936 Book ReviewsDeaile points out that the “SAC mentality” took a toll on its personnel. One of the more interesting chapters of the book is Deaile’s discussion of the effect of SAC’s organisational culture on the daily lives of SAC personnel and their wives and families. Despite LeMay’s (and his wife’s) laudable dedication to providing better pay, food, health, and accommodation on and off base, and even outlets such as social and recreational clubs and support groups for SAC personnel and their families, the reality was that SAC’s drive for excellence combined with rigid discipline, around the clock operations, and Arctic and overseas deployments came with a heavy cost in terms of stress, and SAC had the highest divorce rate in USAF.Deaile ends his book with the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when SAC came close to going to war. He describes SAC’s relentless pace of operations during the crisis, noting that all missions were performed as trained for without accident or incident. At the height of the crisis, SAC had 1,436 bombers and 183 missiles on fifteen-minute attack notice: “SAC personnel had demonstrated what close to fifteen years of a ‘we are at war’ mentality and culture had produced” (p. 218). Deterrence, based on the credibility of the response, was on full display. The crisis would mark SAC’s apex, for 1962 was also the first year since 1946 that it did not have a bomber in production,6 and with a shift in strategy from Massive Retaliation to Flexible Response and from bombers to missiles,7 by 1968 SAC was reduced in personnel by almost half. This steady decline continued until 1991 when SAC’s remaining bombers were taken off alert with the end of the Cold War, and the command officially ceased to exist a year later. But SAC lives on in the esprit de corps of its veterans; at annual reunions its members proudly consider themselves to be victors in a war where none of them ever dropped a bomb on their intended enemy. Deaile has written a fitting tribute to their service.russell isinger, university of saskatchewan6  An examination of SAC bomber procurement can be found in Michael E. Brown, Flying Blind: the Politics of the US Strategic Bomber Program (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).7  Deaile describes missileers—who were not pilots—as a subculture which SAC worked hard to incorporate into the organisation (so as not to risk them becoming a counterculture), but his section dealing with the integration of missiles into SAC is brief and warrants further examination.4Canadian Military History, Vol. 28 [2019], Iss. 2, Art. 11https://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol28/iss2/11

Scholars Commons

Canadian Military History
Volume 28 | Issue 2 Article 11
10-2-2019
Review of "Always at War: Organizational Culture
in Strategic Air Command, 1946-62" by Melvin G.
Deaile
Russell Isinger
This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in Canadian Military
History by an authorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.
Recommended Citation
Isinger, Russell (2019) "Review of "Always at War: Organizational Culture in Strategic Air Command, 1946-62" by Melvin G. Deaile,"
Canadian Military History: Vol. 28 : Iss. 2 , Article 11.
Available at: https://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol28/iss2/11
  33C A N A D I A N  M I L I TA RY  H I S T O RY 
Melvin G. Deaile. Always at War: Organizational Culture in Strategic 
Air Command, 1946-62. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2018. Pp. 
296.
In the classic Hollywood movie about the Strategic Air Command 
(SAC), Jimmy Stewart plays Robert “Dutch” Holland, a former 
Second World War bomber commander. Due to a lack of experienced 
leaders in the United States Air Force (USAF), Lieutenant-Colonel 
Holland is recalled to active service, but he protests having to leave 
his wife and career during peacetime, asking his superior: “Where 
is the fire? I just don’t see the necessity.” The General replies, “You 
would if you were in my shoes. Do you realize we are the only thing 
that is keeping the peace? By staying combat ready, we can prevent 
a war.”1 The film’s message was clear, as it is in Melvin Deaile’s 
book Always at War—SAC’s motto was “Peace Is Our Profession,” 
but the price of that peace was a highly-trained and technologically-
advanced bomber force held on a constant war footing. Though 
much has been written on war planning and strategy in this period, 
Deaile, an associate professor at the US Air Command and Staff 
College,2 adds a fresh perspective on SAC from its 1946 founding to 
its 1962 peak. As Deaile notes, “[m]ore than a simple history, [the 
book] describes how an organization dominated by airmen developed 
its own unique culture,” one that considered itself to already be at 
war (p. 3).
The book is divided into seven chapters plus an introduction and 
epilogue. The first three chapters set the stage with an overview of 
the historical and ideological underpinnings of SAC. Deaile describes 
how the air force formed both a subculture—derived from its 
profession of the officer pilot and its technology of the airplane—and 
a counterculture—stemming from its search for a coherent doctrine 
that could exploit the potential of the airplane while emancipating 
1  Stewart, a veteran of bombing missions over Germany and a postwar reserve 
USAF officer who rose to the rank of Brigadier-General, flew operationally the 
SAC bombers featured in the film. See Strategic Air Command, DVD, directed 
by Anthony Mann (Los Angeles, Paramount Pictures Corp., 1954). For more on 
SAC’s use of popular culture to advance service interests, see Steve Call, Selling Air 
Power: Military Aviation and American Popular Culture after World War II (College 
Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2009).
2  Colonel Deaile is also a former SAC bomber pilot and veteran of the First Gulf 
War. The book is based on his 2007 doctoral dissertation.
1
Isinger: Review of "Always at War" by Melvin Deaile
Published by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2019
34 Book Reviews
it from merely supporting ground forces—within the Army, of which 
it was a part. Airpower theorists like Billy Mitchell provided the 
doctrine of strategic bombing which held out the promise of victory in 
future wars without the need for costly invasions. The Second World 
War put theory into practice and saw the development of training 
and tactics that increased the effectiveness of strategic bombing. 
The postwar Strategic Bombing Survey of Germany and Japan (in 
the latter case, where bombing was deemed particularly effective) 
may not have proven that airpower could win wars, but it certainly 
made a decisive contribution to victory, bolstering arguments for 
a centralised air force command. The advent of the atomic bomb 
and the intercontinental bomber presented the opportunity for 
airpower to deter the new enemy, the Soviet Union. The Truman 
administration, seeking a cost-effective counter to the Soviet Union’s 
massive ground forces, shifted the postwar defence budget in favour 
of airpower and atomic strikes. Consequently, SAC was formed in 
1946 as an independent offensive command, and USAF founded in 
1947 as a service equal to the Army and Navy. The air force had 
finally achieved its goal of controlling its own assets, assets which 
could now devastate an entire city with a single bomb.3   
But things did not go well for SAC at first, and Deaile argues 
this was a function of a critical aspect of organisational culture: 
leadership. The first commander of SAC, General George Kenny, was 
a wartime Pacific theatre tactical—not strategic—air commander 
who mismanaged issues of personnel, force structure, training, and 
tactics. Kenny was fired in 1948 in favour of the man forever linked 
with SAC, Lieutenant-General Curtis LeMay. The tough, blunt, 
cigar-chomping—and innovative and results-oriented—LeMay had 
a proven record as a bomber commander in both the European 
and Pacific theatres, and he recruited like-minded commanders 
with similar combat experience. This command group then set 
about shaping SAC’s organisational culture around the premise, as 
succinctly stated by LeMay, that “‘We are at war now!’” (p. 102) 
According to Deaile, “LeMay and his team of ‘bomber generals’ put 
3  On war planning and strategy in this period, see Edward Kaplan, To Kill 
Nations: American Strategy in the Air-Atomic Age and the Rise of Mutually Assured 
Destruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015).
2
Canadian Military History, Vol. 28 [2019], Iss. 2, Art. 11
https://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol28/iss2/11
  35C A N A D I A N  M I L I TA RY  H I S T O RY 
SAC on alert; war was not months or weeks away, but hours away. 
SAC’s daily routines reflected an organization at war” (p. 119).4
The next four chapters are the best in the book, and they examine 
how SAC became the premier command not just within USAF but 
within the US Armed Forces, a force LeMay envisioned as being 
“‘so strong and so efficient that no one would dare attack us’” (p. 
91). When LeMay took over SAC, he conducted a command-wide 
bombing exercise, and not one crew finished the mission as briefed. 
He then set about transforming SAC into an elite force that could 
deliver on a war plan which required it to destroy the Soviet Union in 
one mission. He established realistic and routine training procedures 
and missions so that crews achieved and maintained a high level of 
readiness and effectiveness; SAC crews joked that every city in the 
US had been obliterated many times over through simulated bombing 
runs. Checklists encouraged standardised operating procedures for 
everything to ensure safety and efficiency. Personnel, who previously 
cross-trained on roles and rotated between crews which undermined 
proficiency, now specialised in roles and were kept together to create 
high performing crews. Crews also competed against each other 
in terms of proficiency and bombing accuracy; high performing 
crews became lead crews and could be spot promoted while poorer 
performing crews were demoted and retrained. And senior officers did 
not fly a desk; they flew missions so they had the same experience 
as their crews. Constant competition and evaluation—between and 
of crews, officers, and units—were key to LeMay’s philosophy of 
continual improvement, and his annual surprise inspections were 
legendary and cost many officers their commands. Security was 
considered equally important, and infiltration teams would try to 
penetrate the perimeters of SAC bases to test preparedness, a risky 
business considering guards were instructed to shoot to kill.5
4  Bomber generals would dominate USAF postwar leadership, and it was 1982 
before a fighter general became USAF Chief of Staff. On their rivalry, see Mike 
Worden, Rise of the Fighter Generals: the Problem of Air Force Leadership, 1945-
1982 (Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama: Air University Press, 1998).
5  On the formative years of SAC, see Walton S. Moody, Building a Strategic Air 
Force (Washington, DC: Air Force History and Museums Program, 1996); and a 
more recent study by Phillip S. Meilinger, Bomber: The Formation and Early Years 
of Strategic Air Command (Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama: Air University Press, 
2012).
3
Isinger: Review of "Always at War" by Melvin Deaile
Published by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2019
36 Book Reviews
Deaile points out that the “SAC mentality” took a toll on its 
personnel. One of the more interesting chapters of the book is Deaile’s 
discussion of the effect of SAC’s organisational culture on the daily 
lives of SAC personnel and their wives and families. Despite LeMay’s 
(and his wife’s) laudable dedication to providing better pay, food, 
health, and accommodation on and off base, and even outlets such as 
social and recreational clubs and support groups for SAC personnel 
and their families, the reality was that SAC’s drive for excellence 
combined with rigid discipline, around the clock operations, and 
Arctic and overseas deployments came with a heavy cost in terms of 
stress, and SAC had the highest divorce rate in USAF.
Deaile ends his book with the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, 
when SAC came close to going to war. He describes SAC’s relentless 
pace of operations during the crisis, noting that all missions were 
performed as trained for without accident or incident. At the height of 
the crisis, SAC had 1,436 bombers and 183 missiles on fifteen-minute 
attack notice: “SAC personnel had demonstrated what close to fifteen 
years of a ‘we are at war’ mentality and culture had produced” (p. 
218). Deterrence, based on the credibility of the response, was on full 
display. The crisis would mark SAC’s apex, for 1962 was also the first 
year since 1946 that it did not have a bomber in production,6 and with 
a shift in strategy from Massive Retaliation to Flexible Response and 
from bombers to missiles,7 by 1968 SAC was reduced in personnel 
by almost half. This steady decline continued until 1991 when SAC’s 
remaining bombers were taken off alert with the end of the Cold War, 
and the command officially ceased to exist a year later. But SAC 
lives on in the esprit de corps of its veterans; at annual reunions its 
members proudly consider themselves to be victors in a war where 
none of them ever dropped a bomb on their intended enemy. Deaile 
has written a fitting tribute to their service.
russell isinger, university of saskatchewan
6  An examination of SAC bomber procurement can be found in Michael E. Brown, 
Flying Blind: the Politics of the US Strategic Bomber Program (Ithaca: Cornell 
University Press, 1992).
7  Deaile describes missileers—who were not pilots—as a subculture which SAC 
worked hard to incorporate into the organisation (so as not to risk them becoming a 
counterculture), but his section dealing with the integration of missiles into SAC is 
brief and warrants further examination.
4
Canadian Military History, Vol. 28 [2019], Iss. 2, Art. 11
https://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol28/iss2/11


https://scholars.wlu.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1987&amp;context=cmh

Review of Always at War: Organizational Culture in Strategic Air Command, 1946-62 by Melvin G. Deaile

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Wilfrid Laurier University

Scholars Commons