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.
So you aren’t buying that a SEAL team could have held Corregidor, or taken back Manila, me neither.
WWII seems to have decided everything forever, in WWII the Army ran an Air Force about 8 times larger than the current one, and had more ships than the Navy.
Today it runs a mass of aircraft, much of it an effort to replace what the Air force took away in military readiness.
WWII is also what largely took the Marines away from the Navy and turned them into another Army force.
A little fresh thinking after 70 years, is due.
It seems weird that our Airborne, Rangers, Special Forces, are always having to depend on assets from another branch of the service to be able to operate, and even train.
Today we have the Army depending on the Air Force.
Because of the time frame involved in provisioning a Navy--and since World War I an Air Force--there is no time limitation on Naval appropriations.
William Flax
Transportation priority is an odd thing to put in the hands of another service even in peacetime. In wartime it makes no sense at all. It should be a mission based decision and not one based on turf or competing objectives.
That... and, I am trying to picture naval mechanized divisions taking Iraq like army ants on a grasshopper. Ain't nobody gonna drive a destroyer to Baghdad.
Army has always depended on the Air Force for weather support. Army has no weather service.
So if they quit calling it “Air Force” Weather Agency, it would cease to exist.
Actually the Army ran it until after WWII.
“AFWA traces its heritage to the organization of the Meteorological Service of the United States Army Signal Corps during World War I. On 1 July 1937, the Secretary of War transferred responsibility for weather services to the Army Air Corps. United States Army surgeons began recording weather observations regularly in the early 19th century as part of the Army’s medical studies. In 1870, the United States Congress directed the United States Secretary of War to establish a weather service for the nation. Thus, the Army’s first organized military weather service was established in the U.S. Army Signal Corps; however, this service waned after Congress authorized the creation of the U.S. Weather Bureau, today’s National Weather Service, in 1890.
America’s entry into World War I highlighted once again the need for an organized military weather service. Today’s Air Force Weather Agency directly traces its history to the re-emergence of a meteorological section within the U.S. Army Signal Corps in 1917. By the mid-1930s, the Army Air Corps was consuming the majority of the weather data the Signal Corps produced. On 1 July 1937, the Army Air Corps Weather Service, under the leadership of the Chief of the Weather Section in the Office of the Chief of the Army Air Corps, assumed responsibility for all Army weather services from the Signal Corps.
During World War II, the Army Air Forces Weather Service girdled the globe with weather stations.”
“Actually the Army ran it until after WWII”.
Weather observing and forecasting were always part of the Air Corps. Yes technically the Air Corp was under the operational control of the Army, but with that said the Air Corp for all intends and purposes was it’s own branch for years until finally making the move official in 1947.
Yes the Army Air Corp, when the army created it’s weather service, it did not disappear years later when they added the words Air corp to Army.
You don’t have a clue, and the only reason you’re on FR to argue with someone.
I think you should read your posts on this thread.
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