Saying Air Force brass does stupid with planes, is like saying that Army brass does stupid things with intel; they’re both givens. (My personal irritation is around the SR-71, and the fact that someone burned the plans). That has more to do with personal politics than it does the roles of each service. Eliminating the Air Force as a branch will not change such idiocy, just alter what goal the idiot has in mind.
The A-10’s a great tool, and services its mission well. However, that mission is a secondary one for the Air Force.
Corporate mergers usually result in a lot of infighting and the loss of jobs at all levers and that is very likely to happen should Services be mergered.
Has merging various agencies into on Homeland Security worked out particularly well?
I’ve worked at Chevron for 25 years, and they’ve done some mergers in that time. Take my word for it, those who are left think it worked out just peachy. Job loss was never a real issue (concern).
Would job loss in the Army/Air Force be a bad thing? It seems there would be a lot of duplication in the admin/intel/logistics, etc areas. I don’t know about AF enlisted because they’re pretty invisible. Army combat types would surely be okay.
Homeland Security is a whole 'nuther topic. Many topics, in fact.
I don’t see why we should get rid of the Air Force. Does the Army need its own support planes? Maybe. But the Air Force, IMO, is positioned to handle global power projection better than any other branch. Navy is great, once it gets a carrier group into the neighborhood. Army/Marines are strictly a local affair, and their aircraft should be all about supporting ground troops.
But who is going to do long-distance spy overflights? (They still happen.) Or bomb a deeply landlocked target? Or, and I notice that no one has mentioned this, who is going to handle the nukes—both in bombers and in ICBM silos? USAF has a long history with nukes, and (recent lapses notwithstanding) are best positioned to keep handling them. Ditto for satellites and the rest of any outer space ops.
I don’t know much about the role of the air force vs. the role of aircraft in other branches of the military . . . but wouldn’t abolishing the air force and (presumably) transferring all those pilots and such to other branches be terribly bad for their morale? I mean, people take pride in their branch of service. Can you imagine if we told the Marines “Guess what, you’re all Army soldiers now”?
I’m pretty sure that I read that the nuke subs can now reach pretty much any threat on earth.
And unless there’s a total surprise, so can carrier bombers.
The AF still has the venerable B52s (not the band ;)), a couple of which can devastate any target.
Are they still sending out spy planes? Anyway, the CIA, or whoever, does that.
The Marines were department of the Navy until very recently (in MC tradition, anyway). That didn’t seem to bother them so much, but having “United States Navy” on their paychecks seemed to.
I don’t think pilots would mind too much, as long as they got to fly. Don’t all services use the F-22? Enlisted support personel could be another story.
For starters, folding the Air Force into the Army isn’t a good idea at all in my opinion. The Air force has very legitimate reasons for being an independent branch. That being said, however:
Didn’t someone say something about inter-service rivalry being overplayed?
While it’s overplayed, this is the root of a lot of gripes against the Air Force. Controlling the skies is not an end unto itself any more than controlling the seas is an end unto itself. The purpose of controlling either is to deny their use to an adversary and to influence events on land. In doing this, the A-10 plays a primary role in the reason that the Air Force exists, not a secondary one. The A-10 controversy does get overplayed however, the only time the Air Force brass planned on retiring them for not being sexy and supersonic and replacing them with the A-16, an F-16 variant that would be supersonic and sexy and nowhere near as useful for the CAS role as the A-10 was just before the First Gulf War in 1990. The results of the war put any plans to retire the A-10 on hold. The was a rumor that ran around in 2003/2004 that the Air Force was again trying to retire the A-10, but that’s all it proved to be: a rumor.
The eventual plan at the moment is to possibly replace the A-10 with the F-35, but the planned date of replacement is 2028, by which time all of the A-10 airframes will have accumulated 18,000-24,000 hours of flight time. Pretty far in the future to be crying againt the Air Force’s desire to remove a proper CAS airframe from it’s inventory.
How can controlling the skies be the primary purpose of any airforce? It doesn’t actually do anything. Rewind, if you will, to the early 1900s. Airplanes are a recent invention, and folks are still trying to figure out if they’re worthwhile for warfare. The high brass has just asked Orville and Wilbur what good airplanes are. If the only answer was “They can shoot down the enemy’s airplanes”, then the brass would just ask why we needed to bother shooting down the enemy’s airplance, when we could instead just make them useless by not having any planes of our own to shoot down. It’s only when our airplanes can attack ground targets, or prevent the enemy’s planes from attacking us, that they become worthwhile.
Well, I’d say there’s a lot more ways to use airspace than merely attacking the ground. Even if the other side doesn’t have a single armed plane, doesn’t mean that I want them able to fly. Intel, movement of men and materiel, are all made much simpler or faster through the air. There’s more to war than simply killing the other guy’s army.
Control of the air is primary not simply because it doesn’t allow the opponent to use it, but because it allows us to use it to perform all kinds of secondary roles. Just because something is a secondary role doesn’t mean it isn’t important, or necessary, or required, it’s simply that only one thing can be primary.
I would reverse that. War has traditionally been about acquiring territory on the ground, and to a huge extent, still is. Just flying around over someone’s capital isn’t worth much. It’s when you use the airspace to drop bombs, take pictures, move men and materials, that it starts to matter.
I would say that the Air Force’s primary missions should be those which advance the aims of war; bombing, reconaissance, transport, etc. Air-superiority (the sleek, supersonic fighters) is secondary, in that it allows the primary missions to succeed.
OK, I’ll grant that I was oversimplifying with “attacking the ground”. There are other ways to make airplanes useful, and in the early days, reconnaisance was probably more important than bombing. But
Exactly. What makes the primary mission primary is not that there’s only one of them: One can have multiple primary missions. What makes the primary mission primary is that the secondary missions exist to support the primary.
It’s the most extreme example that I can think of, but what was the primary role of Strategic Air Command during the cold war? Deterring the Soviet Union from invading Western Europe, and thereby influencing events on land, or should that fail to send bombers and ICBMs at the Soviet Union and burning it to the ground. Also influencing events on land. There was to be no effort made to control the airspace over the USSR, the bombers were going to go in unescorted. There was only going to be a trivial and entirely secondary effort made to control the airspace over the USA.
Less extreme examples, but Argentina was incapable of controlling the airspace over the Falklands, but its air force did a very respectable job as far as things went in its primary role of sinking ships to influence events on land. Had there been fewer duds in the bombs dropped, or if they had a larger stockpile of Exocets than just 6, it is possible that they could have prevented the UK from reclaiming the Falklands. Japan was entirely incapable of controlling the airspace even over its own country by the end of WWII. They had, however, built up a force of ~10,000 aircraft to be used for kamikaze missions when the invasion of the mainland came. If the A-bomb wasn’t developed in time and those aircraft had succeeded in sinking enough ships to disrupt the invasion of Japan, they would have succeeded in their primary role of influencing events on land while being unable to control the air.
Funny you should mention the old SAC. That was probably the Air Force’s most important reason to exist. Now it’s gone. There’s another group in it’s place, but I think their mission is very different. The SAC mission is now in the hands of the Navy, I think.
Right now, in fact, the bone of the SAC’s original mission no longer exists.
Well to be honest, I’m not on your side of this debate. Merging the Air Force back into the Army would be a mistake of the highest order. I disagree whole-heartedly that the primary mission of the Air Force is to control the air. Its primary job is to influence events on the ground, and controlling the skies is a means to better achieve it. The US is in a position where it will achieve total air supremacy on virtually any possible enemy at this point, but losing focus of the primary job being to influence events on the ground isn’t healthy.
If the Air Force had done nothing but control the skies in Gulf War I/II, Vietnam, Korea, etc but didn’t drop a single bomb on the enemy or perform any reconnaissance it would be pretty obvious that it had failed entirely in its role. Controlling the air is a means to further the primary role of effecting events on the ground, the same way that controlling the seas is a means to do the same.
That said placing the Air Force under the control of the Army would make as little sense as placing the Navy under the Army’s control. They operate in environments totally alien to the army, and have reasons that they are separate branches. There is no front line in the air or the sea, there is no flank, and there are no terrain features. Defense has no inherent tactical advantage in the air or the sea as it does on land.
Rail as much as you want against the Air Force for whatever reason, but it has a very, very good reason for being an independant branch.
