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New award unveiled

In April the Air Force will begin awarding a Combat Action Medal to the growing number of airmen whose jobs involve being shot at by the enemy.

The new medal will be to airmen what the Combat Infantryman Badge, Combat Action Badge and Combat Medical Badge are for soldiers and the Combat Action Ribbon is to Marines and sailors: testament that they have come under fire in the performance of their mission.

Lt. Gen. Roger A. Brady, deputy chief of staff for personnel and manpower, said award of the medal would be retroactive to Sept. 11, 2001.

The Air Force unveiled the design of the new medal and ribbon Friday on its official Web site.

Though fighter and bomber pilots have long been the pointy-edge of the sword when the Air Force has gone to war — and so have collected the bulk of combat-related decorations — other airmen have engaged the enemy.

Enlisted airmen fired machine guns from World War II bombers, and security forces troops fought and pushed back enemy ground troops assaulting their bases as recently as Vietnam.

But the nature of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, especially new demands placed on the Air Force to assist the Army, has thrust a growing number of airmen into ground combat, whether driving and securing convoys or making the long walk to a street curb to “safe” an improvised explosive device.

“We have some things happening [in this war] that haven’t happened to this degree at any time in our history, and that is we have a lot more people that are exposed to combat,” Brady said. “These are not traditional [Air Force] missions.“

About 5,000 airmen are doing “in-lieu-of” soldier missions on any given day, he said.

New mission, new medal

As airmen’s combat experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan grew, so too did their interest in an award recognizing their new duties.

But as much as many want to see such an award, airmen also are concerned that it could be handed out willy-nilly.

“It is a great idea as long as it is applied in the original spirit in which it was conceived,” Staff Sgt. John Spence of Yokota Air Base, Japan, wrote in an e-mail to Air Force Times. He has deployed in support of OEF and OIF. “It should be given where true credit is due.”

Tech. Sgt. John Hogan, a full-time Air National Guardsman with the 158th Security Forces Squadron in Vermont, said he would prefer the new award be a badge, but he also is concerned that it not be something that finds its way onto uniforms of people who did not come under fire.

“The persons awarded this new badge will have to have been in an actual combat role,” he said in an e-mail to Air Force Times. “Someone from finance, who never leaves the interior of the base they are at, should not be awarded it because of a hangnail suffered at the snack machine.”

According to Brady, that won’t happen. The medal is not for airmen who are in the wrong place at the wrong time, he said, but for those who get into combat in the course of their duty. Brady said, for instance, airmen in the Pentagon on Sept. 11 would not qualify under the rules as drafted.

In December, 20 to 22 airmen — of different backgrounds, different ranks — met at Randolph Air Force Base, Texas, for about a day and a half to hash out the criteria for the award. While some voiced the belief the Air Force did not need a combat recognition award, most of those in the room felt otherwise.

“The predominant view was that which got us to where we are,” Brady said.

The group looked in detail at the criteria for the Army’s three combat badges and the Marine Corps/Navy combat ribbon. Though the badges and ribbons historically were awarded to soldiers in situations where they came under and returned fire, the branches have tweaked the criteria so that troops fired on by IEDs also may qualify, even if enemy fighters are not present.

“We don’t have to be exactly like the other services, but it should be consistent with the other services,” Brady said.

Creating a medal

It was also in December that the Air Force asked the Army’s Institute of Heraldry at Fort Belvoir, Va., to design the new medal.

The institute handles the design of seals, patches, badges and medals for all the service branches, as well as the White House, said Charles V. Mugno, director of the institute and a retired Marine colonel whose background is in architecture and fine arts and whose hobby has been military awards.

“The key is simplicity. Simple in appearance but bold in impact,” Mugno said.

Campaign and service medals, he said, normally are circular and about 1¼ inches in diameter. Personal awards, including those for combat valor or meritorious service, will vary in shape, he said.

Fred Borch, a retired Army colonel, regimental historian for the Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps and co-author with Jeff Floyd of “The Air Force Cross: A History of Extraordinary Heroism,” said the Air Force’s decision to issue an award for combat action makes sense today.

Until the war in Iraq, the Air Force never saw much need for anything like the Army’s combat badges or sea services’ CAR. The Air Force had traditionally fought its battles from afar and in the air, he said.

“But the emergence of combat controllers, pararescue jumpers, ALOs [air liaison officers] and the like suggests that perhaps some sort of CAB might be a good idea,” he said in August, when the Air Force finally acknowledged it was planning a combat award.

Now that it’s done, Borch sees the only “disconnect” in the fact the medal — or its ribbon — is not something airmen will be able to wear on the uniform they spend the most time in, their combat uniform.

“To me, it’s somewhat of a disconnect if you’re really trying to recognize that airmen are in … combat with the enemy,” he said. “[But] on the positive side, I think it’s great that the Air Force is doing something to recognize those who are involved [in combat]. You have to say this is great, given the nature of Air Force participation now in these ground combat operations.”