Quality Air Force

Quality Air Force (QAF) was an initiative inside the United States Air Force in the 1990s that attempted to apply quality control to all activities. The effort was associated with General Merrill McPeak. Despite air force-wide training, it was largely a failure. Quality control had been developed to help industrial manufacturers increase profits by reducing waste and producing consistent, defect-free physical goods. Most Air Force personnel could not figure out how to apply the techniques of manufacturing's quality control to most of the duties of their Air Force missions, which are often human services depending upon individual skills, with little repetition and numerous exceptions, and difficult to measure in physical terms.

The QAF effort became dysfunctional when in order to be "competitive for promotions" it became a requirement for airmen to show that they were executing Quality Air Force in their duties and using it to show improvements. This created a countable fallacy problem, in which airmen who were lucky enough to enjoy jobs that were easy to apply quality control to were irrationally and unfairly promoted ahead of better airmen whose jobs were much harder to quantify.

The Air University Press printed books on QAF subjects that were distributed to airmen worldwide. There were so many books that they are still easy to find upon the bookshelves of veterans and the libraries of airbases in 2016.

See also

• McNamara fallacy

Further reading

• Air Force total quality management: An assessment of its effectiveness (2010)