Walk across any U.S. Air Force base, and you’ll likely notice senior officers wearing patches from elite military institutions like the Weapons School or the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies. These emblems reflect the Air Force’s emphasis on tactical and strategic mastery. Yet, the operational level of warfare remains underdeveloped.
To rapidly train officers in operational warfare, the U.S. Air Force needs to revamp professional military education to focus on operational thinking and highlight the importance of operational-focused schoolhouses to the same level as its Weapons School. Without deliberate investment in operational planning, the Air Force risks faltering in future conflicts.
Understanding The Levels of War
Military operations unfold across three levels: tactical, operational, and strategic. Each level has distinct characteristics based on the scale, complexity, and level of decision-making required. Tactics deal with specific, often localized actions such as conducting close air support or executing a flanking maneuver. Operations coordinate multiple tactical movements to achieve higher-level objectives such as taking an enemy town or destroying an enemy air defense network. Strategy focuses on achieving overarching political or military goals like securing an adversary’s surrender.
In theory, these levels are distinct, but the Air Force’s structure and capabilities often blur them. Bombers, for instance, can simultaneously deliver tactical strikes and strategic deterrence. The same is true when it comes to Air Force command and control structures. Most air forces are organized into squadrons, groups, and wings as the primary fighting units. The U.S. Air Force continues to aggregate higher with numbered air forces overseeing multiple wings and major commands overseeing multiple numbered air forces, where there is overlap is at the operational level. For example, 3rd Air Force is the overarching numbered air force in Europe but was relegated to primarily focus on administrative duties in 2019, while the major command, U.S. Air Forces in Europe and Air Forces Africa, through the 603rd Air Operation Center, focused on controlling forces.
The Air Operations Center: The Heart of Operational Warfare
Since Operation Desert Storm, the Air Operations Center has served as the Air Force’s primary hub for translating strategy into tactical actions. While the Air Operations Center is made up of multiple divisions, the main ones dealing with operational planning are the Strategy Division and the Combat Plans Division. The Strategy Division develops the Joint Air Operations Plan and the Air Operations Directive, outlining mission priorities for air campaigns. The Combat Plans Division applies operational art to develop detailed execution plans for air component operations. The Master Air Attack Plan creates force packages at specific times matched with specific targets to achieve desired effects. It is then transformed into an executable Air Tasking Order that specifies the details required for mission execution (call signs, identification codes, refueling tracks, etc.). This process, refined over decades, has been effective in past conflicts against non-peer adversaries.
While air operations since the Desert Storm air campaign in 1991 have been successful, future air campaigns may encounter some distinct differences. Of these past conflicts, only one can be characterized as a major regional conflict, and that was Desert Storm. Prior to Desert Storm, Iraq possessed the fifth-largest army in the world with nearly a million active military personnel, over 5000 tanks, 10,000 other armored vehicles, 3000 artillery pieces, nearly 700 combat aircraft, a 40,000-person air force, and eight years of recent combat experience fighting Iran.
Later operations in Serbia, Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq after 2003 were small-scale contingencies where these adversaries were not employing their military components in coordinated attacks and they fielded few cyber or space capabilities. These lesser threats made it less challenging for U.S. and coalition partners to attack targets than one could expect when facing a peer adversary. China can attack from multiple domains and is increasingly acquiring capabilities like those of the United States.
During these past conflicts against non-peer threats, more aircraft were lost due to accidents than to combat. The threats posed by China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea pose much different engagement environments than did the small-scale contingencies since Desert Storm. In a future fight, air and sea bases can no longer be assumed to be safe, which is the primary reason behind the Air Force’s concept of Agile Combat Employment, which would scatter aircraft, personnel, and logistics to complicate adversary targeting and reduce damage to bases. In the past, except for potential conflict with the Soviet Union, the Air Force did not need to plan for the added complexity of scattering forces and combining them back together quickly to generate combat power. With the greater threats to deployed U.S. forces, the Air Operations Center and its operational planners need to integrate strategic changes into tactical success much more rapidly and in a more dispersed environment.
Why Operational Planning Is Unique — and Difficult
Operational planning is uniquely challenging because it sits at the crossroads of tactical execution and strategic vision. Unlike tactics, which deal with defined tasks, or strategy, which often relies on broad concepts, operational planning requires detailed coordination across domains and units. For example, capturing a key enemy position (tactical success) is meaningless unless integrated into a broader campaign that destabilizes adversary forces (operational goal) and advances strategic objectives. Operational planning should reconcile competing priorities, resources, and ambiguous guidance from higher commands into concrete tasks for tactical units to achieve.
The expectation is that as you move up the levels of warfare, the number of factors involved increases, making decision-making more complex the higher you go. Complexity in decision-making is actually more of a bell curve, where the operational level is more complex than the others. At the tactical level, pilots or ground troops are given specific short-term tasks where the fog of war is limited to a small area and a limited number of adversaries. As the geographic area expands, the number of factors involved increases exponentially. But while planners at the tactical and operational level need to give concrete tasks, strategic planners are able to fall back on broad undefined terminology, leaving lower levels to interpret meaning.
For example, the 2022 National Defense Strategy pushed for “integrated deterrence” as the main deterrent concept for the United States. While the concept sounds great, the inability to define what this meant in practice has allowed lower-level commands to come up with their own solutions or continue to funnel down ambiguity to even lower levels.
Just compare mission statements of different commands and you can see the same generalities. Just like U.S. European Command’s mission is to deter conflict and maintain peace and security, U.S. Air Forces in Europe’s mission is to deter aggression and deepen relationships. Even though both commands have their own strategy and campaign plans, there is a continuing funnel of undefined terminology.
Eventually, the ambiguity being pushed down the chain can’t go any further, and the people who have to finally define and connect strategic ambiguity to tactical tasks are operational planners. This is what I saw in U.S. Air Forces in Europe, where the operational planners were the lowest possible level before tactical employment so they had no choice but to come up with a decision. Since there was no guidebook on how to deter aggression or deepen relationships, staff officers had to come up with solutions they thought were best. Since the Strategy Division was primarily made up of pilots, untrained in operational planning, their primary answers were to use aircraft for every problem rather than seeing the wide variety of capabilities — cyber, space, information, exercises, relationship building, etc. A strong understanding of the capabilities and how to employ them comes with experience in an Air Operations Center and a foundational understanding of operational planning.
One reason, according to retired Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, is that officers prefer to stay in the world of tactics, details, and pure facts rather than the abstract. The reason being that operational thinking is more of an art where quantitative calculations inform qualitative judgement. Another reason could be the incentives of the Air Force, focusing on tactical and strategic education rather than operational training.
Misaligned Incentives in Professional Development
The Air Force’s professional military education system prioritizes tactical and strategic expertise over operational proficiency. Programs like the Weapons School and the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies produce elite tacticians and theorists, but operational planning receives scant attention. For example, the Air Command and Staff College, the primary professional military education for mid-career officers, dedicates just eight days to joint air operations in its 10-month curriculum.
In contrast, the Army’s equivalent, Command and General Staff College, centers its curriculum on the operational environment, preparing officers to navigate and lead at that level. The Air Force’s neglect of operational planning becomes even starker when its top graduates are funneled into School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, a school designed to produce strategists rather than operational planners. This is a slot so coveted that a 2010 study found that 98 percent of graduates made colonel and 30 percent made general. While the school promotes the best, its primary purpose is to create theory-based strategists for the Air Force. Since most officers who enter the Strategy Division within the Air Operations Center are fresh out of these programs, an opportunity is missed to train them for a critical job they may fill.
A Missed Opportunity
In 2018, the Air Force attempted to address this gap by creating the Multi-Domain Warfare Officer (13O) career field. These officers received specialized training to plan and execute multi-domain operations within the Air Operations Center. The program showed promise, particularly during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, where 13Os provided invaluable expertise in shaping air operations across Europe.
Yet, just five days before Russia invaded Ukraine, the Air Force announced plans to phase out the 13O career field. According to then Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. C. Q. Brown, “we must reinforce all Air Force members’ multi-domain expertise.” The rationale was to train all officers in multi-domain warfare rather than focusing on one career field. Without knowing the true causes of this decision, the Air Operations Center lost a dedicated pipeline for officers trained in operational planning specifically for the Air Operations Center. As a result, the main source to train officers in operational thinking is now through professional military education and Air Force schoolhouses.
Recommendations for Reform
To solve the gap in operational planning, the Air Force needs to realign professional military education, more specifically Air Command and Staff College, to focus more on operational planning with specific focus on all domains. Most of the Air Force officers in operational planning positions are field-grade officers (e.g., majors and lieutenant colonels) fresh out of Air Command and Staff College. Reinvigorating the curriculum to gear it towards the operational level of war, like the Army’s Command and General Staff College, would get after solving critical knowledge gaps among the mid-career Air Force officers.
If Air Command and Staff College isn’t the answer, the Air Force has to continue to rely on the main command and control schoolhouse in the Air Force — the 505th and 705th training squadrons. Their courses are mandatory for Air Force officers entering the Air Operations Center but are more crash courses than deep dives into operational planning. The advanced course, Command and Control Warrior Advanced Course, is the closest to a deep dive any officer could receive. This course should be given the same status as Weapons School to show that the Air Force wants elite officers trained at all levels of war. By legitimizing operational command and control as a primary responsibility of Air Force officers, graduating from the advanced course would be seen as making someone the best of the best, eventually leading to higher promotions rates due to the realization that operational warfare is critical to the future fight.
Operational Warfare Will Only Get More Complex
The future battlespace will increasingly demand dynamic operational thinkers. Multi-domain warfare, artificial intelligence, and compressed decision timelines will strain existing processes, already difficult for well-trained officers. Without a cadre of operationally skilled officers, the Air Force risks tactical fragmentation — excelling in isolated tasks but failing to integrate efforts into coherent campaigns.
Revitalizing operational expertise is not just a matter of professional development. It is a strategic imperative. The Air Force should recognize that tactical brilliance and strategic vision are not enough. The missing middle — operations — is the key to navigating the complexities of modern war.
Erik Schuh is an Air Force officer serving as an operations research analyst. The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official guidance or position of the U.S. government, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Air Force, or the U.S. Space Force.
Image: Staff Sgt. Jessica Montano via U.S. Air Force
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