“The Air Force has been in a long, gradual decline since the cold war ended,” said Loren B. Thompson, who is a military analyst at the Lexington Institute, a policy research center, and has close ties to the service’s leadership. “First, the nuclear deterrence mission disappeared. Then it was unable to modernize its air fleet. And finally it couldn’t connect with the Bush administration’s vision of military transformation.”  Even air power’s staunchest advocates say the service suffers from a culture of superiority, one that deflects criticism rather than embraces it. In ousting the service’s civilian secretary, Michael W. Wynne, and its chief of staff, Gen. T. Michael Moseley, Mr. Gates said with apparent sadness that he decapitated the Air Force because he could no longer trust its leaders to address the troubles evident in two nuclear episodes — one involving cruise missiles flown across country by mistake, and another involving nuclear fuses shipped to Taiwan instead of helicopter batteries.  Just a few years ago, it was the Army, not the Air Force, that seemed to be the nation’s most troubled military service. Saddled with a sluggish ground force that was a legacy of the cold war, the Army had to think about transforming itself to remain relevant to national security.  While the Air Force continues to promote the white-scarf jet-fighter and bomber mafia, Mr. Gates wants to see the all the services increase emphasis on the unglamorous, unmanned aircraft that track adversaries over long hours and kill them over long distances.  The Air Force justifiably brags that it has more than doubled the number of remotely piloted hunter-killer vehicles over Iraq and Afghanistan since last year. But there has been no sign of the kind of vision that might have promoted an even more aggressive overhaul, and Mr. Gates has now appointed a task force to find ways to increase surveillance.  It remains to be seen whether Mr. Gates will think the service is paying enough attention to even less glamorous tasks, including missions to ferry troops to the fight and to haul their equipment, food and fuel.  In his speech here Monday to Air Force personnel, Mr. Gates said he was aware his decisions had “created anxiety and turmoil.” But he expressed confidence that his actions and the Air Force’s continued professionalism would “yield a service that is, from top to bottom, more reflective and more responsive to shortcomings that may arise in this or any other critical area.”  Senior Air Force officers do not challenge the notion that guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgency, central to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, will remain a core focus for the foreseeable future. But they also argue that the military must prepare for a more traditional class of potential adversaries with advanced warplanes, or at least advanced air defenses. This threat, for which the Air Force says it needs next-generation fighters, includes China, Iran and North Korea.  Yet the Air Force has continued to alienate the members of Congress whose support it needs, most recently through improper influence and preferential treatment in the handling of a $50 million contract to promote the Thunderbirds, the stunt team.  “Any rookie auditor would smell something fishy around the Air Force contract for the public relations work around the Thunderbirds,” said Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, who is on the Armed Services subcommittee for air- and land-combat issues. “And the smell went all the way to the top.”  As the Air Force’s role in handling nuclear weapons became a less prominent part of its mission, the service has done little to entice the brightest and most professional graduates of its academy into the nuclear arena.  That is different from the Navy, which has maintained high discipline and esprit — rewarded with promotions — in its nuclear sector. One reason is that the Navy depends on nuclear power for propulsion, so nuclear expertise is a daily matter of life or death.  But another is that the Navy’s nuclear deterrence role has changed less than the Air Force’s. When Trident submarines go out on patrol with their nuclear missiles, the missions are not so unlike the run-silent, run-deep days of the cold war.  By contrast, Air Force pilots these days no longer sit at the end of the runway, their big engines running around the clock, ready to vault aloft with nuclear weapons if commanders see radar tracks of enemy attacks.  The hair trigger is gone, which is good. But gone, too, apparently, is discipline.  A version of this military analysis appears in print on , on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: In Air Force Changes, Signs of an Overhaul. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates sought to repair a perceived lack of self-awareness in the Air Force as he forced a change in the service’s leadership.