Fed up with unnecessary gold-plated fighter jet programs, the services impatience with counter-insurgency and its anti-China rhetoric, back in August I proposed the disbanding of the U.S. Air Force. The air services missions could be folded into the Army, Navy and Marine Corps without any loss in national power and wed benefit from cuts to Pentagon overhead.
Now Robert Farley over at The American Prospect has taken up the cause in a new piece, Abolish the Air Force (subscription required). To complement the piece, Farley has solicited input from a number of bloggers.
Does the United States Air Force fit into the postSeptember 11 world, a world in which the military mission of U.S. forces focuses more on counterterrorism and counterinsurgency? Farley asks.
Read the rest here.
While I don’t think something this drastic is called for, I would like to see the other service defunded somewhat to wean them off high dollar weapons, and to give the Army its due for doing most of the fighting in all our recent wars. Maybe a 50–25-25 split with the bulk of the Defense budget going to the ground forces.Airlift and sealift, plus littoral warfare and close air support should be the other services’ priority,rather than always trying to “go it alone”. Whatever happened to Goldwater/Nichols and the idea of joint operations?
Farley, like many others, is being shortsighted. Sure the post-9/11 world is all about terrorism. But what about 10, 20 years down the road? What about Russia and China, and conventional warfighting?
This is a dangerous case of dealing with the present at the price of the future.
The Air Force Chief of Staff and Secretary brought this upon themselves with their silly pronouncements, procurement decisions/defense of same and redundant policy papers to prop their service into one of superiority in the scheme of things. I have no sympathy for them. If you follow their actions for the past two years then you would realize that a blow-back has been long overdue. Its already come from the other services in regards to defense budget and will come from the public in future funding battles. Remember when Moseley demanded that airmen get out the “Air Force story and all they’re doing to win the war on terror”??? Remember the COIN manual that the service put out on its own??? The Air Force won’t go away but I enjoy the idea that its top people are caught by the short hairs!
LOL!
“3 comments?“
I saw that number on the scroll and just had to check the details since I saw many more than 3 a couple of days ago. Must have rolled over a magic number to reset the count. Obviously, this WAS a very successful ‘red meat’ exercise.
I won’t bore you with the details, SMSgt. Mac. Let’s just say we modified the item, which caused the previous comments to disappear into cyberspace.
Hello. The Air Force is unconstitutional anyway (the Constitution only authorizes an army and navy) so folding the Air Force back into the other services to end the dangerous rotor/fixed-wing turf war is both legally proper and militarily efficient.
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