Historical Thinking

For this project I tried to use all the historical thinking skills we’ve been practicing in class, and each one really did change how I looked at my sources. Sourcing was about asking who actually wrote each thing and why — the RAND report is a government-funded study, the Air University stuff is an offical military history, and I tried to be careful with news articles and double-check them against primary sources. Contextualization meant remembering that AFSOC didn’t just appear out of nowhere. Modern selection only really makes sense if you also know about the Vietnam-era Air Commandos, the failure of Eagle Claw, and how 9/11 made the Air Force need way more special ops airmen. Corroboration was cool because the same facts — the six-attribute model and the really high washout rates — kept showing up in the RAND report, Air force news releases, and Air University history articles. Close reading the RAND framework helped me figure out what they were recommending versus what AFSOC already does versus what their still studying. Causation helped me connect things — like how USSOCOM (1987), AFSOC (1990), and the Special Warfare Officer career field (2020) each came from specific failures and lessons. And continuity and change showed me that even though the actual job of these airmen has stayed pretty much the same since World War II, the science behind picking them has changed alot.