15 thoughts on “The Air Force”

  1. The US won the Kosovo War with airpower alone. The Afghanistan war was also initially won majorly thanks to airpower as a support for the anti-Taliban Afghan forces. Same thing happened in Libya.

    I do agree that there is poor coordination between the USAF and the Army which would be better served if the Army had its own air arm. Especially for tactical combat aircraft.

    Offtopic did you read the latest EmDrive news? Seems like NASA tested it and may not be complete bullshit after all.

  2. I think the Navy is better equipped, culturally and emotionally, to handle milspace, said the old Air Force vet. I’d like to see the AF curled back into the Army, and have the Navy run both the deep blue and deep black services.

    1. Given that U.S. air power will be transitioning to unmanned vehicles as the norm over the next two decades, the USAF “tooth-to-tail” ratio is going to fall precipitately. USAF space assets are already robotic, So is recon/surveillance except for JSTARS, Rivet Joint, AWACS and the like. Given secure lasercom, the human crews of such craft can be relocated to domestic ground bases pretty shortly and the platforms converted to drone operation. Ditto strategic bombers and large transports. Robotic air-to-air refueling would be trickier, but still doable. There could easily be no aircraft in the U.S. inventory – Navy, Marine and Coast Guard included – that require pilots by 2030-35. Except for land-based ICBM crews, USAF could easily consist entirely of support cadre of various kinds within two decades. A separate service consisting entirely of wrench twisters and electron pushers hardly seems justified.

      As to missiles in land-based silos, both the missiles and their warheads are badly in need of upgrades to newer models. We’re down, I believe, to just two operational bases for these missiles, so part of the upgrade program should be installation of a dense thicket of point defenses and terminal trajectory limited area defenses against incoming hostile nuclear ordnance as the stupid ABM Treaty has been a dead letter for years.

  3. I was nine years Air Force, ten years Air Force contractor. My feeling, once I got a handle on things, was that we should just have the United States Armed Forces, organized around our unified commands, and abandon the three and a half services. That would keep much of the infighting under control.

    Marines would be treated as special forces, just a bit larger. By virtue of their specialty, some people might spend their whole career in one command, while others may perform the same job on land bases and on ships throughout the world. Some jobs might go away, such as Air Force security – just have an infantry unit come in and provide airfield or weapons storage security for a year or two, before bringing in a replacement unit. You would end up with security personnel with better combat training and provide a once-a-career change of pace for infantry soldiers.

    I know Canada tried it and changed back, but I think it was mostly defeated by bureaucratic empire builders who did not want to lose their fife.

    1. Welcome to the House of Rand, new troll.

      Why exactly would I want to check out yet another site run by, as near as I can make out, a dozen or so left-wing college professors, one of whom – Robert Farley – feels called upon to make ridiculous and ahistoric statements about Israeli conflicts with the Palestinians?

      Consider this little gem in which the good professor presumes to refute the pro-Israel meme, “What would the U.S. do if Mexicans were firing rockets into California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas?”

      I daresay, however, that if a substantial group of Americans was subjected to land confiscation and occupation on a scale similar to that imposed upon the Palestinians, they would valorize heroic resistance in the face of impossible odds, however pointless and illegal that resistance might seem to outsiders, and that they would engage in terrorist activity in hopes of overturning the existing political and military order.

      Like the Israelis just up and decided one morning, “Hey, let’s confiscate some land today!” for no particular reason other than that they’re – you know – greedy Jews. Israel didn’t “confiscate” any Arab land until after the 1967 Six Day War in which it was attacked by all bordering Arab states except Lebanon. There were, at that time, no Palestinians and no Palestine. What we now call the West Bank was still part of Jordan. The Gaza Strip was Egyptian. Israel captured and held both these territories as well as the Golan Heights (formerly Syrian territory) and the entire Sinai Peninsula (formerly, and now once more, Egyptian territory).

      A very customary outcome for nations that initiate wars they subsequently lose is to have pieces of their former territory confiscated by the victors. Germany, for example, lost territory after both World Wars. Each of the Arab aggressor nations in the Six-Day War lost territory to Israel. Egypt got part of Sinai back after initiating another war with Israel in 1973. Concluding a separate peace with Israel in 1977, Egypt got the rest of Sinai back. Israel kept Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan Heights.

      In a successful bit of PR flim-flam, the Jordanian Arabs in the now-severed West Bank and the Egyptian Arabs in Gaza began referring to themselves as “Palestinians” and to the West Bank and Gaza as “Occupied Palestine.” In 1969, their tribal brethren still resident in Jordan attempted to overthrow that nation’s monarchy and establish a Palestinian state that was not Israeli-occupied. This effort failed and the self-identified “Palestinians” in Jordan who were not killed in the fighting were forcibly expelled to the West Bank.

      Israel, having legitimately captured new territories in war, not unreasonably began to open these new lands up to settlement by its own citizens. The “Palestinians” of both Gaza and the West Bank have waged ceaseless low-level warfare against Israel with occasional excursions into renewed mass conflict (the various intifadas).

      Despite such ongoing provocations, the Israelis have been remarkably magnanimous toward the Palestinians despite the utter intransigence of the latter. Israel withdrew its army of occupation from Gaza in 2005. In return it got a bloody coup by Hamas against the local Palestinian Authority government and recurrent rocket barrages.

      Now Israel is back in Gaza, likely to stay. I, personally, would like to see the Israelis do to the Gazan Arabs what Jordan did to their own “Palestinians” back in 1969; expel them all to the West Bank and formally annex Gaza as Israeli territory. Israel probably will not formally do this while the anti-semitic Obama remains in office, but I still harbor hopes it will do so once he is gone in 2017.

      In the meantime, the dimwitted and unschooled American Left continues, on the comment thread, its now-traditional bloviations about the Israelis being “monsters” and wailing, ahistorically, about “65 years of occupation.” The latter claim makes no sense unless one subscribes to the common Arabic delusion that there were no Jews in the Middle East before 1948 and that Israel is entirely illegitimate as a nation state. I don’t doubt that there are American Leftists who believe this line of crap, but they deserve no consideration for their credulousness.

      Mr. Farley’s latest book advances the thesis that the U.S. Air Force has outlived its usefulness as a separate service and needs to be abolished. That was the hook upon which Rand hung this thread. I’m in general agreement with this point of view as I have indicated above. But I now wonder if this is a case of a stopped clock being right twice a day or of a blind squirrel still stumbling upon the occasional nut if the execrable piece of dimwitted and mendacious Israel-bashing to which you have linked is typical of Prof. Farley’s output.

      1. Mr. Eagleson, you appear to have assumed that I pointed out that link approvingly. I did not. But I will happily leave you with your assumptions.

        1. Mr. Eagleson, you appear to have assumed that I pointed out that link approvingly. I did not. But I will happily leave you with your assumptions.

          So why would we want to check out Professor Fawley’s thoughts? You seem awfully vague about the point of the article or even why you are here.

        2. I’ll second Karl here. In general, I only link to things I approve of or which buttress my own point of view on the topic of conversation. In rare cases where I don’t agree with something, but link to it anyway for reference purposes, I’m not bashful about making that fact plain in my accompanying commentary. My tendency is to assume most folks do likewise.

          Apparently you do not personally operate according to my assumptions. Okay, acknowledged, though I still don’t see how I could reasonably have guessed that in advance of your second post. So, that being the case, what was your intent in linking to Farley’s Israel vs. Palestinians post? It seems to have nothing obvious to do with his thoughts on the obsolescence of the U.S. Air Force. Please explain. Enquiring minds want to know.

          1. I’m leaning towards deliberate spam. The original post was off topic and the author hasn’t committed to having any sort of opinion on the matter other than that they want the link present.

          2. I thought RNB’s intention was to say “Hey, you may or may not be in agreement with the Prof about the Air Force, but you might be interested in knowing what else he believes!” This is not the ad hominem fallacy — the professor’s argument about the Air Force is not being criticized or praised — but I suppose RNB might have been encouraging others to make the ad hominem fallacy. But maybe not. Maybe the intent was just to say “this author has opinions on the middle east that that might be of interest to a group that is dicussing the middle east.” Obviously, it would have been helpful if RNB had included a bit of accompanying explanatory text with the link.

            With great difficulty, I’m going to resist the temptation to comment on on Dick’s comment!

  5. The article completely ignores the long-term political aspects of the question. We have been very lucky in the US never to have had a military takeover of the government. Having separate, and competing branches makes the odds of a successful putsch a lot less likely. Look at the history of pre WW2 Japan for an example. The army and navy had competing interests, which prevented a number of coups, prior to the one that worked. It has happened in plenty of other countries, no reason to imagine the US is immune to human nature.
    Military efficiency is not the only important question.

    1. Segregation can also be done by location, though that leaves the possibility of a Praetorian Guard type problem with whoever hangs out in Washington, DC. I think segregation of commands by location and then secondarily by function (which I believe is how the Russians do it), combined with considerable mobility of personnel would probably keep that from being a serious problem.

      There’s also other concentrations of power such as the US Joint Staff (though I find it interesting that apparently the structure of that group is intended to negate some of the perceived anti-democratic problems of the more authoritarian Prussian “general staff” model).

      I think that making sure only existing citizens serve in the military is the best safeguard. People who come from civilian life and expect to return to civilian life would be among the best curbs on military usurping of power.

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