A Few Reform Links
A few links I’ve been browsing today:
Up, Up and Out-New York Times: Discusses abolishing the Air Force, and National Service for youth. I visited the subject of scrapping the USAF a while back. They always seem to want to fight wars separate from the other services. Very expensive to maintain when we have three other air forces. A symbol of our military might in the last century, but their days are gone. Give the savings to the Army and encourage the Navy to get its act together and be more cooperative with the wars we have now.
The Future of DoD-Defense and the National Interest: Chet thinks we need to keep the Air Force for Space Wars. Why not just create a military space force then?
A Mere Five Defense Programs That Should Be Axed-Center for Defense Information: Winslow Wheeler asks “Only Five?”
Navy and Marines to Part Ways Over Expeditionary Strike Groups?-Captain’s Journal: For better or worse?
The Future of U.S. Ground Forces-Small Wars Journal: Looks interesting.
New Wars 
Chen,
Is the Navy bearing their share of the burden? They drive their expensive CVBGs over to fly sorties a Predator could handle. Is that an efficient use of funds and manpower?
What should the Air Force do, in your opinion, to carry their “fair share”?
What part of the burden are they shirking?
Wasn’t it our so-called “Cold War” force structure that took down Saddam and ousted the Taliban? Tossed the Serbs out of Kosovo? Liberated Kuwait? All in the past 18 years. The Air Force was a major portion of all of those conflicts.
Maybe myopically focusing on the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan as they are today is not the right way to plan for the future of the US military. Maybe we should consider the range of conflicts we might have to fight.
Not all will be COIN.
Smitty said “Is that a good thing?”
No, but there is very little we can do at this stage, except perhaps hasten the inevitable!
Well Smitty, those are all fine generalizations and pleasant excuses for the Air Force’s lack of bearing its fair share of the burden in today’s types of warfare.
It seems you have missed the point that Kane is not necessarily advocating, you taking it literally, the disbanding of the Air Force. He is using arguments to make us re-think some of the sacred cows in our defense establishment and ask, ok, is this the way it has to be or can we do better.
What parts of our defense thinking and force structure are Cold War and which ones are suited for today. This does not seem to have registered with you and you are simply playing the apologist for the Air Force for sake of it being the Air Force.
Recall, the SECDEF fired all the top leadership of the Air Force in December. Apparently, Kane is not the only one thinking the jet jockeys need a wake-up call. Just a thought.
Edit: should have said “Air and naval power plays a supporting role.”
Sure wish we could edit posts in these threads..
Mike,
Is that a good thing?
Chen,
How does body counts or months deployed say anything about whether the Air Force is “in the war”? They fly the sorties the Joint Forces commanders ask them to fly.
How does it matter where they fly from? Are there airstrips large enough to operate F-16s and A-10s at every tiny forward operating base? No. Of course not.
The Air Force is doing the job they’re being asked to do. I see no evidence that they are skirting it.
Yes, the Army and Marines are bearing the brunt of the casualties, but that is the nature of this conflict. Air and naval power plays a supporting. Should we retrain carrier, submarine and warship crews to drive HMMWVs in convoy esorcts? Should we disband the Navy because they aren’t dying enough on the the ground?
No, that’s just plain silly.
According to this Rand report on aging aircraft, we can let the USAF die out on its own;
Click to access RAND_TR560.pdf
Smitty, maybe you should get under the covers of just HOW the Air Force counts and presents its “deployments”.
Army deploys for 12, 15 or maybe 18-months. That’s an Army deployment, and it is on the ground up-close-and-personal in active combat (not in an ajoining country far from the fight).
Marines deploy for 7-months, or 12-months for staff assignments, to Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Air Force, well, you could be doing 60- or 90-days or 4-months as a deployment, and hence, be counted among those “deployed”. Also, you might be serving those 4-months in one of the former Soviet ‘Stans, or Bahrain or… that ain’t Iraq and Afghanistan. The Air Force has gotten too clever by a half since 2001 in trying to dress itself up numerically so its numbers do not draw attention to the fact they are not in the war.
More than 4,000 Marines and soldiers and sailors have died in Iraq, the Air Force has lost 48 brave souls in that fight.
Smitty, the RAF tried that after WW 1 and by the time the next war started the naval air force was in poor shape, and ground support non-existent. But they got lucky with the Spitfire.
Maybe instead of getting rid of the Air Force, we should get rid of the other service’s mini-air forces instead. Maybe while we’re at it, we should fold the “Navy’s Army”, the USMC, into the Army.
That way we would align the services the way we fight – under a Joint Forces Command structure (with Air, Land, Maritime and SOF Component Commanders).
Maybe Paul Kane should go check his facts. Between 2001 and 2004, 151,000 Air Force personnel deployed in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Navy “only” deployed 26,000 more (177,000), and the USMC deployed less (98,000).
http://usmilitary.about.com/od/terrorism/a/deploymentrates.htm