Posted on 03/17/2014 12:37:23 PM PDT by xzins
Robert Farley, a political science professor at the University of Kentucky, wants to ground the U.S. Air Force, for good.
In his book, Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the US Air Force, Farley argues the United States does not need an independent Air Force in order to effectively wield military air power. Farley, an assistant professor at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce, came to his conclusion after studying the conflict between the Army and the Air Force over which military branch was primarily responsible for winning the first Gulf War.
“I slowly became more aware that these arguments between the Army and the Air Force have broken out along virtually identical lines after every conflict we’ve fought since World War II,” Farley said. “Each service, each capability, claims its own decisive role.”
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Farley argues that inter-service rivalries and different interpretations of combat effectiveness have had such a negative effect on both doctrine and weapons system acquisition over the decades that the Army and the Air Force are unprepared to cooperate with each other next time America goes to war.
“That got me thinking, why not just re-marry these organizations rather than maintain their distinction?” he said.
The U.S. Air Force, originally the Army Air Corps, was established as an independent military service in 1947. Over the next four decades, as conflicts over Army and Air Force roles and missions emerged, Congress stepped in and passed the Goldwater-Nichols DoD Reorganization Act of 1986, the most far-reaching legislation affecting the U.S. military since the National Security Act of 1947. By vesting operational command of U.S. forces with a joint commander, Goldwater-Nichols sought to mitigate much of the inter-service rivalry.
But, according to Farley, Goldwater-Nichols failed to solve the dual problems of procurement and training. By law, the services have their own budgets for acquiring weapons and recruiting and training personnel.
“The primary responsibility of an Air Force aviator still lies with the … parochial interests of the Air Force and for a soldier with [those] of the Army,” Farley said. “And that’s a position that I think inevitably creates friction during wartime, which we’ve seen even in conflicts that come after the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols reform.”
Piecemeal approaches to transferring missions and capabilities from the Air Force to the Army have been proposed before, particularly with close-air support aircraft like drones, and the A-10, which the Air Force wants to retire.
“It would seem to be a fabulous idea to take away these capabilities that the Air Force is unenthusiastic about,” Farley said. But the Air Force routinely opposes giving them up. “There’s a general Air Force lack of enthusiasm about drones unless there’s a prospect of the Army having them,” he said.
The best solution to such problems—and the proverbial “elephant in the room”—is to rejoin the Air Force with the Army, Farley said. Although not likely in the short term, Farley thinks it might eventually become a reality.
“I’m trying to reopen the question of whether the reform we did in 1947 was really the appropriate reform and whether we should return to it and rethink it,” he said.
The remark didn’t make any sense, the SEALs aren’t doing our ground combat for us, and it ignores Delta and Special Forces.
I just have one question for this guy,,,
WHO’S GOING TO RUN THE STARGATE PROGRAM!!!??? Hmmmm?
We need the Air Force.
JB
Yeah, I suppose the Canadians could send one down.
Depending on the reports, it showed the opposite. We sent waves and waves of bombers into hell, and Germany kept making tanks and guns till we over ran the factories.
In Japan, we would bomb and shell all day and night, and then we still had to send in the Marines to clear an island. Now air power has a role, a big role, but at the end of the day it is some guy with rifle that will solve the problem.
“They managed in less than 4 years what we’ve not been able to accomplish yet in Afghanistan.””
Different rules of engagement. If we could use WWII rules Afghanistan would be flatter than Kansas.
Once Germany lost control of the skies with their Luftwaffe, they were finished.
Air power may not win wars alone, but you sure can’t win wars without it.
Soon it will be a human form robot with a gun. Then things get interesting. As in the Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times”...
Would the Army reverse the decision to retire the A-10’s, for example? That would be an interesting litmus test. OTOH, how do the Marines feel about being the Navy’s red-headed step child? Would command parochial thinking doom this combination to failure?
There’s a huge problem within the AF after the destruction of the Strategic Air Command. Bomber/missile types are very checklist oriented. Fighter jocks are more seat of the pants. The nuclear mission requires the former, but the fighter jocks have been in control for a couple of decades now. And so, of course, the wheels are coming off the nuclear mission. Utterly predictable.
BTW, the USAF has always been rather lukewarm to the idea of close air support, preferring to leave that to carrier-based Marine flyers.
Case in point: The A-10. The USAF hates the damn thing. Always has. As soon as decently possible, they sent it out to ANG units. I mean the thing is ugly, it can barely make 500mph in a dive, and operates at low altitude. Blows up tanks. BFD. Yuck-O. The real AF is at 50,000+, flying at Mach3, and using missiles to shoot down the enemies of uhmerrika! It must be flown by blond, blue-eyed guys who are not satisfied with one nickname like "Biff," but must have a flier handle, as well, "Trash-Hog," "Busterface", "Slobbo," etc.
The A-10 belongs in something like the old USAAF, but according to the "Treaty of Key West," the Army got missiles and helos, no fixed wing stuff with guns or bombs on it. One other thing: Nobody could wear brown shoes, anymore and that's final. Nobody, got it?
Maybe.
But they have been predicting robot armies for a long time. The main issue is that there isn’t a computer made that can keep someone else from hacking into.
The MI in STARSHIP TROOPERS was Army, so that sorta ends the argument.
Precisely.
That is not a good thing.
I was in the Army and others in my family were Air Force....the culture of the Air Force and Army are very different. I think they should remain separate.
I couldn’t imagine an organization so huge that it was in charge of everything from boots to missile defense. Purely to avoid creating such a large beast, I would be against a re-merger.
The real issues to be hashed out include: should the Army operate its own drone force (to include armed drones), should Army intel have real time access to satellite info without going through an Air Force middleman? And, I think the Air Force might need to split into two divisions. One can handle the theater scale operations like long range bombings, and the other can specialize in direct air support of the Army...recognizes and subjugating itself to a combat support role to the Army.
I spoke with a Warthog driver one time. He was so proud of his aircraft and the reputation they had. He seemed to take pleasure in announcing that it lacked a normal airspeed indicator. Rather, it had a calendar.
Absolutely! Where else in theater can I get luxury air conditioned billeting with a fully stocked bar and an 18 hole golf course? 😉
The losses were simply horrific. It was safer to march across Europe than fly across. There was also a lot of pressure to end the bombing raids right up to the taking of Berlin because we were losing men left and right, and not hurting the Nazi's as much as promised.
You can win wars without air power. You can win without air superiority (the Russians did in WWII). Air power is a tool, and a very effective tool, but in the end you need boots on the ground. Now having air power means that many more of your guys on the ground make it home, and it doesn't take as long, but to say that air power is the only way to win kind of ignores history (including recent). We lost Iraq and are losing Afghanistan with 100% air superiority, but 0 will.
The issue in my mind is the war and fighting the war and winning.
If in war, we don’t want different commands running around doing their own thing, but we want them focused on a unified effort, then why do we at other times think that’s the best answer?
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