Inspiring Doctrinal Innovation

Prompt:

The Air Force is adopting In-Place Combat Wings, Deployable Combat Wings, and Combat Generation Wings as units of action, and is implementing an Air Staff (A-Staff) structure within each wing’s command layer.

Write an essay on how the Air Force can effectively organize, train, and equip wing
commanders and their A-Staff personnel for distributed control of airpower operations.

• What authorities and capabilities are required to allow Commanders and A-Staffs at these echelons to establish/conduct distributed control and fight within their AOR?
• How, (if at all), will the composition and authorities of the A-Staffs be structured differently between the three types of Wing missions?
• What are the necessary command relationships between units of action and the Air Force forces service component and functional air component commanders?
• What doctrinal, operational, combat support, and C2 changes will be needed to support this new construct?

Submission Guidelines:

• Essays must reference at least three USAF Operational Doctrine. U.S. Air Force Doctrine > Home (af.mil)
• Essays must be greater than 1,500 words and less than 3,000 words not including footnotes, headers, title, or author’s bio. Include a word count at the end.
• Your essay should be clearly focused. Establish the focus by providing a thesis in the first paragraph.

• Your essay should be well structured and developed using a logical, orderly progression of writing. For example, a paragraph with a topic sentence, supporting sentences, and ending in a concluding sentence is one model to follow.
• A note on support/citations: authors may refer to themselves in the first person (e.g., “I could not put down the book”), but personal and professional experience are no substitute for external citations.
• Your audience does not necessarily share your opinion, background, and knowledge base; write in a well-reasoned supported manner.
• Finally, prose is important. Clarity, concision, and directness at the sentence level ensure even the most complicated ideas are presented in an accessible way. Avoid jargon.

Use of AI Tools for essay creation:

• Contestants are permitted to use AI tools to assist with writing the essay. It may be useful to use AI tools to assist with research, rephrasing, citations, and summaries within individual paragraphs. However, using an AI to write the entire essay is not recommended, as AI writing tools generally produce poor papers that do not answer the prompt or meet the requirements in the submission guidelines.

Style Matters:

• Please use AP Style for the content of your piece; that is, for matters including abbreviations, capitalization, forms of address etc.
• Your article should use the Chicago Manual of Style for formatting and citations. Begin each new paragraph without indenting the first sentence. Use footnotes only—do not use endnotes. Do not include bibliographies or works cited listings.
• Use one space only between a punctuation mark that ends a sentence and the first word of the next sentence. All punctuation goes within quotation marks in accordance with AP Style.
• Default to standard American English for spelling and punctuation.
• Avoid hyperlink citations.