Building Air Force Intellectual Capacity: An Innovative Look at Creating Air University and the Air Force Academy, 1918-1955

Military technological and educational innovation must win backing by senior officers, ideally with a strategy for intellectual and organizational improvement.2 In "Technology and History: Kranzberg's Laws," Melvin Kranzberg offers additional insights of technological innovation as a human activity.[...]technological determinism, the belief that technology is "the prime factor shaping our lifestyles, values, institutions, and other elements of our society" must be viewed as a human activity with all the foibles and irrationality associated.3 The author articulates "Kranzberg's Laws" that with some adaptation inform understanding of military education.Because organizations inherently resist disruptive change, product champions succeed by disguising disruptive (major) transformation as sustaining (incremental).5 In sum, the technological innovation thoughts of Rosen, Kranzberg, and Pierce inform understanding of the military educational innovations represented by the creation of Air University and the Air Force Academy that span the 1918-1955 time frame.First manifested in the 1921 Ostfriesland bombing trials where Mitchell's airmen "sank a battleship" and then escalating in his attack on the Departments of War and the Navy for "gross negligence" in the 1925 USS Shenandoah dirigible crash, Mitchell seized newspaper headlines and sparked Congressional debate over airpower.The official Air Force Academy History describes fourteen separate bills with varying degrees of overlap.Since many of the bills tied the new academy to a specific location within a Congressional district, the Air Force legislative liaison team sought to decouple approval for an academy from the decision of where to locate it.