Is it time to abolish it? This would help resolve things like the ongoing battle over the Warthogs. But he doesn’t address what to do with the space stuff. Or the missiles.
30 thoughts on “The US Air Force”
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Is it time to abolish it? This would help resolve things like the ongoing battle over the Warthogs. But he doesn’t address what to do with the space stuff. Or the missiles.
Comments are closed.
Space inherently screams “Independent Command” to me, and the Air Force’s general idea of a long mission involves bringing a sack lunch.
So, while I have no real qualms during the period of Apollo-like “You are under a microscope” oversight, the years-to-decades of development of independent command, logistics, and damage management skills of the navy seem like a far more natural fit to me.
Turn the Air Force into the Space Force. Army gets tactical air, Army and Navy split air superiority, strategic and cargo as needed. Land based missiles are clearly artillery and belong in the Army.
Abolish NASA and roll its assets into the new SF. The new SF focuses on space assets, space superiority missions, and an expanded exploration program. Hope that as a military force it will have a more reasonable attitude toward risk.
USAFA becomes Starfleet Academy.
Give ’em to the Navy.
I find Farley boorish at Information Dissemination. I’ll skip reading him at airspacemag. I do think it is time to abolish the Air Force, and the US Navy has more than enough experience with missiles to handle that part of the triad, as well as the significant experience and need for satellites. The notion of a strategic bombing force protected by fighters is like a horse drawn buggy. Further, the weakest legs of the nuclear triad is the fixed, easy to target, missile locations; followed by known bomber bases.
We still need bombers and fighters, but they need to be complimentary to ground and naval forces. And yeah, we need bomb trucks like the A-10.
Speaking from nine years of active duty Air Force and ten years of defense contracting, it is long past time to abolish it. But I will go further – it is time to abolish all of the services and replace them with the United States Armed Forces.
Reorganize along the lines of the unified commands. Recognize that a jet engine mechanic can probably work on an aircraft carrier and at an airbase – and many hundreds of other such situations that can give you maximum flexibility with your personnel.
I could go on about this at length. I know the objections, but most of them come down to traditions. Don’t worry – a marine would still be a marine, the training the same, but it would be more of a special forces sort of thing, not a separate sub-branch. Nobody is going to take an infantry commander and put him in command of a ship – that isn’t his specialty.
But when you organize along the lines of the operational commands, you refocus everyone on the mission instead of the service. As they should be.
” it is time to abolish all of the services and replace them with the United States Armed Forces”
This is a very bad idea. We did this in Canada. Regiments that had been around for over 100 years simply ceased to exist. It would be a particularly bad idea to do this to the Marines – what a huge blow to morale. Retired Marines (there is no such thing as a *former* Marine) would raise hell across the country. Do you think the Obamacare townhalls were acrimonious?
This approach makes a lot of sense to me. Operational Commands should have combined elements of force projection. They should have full integration of land, sea & air. Tactical operations can be conducted fully within an operational command. Strategic operations will require co-operation between Operational Commands and probably should be commanded from the JCS level down. Strategic operations are the “big-shot” warfare capability. Multi-theater, or long engagement. Probably to be effective a Strategic Command should be formed along & among the Operational Commands that rotate people through from each Operational Command, who have to learn how to work together to co-ordinate activity on a global level. This will have to be simulated through exercises that tax our war fighting capabilities to the max. To avoid the tendency to form fiefdoms around the Op Commands. Space becomes another Operational Command. Where the Armed Forces structure remains essentially the way it looks today is along the lines of recruitment and training. Arming & release of nuclear warheads is still considered an important theatre threshold. As such it would be wise to retain their control under the province of a centralized Strategic Command with permissive action links that are not the equivalent of 0000000 or 1111111 or 1234567 (ahem). After a first-use or full out assured attack, the “fall-out” from deployment is already realized and it would be assumed we are already in a very dicey situation, They can then be released for deployment among the Op Commands as necessary.
Released for deployment gives the wrong impression. The weapons are of course largely already in place. Armed I guess is the better term.
Operational == Unified
I left out Cyber Command but should not have.
If you think Cyber Command is a joke, how about I assign EMP Nukes under their auspices. Still think it’s a joke?
Of course, if you abolish the Air Force, you’ll never have another new aircraft – NAVAIR has zero incentive to ever approve a new design, the Navy leadership doesn’t care about aircraft (only boat drivers make admiral), the Army hasn’t managed to procure a new aircraft (fixed- or rotary-wing) in 20 years…(no smiley unfortunately)
And remember Kelly Johnson’s famous dictum: “Starve before doing business with the Navy.” Having witnessed two Navy aircraft programs up close and personal (both of which were successful despite the Navy’s best efforts), I tend to agree.
The way the F-35 is going, any future fighters will cost a billion dollars apiece and not be ready for combat until the 22nd century. At which point, third-world goat herders will be able to field a thousand drones against every US fighter… and 3D print more in their barns for $10 a time.
(only boat drivers make admiral)
Only boat drivers that have been pilots can command carriers, and they are the first to get command of carrier task groups.
I think the Air Force is in for a very rude awakening if they pit their super duper multi billion dollar toys against someone like China. “Our F-35 can take on 100 enemy targets at once!” Well ok then, as a Chinese general I make sure to launch 101 planes against each of your F-35’s…and STILL manage to do it for a lot less money. A perfect force is the enemy of a good force, and that’s the mindset the Air Force has…must have the perfect high tech plane.
And why aren’t we building the A-11…or 12…or heck, we should be up to the A-15 by now, to replace the A-10. Of course, if the Air Force has it’s way, it will cost 1 Trillion a copy, and only carry half as many munitions.
the Army hasn’t managed to procure a new aircraft (fixed- or rotary-wing) in 20 years
JSF flyoff contracts were awarded in 1996. First production began in 2006. KC-X started in 2007, first USAF production in 2015, for an aircraft essentially in production since 2003.
LUH began in 2004, winner announced in 2006, 100 production aircraft by 2010. And that was just about 11 years ago.
Still, the biggest problem is the entire DoD procurement process, and the need to spread the pork across Congressional districts in all corners of the United States.
The Lakota isn’t really a new rotorcraft; it’s an existing civilian helo in an Army paint job with a new radio.
And the KC-X is what? A major new design in what air transport tanker could be, and not a mediocre performing commercial airliner that’s phase out of airlines is producing excess airframes with available structural life. Sorry, but the problem isn’t Army or NAVAIR, or even USAF; it’s the entire procurement system that relies on spreading the pork and design/logistic decisions made by Congress. The beauty of Lakota is at least the design decision was kept with the engineers.
I think James C. Bennett had the right idea of what to do with the Air Force’s space stuff – along with the NOAA’s space stuff, and the USGS’s space stuff. A Space Guard modeled on the Coast Guard would also absorb much of NASA, leaving it a skeleton resembling NACA.
Stream of consciousness thoughts on this prior to my first cup of coffee:
The basic problem with Farley’s idea is that you are splitting the Air force and combining the two parts with two separate services. The parts you are adding to the services are very different from the core functions of each of the two services.
Farley seems to think the only job for an Air Force is close air support. That all you need is a Tactical Air Force. Perhaps he thinks that way because that’s mostly what the USAF has been doing in all fights since Vietnam. Vietnam could have been a strategic Air War (and was to a small degree) but LBJ wouldn’t have it.
Thing is, all our wars since WWII have been small limited proxy wars. Wars that had to stay limited or it would turn into a war with a Big Shot. We haven’t had Big Shot War since 1945. Can he definitively promise we won’t? If he can’t (and he can’t) then those B-1b’s are not supporting ground troops but mashing a nation as prep for invasion.
So if you have a combined Army/AF service and all that combined service can see is ground support, you’ll be caught short if that was short-sighted. With two services struggling for existence, every argument that can be made often is.
That he thinks Douhet is still baked into the USAF mind is ludicrous. In my AFROTC classes in the 70’s *everyone* understood that the power of an air force is limited and that boots on the ground are essential. So that whole bit of support structure to his argument is a straw man. We were taught the Douhet theory but only to put the historical evolution of airpower into context. We were also taught how WWII demolished the Douhet theory. So when he makes comments like that I tend to start to dismiss him.
If he thinks that combining the air force and Army will eliminate the fact that “….when you decide to organize your military around an Army, a Navy, and an Air Force, you put them into competition.” he’s dreaming.
Competition will still exist and I claim that competition is very good. Intra-service competition is much more destructive – to the Service as well as the careers of the “combatants”. Think about it:
If the AF and Army are combined and you have a “Billy Mitchell” on the flying side, pushing for some big resource expenditure in a finite pie, and the Army is commanded by an Infantryman, that Billy Mitchell career could be destroyed.
Whereas in two separate services, the Chief of the AF is going to SUPPORT the Billy Mitchell. Billy might lose the fight but his career isn’t over.
Separate services means that THE service (if combined) can’t decide to short shrift one (ground) vs the other (air). Congress gets to decide that and the representatives of the two services get to fight it out on even terms and they will offer as many arguments as they can. This leads to creativity.
The Navy fought it’s way across the pacific quite well, but when it came time to bomb Japan you needed B-29’s and Mustangs. Yes you needed the base from which they flew and you want the Navy and Marines for that. But the Navy’s mindset was not and never has been on long range strategic bombing. The B-29’s and Mustangs would never have existed.
You cannot have a perfect division of “labor” here and one has to accept certain inefficiencies. But the Air Force was able to adapt. The original idea was to bomb Germany to it’s knees, from England. But eventually it was recognized (desert experience) that you needed a Tactical Air Force and so the 9th AF was created along with equipment training and doctrine to deal with ground attack.
These inefficiencies results in things like the overlap of helicopter gunships vs A-10’s. But if the Army concentrates on building an organization that fights on the ground and it uses choppers to get the troops in and for insertion close air support the inefficiency is not unbearable.
If Farley thinks that the infantry cannot get the air support where and when it wants it because the AF has other ideas, and other commanders, he lives in an academic bubble.
I’d rather have three services constantly having to justify their existence and fighting it all out creatively than two or one service.
As an aside, I don’t think the land based ICBM’s are worthless. Any adversary has to know those missiles will not be in their silos when the inbounds strike…..
…or at least they would know that with any President other than the one we have. I haven’t read this anywhere but in my opinion, Obama and his weakness and fecklessness has made the idea of nuclear war more attractive to others. After all – if you think the American won’t strike back, you could actually win a nuclear war.
“We haven’t had Big Shot War since 1945.”
Right. And we won it without a separate “Air Force” service.
“Sir, what is your view on the Triad and which element needs the most resources right now?”
“The Triad? I am not clear on your question.
Do you mean the basing of our strategic nuclear arsenal on land (the Titan, Minuteman, and Peacekeeper systems in hardened silos), air (the long-range bomber force once known as Strategic Air Command), and sea (the missiles that can be launched from submarines)? The publically believed doctrine that the purpose of our arsenal was to launch a retaliatory strike after an enemy struck us first, hence our nuclear forces need to be survivable? And the land, air, and sea elements protect that retaliatory force against any technological surprise that would endanger any one element?
Or do you mean the inter-service rivalry where the Air Force had its bombers and land-based missiles but the Navy, prior to the Polaris system, didn’t have anything, so they strapped long-range fuel tanks onto a Korean-war vintage prop plane called a Skyraider that could launch from a carrier?
And the Army had the bomber defense mission using a radar supplied under defense contract by the phone company? And the Navy practiced war games using their carrier-based Skyraider against American coastal cities and they found that their prop plane could fly inland “under the radar”, so we just plain gave up on the idea of defending ourselves against Russian bombers?
Or that the doctrine of strategic deterrence by a retaliatory second strike was always a fiction meant for public consumption, and that our true strategy was always overwhelming nuclear superiority to deliver a disarming first strike against any enemy if need be, and this was demonstrated to be the case by a front cover of IEEE Spectrum Magazine showing the reentry vehicles from two Minuteman launches from Vandenberg converging on three targets at the US Marshall Islands test range demonstrating a precision counter-force strike? And that our submarine-based missiles have the accuracy to be first-strike capable, this was known to the Russians and contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union exhausting their financial resources in a futile attempt to counter US military supremacy?
Mr. Hewitt, what “Triad” are you speaking of?”
“Um, Mr. Milenkovic, I think you have used up your time . . . (and who wants a geek-snark as a presidential candidate anyway . . .)”
he lives in an academic bubble
That definitely describes Farley.
A bit of wisdom if I may. Before one tears down a fence, they should carefully consider why is was built in the first place.
The AF was born out of the inefficiencies and at times ineffective application of air power. Granted, a separate space force may be a good thing but disbanding the USAF does not logically follow from that initiative.
His arguments for abolishing the Air Force have nothing to do with a space force.
He’s entitled to his opinion, no matter how uninformed it may be. So are you.
–Ground, sea, and air aren’t naturally in competition with one another, but when you decide to organize your military around an Army, a Navy, and an Air Force, you put them into competition.–
Right. And that why you keep the Air Force.
I don’t think integrating US intelligence into Homeland Security has been a good idea.
One could say the idea that Air force is all that’s needed to win war is wrong and problematic in terms of it’s religious dogma.
But it “could be” better if the Navy were think all one needs is the Navy to win a war. Or all you need is the Army. Though I think the Marines already think they are all that is needed.
One could argue that governmental US military bureaucracy is fundamentally problematic but I don’t think reducing competition of the bureaucracy by merging them is going to help, in terms of lower costs and making a better military, rather I think increasing competition of military bureaucracies is better. So adding a space force or military that wins wars by tunneling, or whatever, is better.
The USMC comes pretty close to being a well-functioning integrated service, combining everything from fast jets to riflemen. But even the Marines have been resistant to the principle of combined arms. A recent commandant stated that he would have gotten rid of all the Marines’ tanks if he could have.
Part of the reason the Marine integration is successful is that they are fairly small.
This argument has been going on for decades. I first encountered it when I worked on ICBMs for the Air Force in the 1980s. There isn’t a clear-cut answer, either. Each service separately is a “center of excellence,” representing the best we’ve been able to figure out how to do in each area of combat. Getting all of the services to play nicely together in a combat environment is a lot trickier, and seems to me to be the crux of the problem. Don’t abolish the centers of excellence, if that is what they truly are. Figure out how to get them to play together nicely.
Establishing one single military service doesn’t solve the problem, or really even start to address it. As proof I offer the fact that the entire US military is under the Department of Defense, and could thus be considered “one single military” with lots of different specialty groups under it. In other words, there would be no change.
I really think it is a matter of keeping the separate services, and figuring out the most effective means of getting them to play nicely together.
While we are putting items in a wish-list, can we go back to the pre-1941 War Department cabinet structure?
I think let’s wait and see if we can get rid of the Department of Education before we tinker too much with national security — especially post-Obama.
The scientific method, applied to the real world, would seem to argue that you make one change first, observe the result, and then decide what to do next. Abolishing the Air Force would involve multiple changes all at once.