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.
Its an article about a book written by Robert Farley. I know its heretical to actually read the article but its only the first sentence.
If they folded everyone into one group who would the navy beat up on in football?
I agree. It’s an article by Cochrane about Farley’s ideas regarding the Air Force. They are not particularly new ideas, but they’ve always been controversial.
Unless they maintain a strategic mission with bombers, the Air Force is limited to their ICBMs for any mission beyond the extended battlefield.
Therefore, it makes sense for all missions involving a land war to come under a unified commander. That argues for all assets coming under a unified service.
They are under a unified commander. Further “unification” makes no sense.
Navy is almost always better than Army, but Air Force and Navy are often comparable.
Navy enters the new American Athletic Conference for football only (I think) in 2015 or 2016...I forget which.
Navy, UConn, Cincinnati, Memphis, SMU, Houston, E Carolina, Tulane, and a few others I don’t remember...Temple maybe?
It does. It’s a basic rule of war...unity of effort.
One command over land warfare and one command over naval warfare. (It’s also Constitutional, although that’s not really a fair argument.)
One problem all this causes is having to duplicate assets, the Army has had to spend billions in an effort to fulfill it’s Air Force needs, and as the Navy has lost control of it’s Marines, it has been working on a ground force of sailors.
>>Whoever controls the high ground controls the engagement. The first thing we’ve done in every war since WWII is establish air superiority.<<
You didn’t serve in Korea or Nam, did you?
I think in those wars the general mindset was “don’t fight back too hard”. For the most part they were defensive wars, which is a bad strategy. We never really took the wars home to the enemy. But we still maintained a level of air superiority over what we considered friendly territory.
There was a reason why the Air Force became a separate branch in 1947. Here’s a hint, the Air Force was always “separate” from the infantry. Vastly different roles. Over 60,000 Airman lost their lives in WW2. Liberals have also had the brilliant idea of getting rid of the Navy. The nation that controls the seas and the nation that controls the air wins wars. Infantry can’t do it alone. Rapid demobilization of forces immediately after World War II, although sharply reducing the size of the Army Air Forces, left untouched the nucleus of the postwar United States Air Force (USAF). A War Department letter of March 21, 1946, created two new commands and redesignated an existing one: Continental Air Forces was redesignated Strategic Air Command, and the resources of what had been Continental Air Forces were divided among Strategic Air Command and the two newcomers - Air Defense Command and Tactical Air Command. These three commands and the older Air Transport Command represented respectively the strategic, tactical, defense, and airlift missions that provided the foundation for building the postwar, independent Air Force.
To describe the SEALS as a “ground combat force” is to misunderstand what ground combat forces ARE. The SEALS are highly trained specialists who conduct special warfare operations for relatively brief periods on behalf of very high authority in support of strategic and /or diplomatic interests, after which they are withdrawn rapidly in preperation for other assignments. They are not expected to conduct long term operations in pursuit of and destruction of enemy forces or particularly to hold terrain for sustained periods. There are simply not enough of them.
Ground Forces are principally units of infantry armor and artillery that are expected to close with, engage and destroy large units of enemy forces and to hold or deny the use of terrain to enemy forces.
SEALS, despite their incredible virtues, are not expected to nor should they be used for these sorts of missions. It would be a waste and misuse of their unique assets.
Regardless, why not?
Why not? Are they incapable?
Because you would be wasting them by using them in missions for which they are not designed or equipped and which are accomplished better by other types of units.
SEALS are a very sharp blade best used for specific tasks, not grunt work where they would be dulled.
Who knows what in the heck you are talking about, or why you keep posting simple posts with such fervor.
Right, we understand aviation is different from infantry, it was during the almost 40 years the Army was the Air force including WWI and WWII, and it was when those 50,000 Army Air people were dying in WWII and 60,000 going missing and being captured, and it is the same with the massive Army Aviation Forces that we have today, and in Vietnam etc.
It’s as though this stuff is brand new to you and you think that it is all new to us as well.
Well, they got rid of the Oldsmobile.
A SEAL team is NOT expected to blunt an attack by an armored brigade. Research what happened to the SEALs in Grenada who came across Cubans with BTR-60 armored personnel carriers.
Hecky Durn.
Why not use our Special Operations troops as line infantry?
At one time those fellas, could deal with all environs. What you comment about, is a command fukup. Which I have no privy. They are good men, being misapplied. By the by- good briefs, are like sad shorts— you just won’t wash ‘em, no matter what, happens.
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