Angry Planet - Is it time to get rid of the Air Force?

Episode Date: June 16, 2016

Until 1947, the Air Force was part of the U.S. Army. Of course, even then, the Navy had its own airplanes launching from aircraft carriers, protecting the fleets and attacking the enemy largely at sea.Nowadays, the Army has helicopters and transport planes. The Marines have their own fighter jets. Naval aviators are as renowned as their Air Force colleagues and fly missions against ground-based targets.This week on War College we talk with a man who believes the Air Force should be disbanded. That having it separate from the Army does little beyond creating a bureaucracy. In fact, he argues, a separate Air Force has changed the nature of warfare and not in a good way. If all you have is a hammer, he says, all problems become nails.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters News. I mean, it is the case to abolish the United States Air Force, but the way to think about it is more of a bureaucratic reorganization. Throughout World War II, the U.S. Air Force,

Air Force was actually part of the U.S. Army. Nowadays, the Army has helicopters and transport planes. The Marines have their own fighter jets. Naval aviators are as renowned as their Air Force colleagues, and they fly missions against ground-based targets. This week on War College, we talk with a man who believes the Air Force should be disbanded, that having it separate from the Army does little beyond creating a bureaucracy. In fact, he argues, a separate Air Force has changed the nature of warfare and not

not in a good way. You're listening to War College, a weekly discussion of a world in conflict focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Here's your host, Jason Fields. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Jason Fields with Reuters. And I'm Matthew Galt, contributing editor at Wars Boring. The American military loves bombing campaigns.

From Iraq to Libya and beyond, strategic air campaigns have been a quarter of course. cornerstone of recent U.S. military strategy, and in fact, even back to Vietnam when we tried to bomb Hanoi back to the Stone Age. But do they work? Robert Farley is Professor of National Security at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky. He's also the author of Grounded, the case for abolishing the United States Air Force. Robert, thank you so much for joining us. Well, thank you for having me. So, to be clear, Are you actually advocating for the end of air power or the Air Force as an institution? And what do you see is the difference between those things?

So no, I'm not advocating for, I think the first line of the book goes something along the lines of the United States needs air power, but it does not need an Air Force. And so, you know, the title notwithstanding, I mean, it is the case to abolish the United States Air Force, but the way to think about it is more of a bureaucratic reorganization. So it is to sort of turn back the clock that was before 1947 when the Air Force was part of the Army, not to restore exactly the institutions as they existed then, but nevertheless to incorporate the air arm into the other two arms, so that we go back to a situation that's similar to what we had in 1947. All right, Robert, why? Why do that?

So I guess what gave me the idea for the book was reading through a series of histories of campaigns, from the Gulf War to the Vietnam War to the early parts of the Second Iraq War, and discovering essentially that this problem of inter-service conflict has dominated the opening stages of virtually every conflict that the United States has been in since 1947. And then reading more and more about inter-service conflict became clear that inter-service conflict not only dominates war-fighting, at least towards the beginning of a particular conflict. but also cast its shadow over procurement, over doctrine, over training, over essentially everything that the United States military does and has done since 1947.

And so I began thinking about the U.S. military services as what they are, which is giant bureaucracies, right? And each one is a giant bureaucracy, Air Force, Army, Navy, Marine Corps. And they do what bureaucracies are supposed to do. They protect themselves. They pursue their own interests. They want more funding, more missions. They want to shed some missions that they don't like. And so the reason that I want the Air Force to go away is that I think that essentially any military mission that the United States conducts today

necessarily and inevitably involves this third dimension, the air. And we have created a gigantic bureaucratic wall right in the middle of every military mission that we do. And that wall is called the United States Air Force. and that means that almost everything requires this thing that we've come to call jointness, which is an imperfect substitution for simply moving the parts of the military that do air back closer to the parts of the military that do water and that do land. Another way of phrasing it would be absurd to put the infantry in an entirely different service from the armor or from the artillery.

But we think that it's just fine with air power, even though air power is an intrinsic part of everything the military does on a daily basis. So what happens when you're talking about power directly overhead? So if it's the Army, would the Army Air Force be responsible for patrols over whatever land masses you're talking about and then the Navy overseas, like literally over the ocean? Yeah, so this would be thinking about, so how do you take the assets that currently belong to the Air Force and then meld them back into the other two services? And, you know, in the case of the Navy, it's really easy because that's what we already do, right? The Navy already has a gigantic Air Force, and the Navy has an Army which has its own large Air Force. And so in terms of day-to-day changes, the biggest change would be integrating a lot of Air Force assets and Air Force missions back into the Army. And so, yeah, the stuff that, you know, in terms of the missions that the Air Force does,

which are everything from close air support to battlefield interdiction to deep interdiction, and so forth, those would mostly to air superiority, those would mostly be taken over by the Army, although some of them would be very much like we have now, right? The Air Force and the Navy share the air superiority or already mission, depending on context. The Navy does a lot of close air support and interdiction. missions, but most of those missions would shift back to the Army with the air branch that would be part of the Army. How nasty do these conflicts get that you point to between the different branches? Like, is it really that much of a problem? It is not a problem. It hasn't been a problem for the

United States since 1947 in terms of changing the outcome of wars. And that's because the United States always brings more than it needs to to a particular conflict. Right, so we are always, we either win or lose our wars for reasons which are entirely separate from how we're organizing our military. But it has produced pain, it's produced poor war fighting, it's produced inefficiency. Sort of classic examples in what really drove the Goldwater Nichols reforms that tried to resolve some of these problems was the catastrophe of Eagle Claw where you had every service trying to get a part of this mission, and then it resulted in a disaster where people weren't able to communicate with one another

or they communicated poorly. In Grenada, in 82, you have a similar problem where people from different services are using different kinds of radios and are unable to communicate with one another. But a lot of these problems really go into the Gulf War. They happen in Vietnam, where the Army and the Air Force really struggled to get on the same page about how they're engaging in tactical and operational missions. even in South Vietnam. And it has a bigger strategic impact as well, because, and this would be the case in Vietnam,

but also to some extent the case in the Gulf War, where the Air Force just really didn't construct itself in a way that was well suited to fighting a war like Vietnam. Now, of course, the Army wasn't ideally constructed either, but the Army changed and was able to change and was able to redesign itself during the conflict in a way that was much more difficult for the Air Force just because of the long, lines of procurement. So you had these massive B-52s that are conducting World War II-style saturation bombing towards the end of the war, missions they're completely unsuited for, but it was the only thing we had in part because of these inter-service conflicts coming out of the 1950s.

So how does the Air Force actually integrate with other military branches now? I mean, you were saying that they'd have problems in the past with communication. I mean, is, I mean, does everybody have the same radios now? I mean, there's been a huge effort on the part of the military and in development a couple of weeks ago, Matt and I talked with an expert on DARPA. And one of the things they've been working on is command and control systems that link everybody together. Is that something that's just not working? No, I think that all of those things have really improved a great deal. They have improved a great deal in part because of the 1986 reforms, the Goldwater-Nichols reforms. But I think that they have improved even more.

because of the fact that the United States has been fighting continuously since 2003, right? One of the phenomena that you see with this phenomenon of inter-service conflict is that most of the problems happen towards the beginning of the conflict. And this is as you would expect, right? So you have a war, the war ends, and each of the services then has a different set of priorities, which it goes and works on in these peacetime priorities. And by the time you get to another war, the services have diverged to the point where they do have communications problems. And it's not just the radios, it's the lingo, right? When the army says

interdiction or when the army says that it has destroyed an enemy unit, it means something different than what the Air Force is saying when it has destroyed that kind of unit or that it's conducted that kind of mission. And those kind of problems get flattened out over the course of a conflict. And so what we're seeing now is actually, you know, really pretty good collaboration between the services right now because they have been almost continuously at war since November of 2001. Now, I guess you can say that one solution to inter-service conflict is just to always be at war. But, you know, that might not be the best solution, best long-term solution to inter-service conflict.

The expectation would be that if these wars ever end, then you will return to seeing the services pursue their own peacetime prerogatives, their own peacetime missions, cultures, and so forth, and you'll see that divergence again that makes war-fighting so difficult when we'll we actually start a new war. I think it's also fair to point out that the individual branches also have their own air power still. They also maintain their own jets and the like. Right. When I give this talk I almost always start off with, the United States does not have an air force.

The United States has at least four air forces, probably five, depending on how you count. Right. Possibly six, right? The Army has its air arm. The Navy has its Air Force. The Navy has an Army that has an Air Force. The Air Force has an Air Force. The Coast Guard has an Air Force, and many of these air forces are larger than the Air Force of any other country.

Our Navy has more aircraft than the entire Chinese Air Force and Navy. So we're talking huge numbers, but we're already comfortable with the idea of air power being part of other branches. The only question is how much air power is part of the other branches. Is there a lot of rivalry between the various air forces, Air Force and Navy aviators? I mean, is this actually still a source of contention? It varies quite a bit. And like I suggested before, when you've been in a war for quite a while, usually those, or in a lot of cases, those differences get smoothed over.

Certainly there are cultural differences, and if you get a Navy aviator here and you have them talk to an Air Force aviator, there's certainly going to be a lot of bluster on either side. In the past, when we've had communications technology that's not as advances, we have now, the Marines, the Air Force, and the Navy have essentially had to divide up target sets because they couldn't agree on how they were going to conduct campaigns unless they were effectively conducting separate campaigns. We also have experience in the past of situations where the Navy does something quite well in the air

and the Air Force does something quite poorly, and there's very little transmission of information between the services. So the classic example is the question of air-to-air combat in Vietnam, how the Navy was utilizing a lot of really innovative techniques for formations, and they were doing quite well, whereas the Air Force was really struggling to do air-to-air combat, and the bridge never really got, the gap never really got bridged between the two services. All right, how did we get to this place, Robert, where we even have a separate Air Force then?

Why is that bureaucracy there? Sometimes military historians, they'll say, say something like there was no really no inter-service conflict in the United States before the development of the Air Force. And that's not quite true, but it's pretty true. We got to this point because of the invention of the airplane, right? Because of the invention in the airplane and the expansion of warfare to the third dimension. In the teens, the 20s, and the 30s, you had an explosion of interest from all kinds of military theorists in what warfare was going to look like, and especially in what warfare was going to look like from

the sky. And the, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, names here are familiar to a lot of people in the United States. It's Billy Mitchell, DeSeversky in the United Kingdom, it's Trenchard, Jackie Slesser, Arthur Harris, among others. Giulio Du Hay is the sort of the Italian godfather of all of these. And all of these theorists are making two arguments that are connected. The first argument is that air power is going to dominate the next war, that the next war is primarily going to be an air war,

even to the extent that navies and armies are not going to be very relevant. And the second part of the argument is, because the next war is going to be an air war, we in fact need a separate and independent air arm, because we need to free our aviators from the outmoded, non-thinking ideas of the big gun people in the Navy and the ground-pounders in the army. And the only way to do this is to create independent airmen forces that will have their own funding streams, that will have their own accountability to

civilians, and their own ability to pursue their own strategic vision of warfare. Now, the British did this at the end of World War I. The French did it a little bit later during the interwar period. The Germans did it in kind of a funky way in the 1930s. The United States didn't do it until 1947, so it took the United States longer, but the U.S. was really following a trend that was developed in Western European countries in the interwar period. So you're saying that during World War II, did it work exceptionally well during World War II since the U.S., and was it an advantage for the U.S., that there was a combined force?

In ways there definitely was an advantage for the U.S. The U.S. did a really good job with tactical air power in North Africa. But part of the problem with how the U.S. was approaching air power in World War II, was that you had this committed group within the U.S. Army Air Force. It was the U.S. Army Air Corps and then the U.S. Army Air Force that had their eyes on the prize, that saw the Royal Air Force, and that's what they wanted. They wanted full autonomy, full independence for the U.S. Air Force,

and they were looking for an independent force. And they construct doctrine around it. They constructed procurement policies around it. They constructed the entire combined bomber offensive around the, this idea of proving that heavy bombers attacking the German industry and Japanese industry could in fact win the war by themselves, right? That you didn't need a D-Day invasion. You didn't need all of this other contributions that the other services could make. And so even though we did have in the United States still a unified service in the 1930s and the 1940s,

a lot of the problems that were associated with independent services were already happening, because you had this group of air power theorists and aviators who just were absolutely adamant about proving the effectiveness of air power, to the extent that they thought the D.A. invasion was a terrible idea, and they lobbied against the D.A. invasion, right? So, no, let's just bomb German industry, and Germany will surrender. And so, yeah, so part of the problem was that the eyes were on the prize, even though the service was not fully independent yet.

Do you think that we're too reliant on air power? Is America too relying on air power? Did we learn the wrong lessons from World War II? Did that strategy work? Yeah, there are people who debate, the debate on how the combined bomber offensive affected Germany is endless. And there are still, there are smart people and honest people on both sides. I think that generally the argument has developed to that we over-emphasize strategic bombing in World War II. And that was a problem for the early history of the Air Force, and it's a problem today,

because the Air Force in its early history is an independent force concentrated overwhelmingly on strategic bombing to the exclusion of tactical and operational modes of warfare. So this came out in Korea, it came out in Vietnam. In Vietnam, we're trying to wage a counter-insurgency conflict with strategic bombers that were designed to destroy the Soviet Union. I just want to interrupt briefly to say strategic as opposed to tactical, but in this case it means that you go after the machinery of war, including things like factories and destroy the enemy's ability to wage war in more of a long-term way rather than destroying troops on a battlefield. Am I saying that correctly? Exactly. That's exactly correct. And so the Air Force having won its independence, its bureaucratic independence, around this idea that strategic bombing is effective, then, of course, builds itself to carry out strategic bombing campaigns.

It doesn't build itself to carry out the kind of tactical support. See, even in the 1950s, even the tactical part converted itself to dropping nuclear bombs, right? Because it just wanted to prove that fighters can drop nuclear bombs just like bombers can. And that created a lot of problems. This idea that strategic bombing, and this is, yes, attacking the machinery of war, could win wars on its own, created a new. enormous problems in Korea. It created enormous problems in Vietnam. It almost created problems

in, as far as late as Gulf War I, where Colonel John Warden made the argument that the United States could win Gulf War I without any army at all, right? That essentially you need an army that would fight a holding action alongside the Saudi-Qaeda border, and then we would carry out a strategic bombing campaign that would completely destroy Saddam Hussein's regime, and we would intentionally avoid attacking the Iraqi army because the Iraqi army would be necessary to go back and occupy the country after the collapse of Hussein's regime. This is an argument that was made and taken seriously as late as 1991, this idea that you can decisively win by attacking by strategic attacks against the machinery of warfare. And it's an argument that makes complete sense

in context of where the Air Force is from and where the Air Force has been. Okay, that actually makes a lot of sense to me. I mean, it fits in with And I guess it does seem like it would be hard to point to a case where it certainly worked quickly, right? I mean, the Germans had massive air superiority to start off with in Russia, right, and bombed the factories within an inch of their life. And yet somehow Russia was able to come back in World War II. And it feels like, you know, we certainly dropped enough bombs on North Vietnam as well. Do you have any idea why people thought it might be different in the Gulf War?

Did they see something that it fundamentally shifted? Yeah, the argument that Warden made, and it's not an absurd argument, I think it's wrong, but it's not an absurd argument, is that the precision of weapons had changed, right? So why does a strategic bombing campaign fail? The answer is always that, well, the weapons we had were not quite precise enough. And so that's always why it's going to succeed. in the future. And this argument is made over and over and over again for every time you're thinking about

waging a strategic gear campaign. And Warden's argument is that, well, these things may not have worked in the past, but in fact now we have weapons that are sufficiently precise that we can tear apart the sinews of Saddam Hussein's regime. We can blow up individual police stations. We can identify and blow up individual bath party headquarters. We can destroy their communications, right? We can do all of this because we have these precision-guided munitions now.

now, and we don't have to fly a fleet of B-29s over to an island and entire city, we can precisely target and just tear apart the way that the regime thinks, right? Invade the brain of the regime and destroy it that way. And so that's the logic that's really animating this argument in 1991 of being able to wipe out, wipe out Hussein's regime without actually invading Kuwait or invading Iraq. All right, well, what about now? Have we kind of, have we figured it out, or Are we still relying a little too much on air power, do you think? I mean, the interesting thing about the way the U.S. has used air power since 2001 is that we have not actually engaged in strategic air campaigns. And it sounds weird to say it, but what we're doing against ISIS right now is not something that Billy Mitchell or Bomber Harris or Curtis LeMay would recognize as a strategic air campaign.

We're plinking tanks. We're blowing up oil, right? We're not necessarily attacking the sinews of the regime, even in a way that John Warden would suggest that we ought to. We're carrying out a large-scale tactical air campaign against ISIS in the same way that we kind of carried out a large-scale tactical air campaigns in Iraq in 2003, in Afghanistan in 2001. where you're using these, you know, what has always been known as tactical air power

to win individual battles against the fielded forces of the enemy. And, you know, there's one argument that says, well, that's worked kind of fine, right? That's worked kind of okay. You know, the Air Force hasn't done something crazy, like insist that we need to, you know, bomb Raqa and destroy the ISIS regime. But at the same time, if all your... air force is really doing is carrying out these kinds of tactical air campaigns, which is pretty much what we've been doing, then it's not obvious that you need an entire organization

that's been built around this strategic bombing mission. Wouldn't the Air Force make the argument that, hey, the tactical mission that we're undertaking right now is only a very small part of what we do every day, that we're out there patrolling the skies and flying over the South China Sea, although I guess that's probably the Navy, you know, but acting as a deterrent and engaging in case there are Russian migs that come over a border, which they seem to be doing more lately. Isn't that something that the Air Force might respond with? Sure, no, I think absolutely that that's how the Air Force would respond, right? Then we do all these other things. And they would also say we do ISR and we do C3 and we preserve the competency,

the capacity for deep strike in addition to carrying out these kinds of tactical air campaigns. And all of that stuff is true, but most of that stuff you can also pretty easily envision finding its way into the other services, right? I mean, the Navy does a ton of this different kind of stuff as well because it has its own air arm. And sort of the problem with it is, you know, what happens, you know, this is stuff that the Air Force wants to do. The stuff that you just talked about is all this stuff that the Air Force understands to be its strategic priority. It's organizational priority. It's bureaucratic reason for existence.

And all of this is the kind of stuff that it's going to want to do in the future when it's not necessarily being tasked with plinking tanks against ISIS. with blowing up tanks and ISIS. And this is what sort of brings us back to this issue of why the Air Force really seems to hate, and in fact it doesn't seem to, it really hates the A-10 Wardhog, and it really loves the idea of the F-22, which is, you know, really made, it's a great plane, it's a lovely plane, I love it, but it's made virtually no contribution in any war that has been fought since it existed. The long-range strike bomber, which, you know, in the kind of wars that we've been fighting since 2001,

would make virtually no independent contribution. Right. You can bomb ISIS with a long-range strike stealth bomber. You know, why would you when you can have B-52s to do it? And so the concern is not necessarily how we're fighting the war right now, but once this war is over, what direction is the Air Force going to go and how is it going to treat its priorities?

And if the future is anything like the past has been, it's going to de-emphasize the kind of capabilities that we've seen it using since 2000. in favor of these longer range, more sophisticated air-themed priorities, strategic bombing, counter-air, and so forth. Does the mission, their mission with drones change that equation at all, though? I mean, more and more they've actually had to divert pilots to fly drones, put more and more of their money and effort into them, which, again, seems, I mean, it's a very tactical mission, right? You can't really go after infrastructure much, I don't think, with, like, a single missile on a drone,

So does that change the equation at all? I think that, I mean, what's fascinating about the drone situation is that the drones have been such a huge cultural shift for the Air Force, but it's a cultural shift that they've actually adapted to pretty well, right? And it's the problem of this pilot-themed culture that a lot of people really doubted they were going to be able to adapt to it all, right? That they were so pilot-centric. And so pilots flying an actual airplane-centric that it was going to be a struggle for them to do it. going to be a struggle for them to do the mission. But, you know, as you would imagine, when this question came down of who's going to own the drones, right? Who's going to be essentially the lead

service on the drones? The Air Force acted like a bureaucracy, right? It said, this is in the air, and so we get this stuff. And that battle was fought during the late Bush administration, and the Air Force won the battle against the Army. You know, I think that drones do carry out a lot of what we treat as strategic missions, right? Strategic reconnaissance, which is, you know, the firing of hellfire missiles notwithstanding. It's still strategic reconnaissance is the biggest thing the drones do,

you know, keeping eyes on the battlefield. And that's something the Air Force has always done and something you would expect the Air Force to keep doing in the future. You know, the actual drone campaign in Pakistan is, I think, it's really hard to categorize it. as strategic war tactical, because in a lot of cases, you're just trying to kill individual people, and that feels really, really tactical.

But at the same time, you're kind of going after the machinery of war, right? It's just that the machinery of war for an organization like Al-Qaeda are the interpersonal connections between different Al-Qaeda leaders, right, and how specific groups are held together. And so there's a tactical aspect to it, there's a strategic aspect to it, And there's this bigger question is, has it really worked at all? And we don't have really any good metrics at all yet, with which we can even answer that question. I mean, Al-Qaeda still exists.

You know, ISIS still exists. Would they be bigger if we didn't have this campaign? Well, possibly, maybe not. It's really hard to say. I think, actually, we'll have to stop it there. But Robert Farley, I just want to say thank you so much for talking us through this. I mean, I have to tell you that I don't really, it seems like it would be a very, how do you put this, but it sounds like it's a little far-fetched just in terms of current setup.

But, I mean, do you actually see the Air Force going anywhere? One of the reviewers for the book right away said, first things first, this is never going to happen. And so it'll always be up-to-date and relevant because there's always going to be an Air Force you can argue against. And then he said in the next thing, and if it never did happen, then this would be hailed as the greatest book ever because it killed the Air Force. And so go ahead and publish the book. The, you know, alongside a lot of different, what I hate about military conversation and any kind of institutional conversation is that we treat things as impossible that are, in fact,

merely improbable. And the reason we have in Air Force is because there were a lot of really motivated people who were really smart, and they developed a lot of theory, and they were able to create this institution. And it's very useful for us to remember when we're thinking about military reform in the United States, military reform, wherever else, that these are not stone edifices

that have been around since the dawn of time. These are things that we made within living memory. And so we can rethink whether these institutions that we have really serve us effectively. That doesn't mean I think I'm going to win, and then the Air Force is going to die. But it's a victory for me if we just stop and think, when we think about the Air Force,

as something we made and something we can unmake, rather than as something that's this permanent institutional bureaucratic fact. All right. Well, thank you, Robert, very much for joining us. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. I enjoyed a lot. Thanks for listening to this week's show. We hope you enjoyed it. And as always, we'd love to hear from you.

Comments on iTunes are always appreciated. And you can tweet at us. Our handle is at War underscore College. The show is hosted by myself and Matthew Galt. It was created by me and Craig Hecht. Bethel Hapty is our producer this week. And she also approved this message. Next time on War College.

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