Looks like the Navy isn’t the only service having one:
“Why does the country need an independent Air Force?” the senior civilian assistant to Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, the service’s chief of staff, had written. For the first time in the 62-year history of the Air Force, the answer isn’t entirely clear.
The Air Force’s identity crisis is one of many ways that a decade of intense and unrelenting combat is reshaping the U.S. military and redefining the American way of war. The battle against insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq has created an insatiable demand for the once-lowly drone, elevating the importance of the officers who fly them.
These new earthbound aviators are redefining what it means to be a modern air warrior and forcing an emotional debate within the Air Force over the very meaning of valor in combat.
Since its founding, the Air Force has existed primarily to support its daring and chivalrous fighter and bomber pilots. Even as they are being displaced by new technology, these traditional pilots are fighting to retain control over the Air Force and its culture and traditions.
“Wonder weapons… my God, I don’t see the wonder in them. Killing without heroics, nothing is glorified… nothing is reaffirmed? No heroes, no cowards, no troops, no generals? Only those who are left alive… and those who are left dead. I’m glad I won’t live to see it.” — George C. Scott, Patton
This assumes that all the U.S. will need to do in the next xx amount of years is USELESS DIRT type operations. If that’s the case, no real need for a Navy…at all, nor does the Army need anything other than a shitton of infantry, MRAPs, and civil affairs folks. And this all ignores the absurdity of doing away with an independent AF yet allowing the Navy’s army to have their own air force. The thought process, going on both within and without the AF and DoD as a whole, that “next-war-itis” is the plague and needs to be destroyed, is going to be the death of airpower in this country’s armed forces.
That said, this bit let me know that the Col who has been spearheading a lot of the UAV stuff has his head on straight:
“”Most mission statements are long, complicated and italicized,” he said. “Mine was three words: “Kill [Expletive] Heads.”"
“Hitler built a fortress around Europe, but he forgot to put a roof on it.”
— Franklin D. Roosevelt
Makes me think of an article in Proceedings many years ago, where a CMDR was relating a complaint from an AF co worker during a tour at the Pentagon, the gist of the complaint being how unfair it was that the USN has it’s own Air Force, and it’s own Army, and the Navy’s Army even has it’s own Air Force. As I recall, the CMDR’s response was, ” So do we really need you guys?”
my question is, if any young person with a few years of playing video games prior to turning 18, after screening, can fly UAV’s, why do they have to be officers?
what will that do for budgets? if we can have A/C for a few million/body, and “pilots” at E5-7 rates, or maybe less, and maintenance crews in the same ball park, suddenly air superiority might just be affordable again.
I think they do have enlisted predator/reaper guys…at least the squadrons are full of enlisted personel who help operate the planes (I’m not sure in what capacity).
In the USAF, you must be an officer and a rated pilot to “fly” a UAV — the enlisted folk are the maintainers — and the section commander is usually an O-5.
In the Army, you must be — ummmmmm — in the Army. I know two E-6 Shadow jockeys and their five E-4 maintainers — and their section leader is an E-7.
When you see the structure of an Air Force UAV unit, the unofficial USAF motto immediately springs to mind: “No colonel left behind.”
The Navy had a similar psychological crisis about “the meaning of valor in combat” in the 1860s–if you fought from behind armor, could you really display valor? (David Mindell, _War, Technology, and Experience aboard the USS Monitor_ is a good start on the discussion but there’s plenty of room for more work on what one might call the “evolution of heroism.”)
The problem isn’t in re-defining the meaning of “valor in combat” — the problem is that the Air Farce is trying to define sitting in a trailer 2,000 miles from any fighting as being “in combat”…
I know USAF types who log “C” time in the friggin’ *pattern* over here.
The enlisted folks that operate the UAVs (not the maintainers, that’s a separate job) are sensor operators. A very simplistic explanation is that the officer type actually flies the plane/releases munitions, while the enlisted guy points/operates the cameras.
As for why officers fly…two reasons, both related to accountability/responsibility (and both stuff that does not change from manned aircraft): first, maintaining responsibility for seeing/avoiding in the airspace you are flying in, and accountability/responsibility for release of munitions. The military, understandably so imho, wants to maintain these within the officer corps.
Of course, there is a simple solution to this, one the Army figured out a long time ago: Warrant Officers.
The AF forgets that its mission statement is very simple, support the Army with aircraft, and the other armed forces likewise – where centralization makes fiscal and operational sense for the tasks involved.
In addition, valor is not limited to fighter and bomber crews (including CAS, which can be most demandingly valorous and is all to often greatly undervalued).
A few brief examples, by no means all:
FAC, combat SAR (God bless and keep them),
what used to be called Combat Cargo (think Burma and the Hump)which is delivering supplies to, and evacuating wounded from, the front lines or deep behind them (if such lines exist),and parachute troop insertion, to name a few.
Valor doesn’t just happen in airplanes, even in the Air Force. The AF needs bases, and the bases need to be defended from attack on the ground (remember Tet).
Whether having an airplane force independent of all other military organizations makes any more sense than an independent submarine force.. opinions vary.
Of course, some think the bubbleheads seceded long ago, they were just sneaky and smart about it, and kept it to themselves.
Wonder weapons… my God, I don’t see the wonder in them. Killing without heroics, nothing is glorified… nothing is reaffirmed?
One of the better quotes from that film.
If it devolves into the U.S. Drone Force, there *is* no need for courage or valor. The pilot’s life isn’t on the line and Drone Airbases can be established away from the hot areas so there’s nothing to defend.
I don’t see it playing out this way short term. For now, you can’t establish air superiority with drones and CAS continues to depend on manned planes.
At least for now.
No farce like the Air Farce.
Over at Brad’s place he had a thread on this subject last month. I chimed in with two relatively long posts.
Suffice it to say, the AF has had problems almost since independence. The service it has given the Army has been less than stellar and that needs to be fixed. It won’t be fixed until Army Aviation looks a lot more like USMC Aviation. Leave the Bombers and ICBMs in a Strategic AF, along with the F-22s (basically the old SAC and ADC commands), and enough of MAC/Mobility and Material commands to serve their transport needs, in an independent AF, the rest goes to the Army.
The Navy has discovered WO pilots, but they limit them to certain types. The Army doesn’t, and they have served quite well.
You mean you don’t need a degree in English Lit. to drive an Apache?
You do to run AIC’s in an E2. A Physc or Poli Sci degree will ya do.
Wasn’t always that way.
Gotta keep attendance up at Tailhook I s’pose.
The Army used to have a recruiting slogan “High School to Flight School.” Back in ‘nam, they would start a class with about 450 just to get about 200 pilots. A guy who attends church with me was in a class that started with 450, and ended with around 260. He said that ratio was a little higher than the average class.
Those TAC Sergeants could be a bit hard on those WO Candidates.
also let a long post over at XBrads on this very subject. Look, the USAF came into being for two reasons, 1) the belief in strategic bombing as an independent weapon not to be limited by the parochial, more immediate concerns of theater ground commanders, and, 2) the tendency of gnd commanders to not play well with others and horde their toys. Aircraft are a scarce resource–always have and always will be. And when gnd commanders were assigned control over a set number of air assets they were loath to loan them out to adjacent theater ops where the action might be hotter on any given day for fear they would never get them back. It was this attempt to rationalize the use of scarce resources that led to the WWII Casablanca airpower conference and created a separate AF in all but name by taking opcon away from gnd commanders and instituting a form of early “single-manager” system for cas–to be followed by the official break in 1947. The “single-manager concept has been followed ever since, although it has waxed and waned.
Look, as I said at Brad’s, unless America never plans to fight a war larger than a single Corps-sized engagement on one geographical spot on the globe at a time, an organization like the USAF will be needed, as only it is “scalable’ enough to provide seamless world-wide coordinated ops. The Army mind-set thinks in hundreds of yards, the Navy in hundreds of miles in terms of daily ops–only the USAF thinks in globe-spanning thousands of miles. One–the Army–is highly localized. The USAF, by contrast is global, with the Navy falling midway in between.
If the USAF didn’t exist no airplane would ever be built with a combat radius reaching further than 500 yards past the FEBA..
Excellent shooting, lead! Two’s tally, visual, press!
The problem for your argument is the WW2 TACs answered your your criticism, and they were available in much the same way Marine Aviation is to a Marine commander. Portion of Army Aviation would remain organic at the division level as it is now, with the updated TACs being handled in the same way their equivalent was in WW2, or pieced out as needed as the AF is being now when it calls for it.
The other side of the problem you present is taken care of by a Strategic AF.
Frankly, the fight that is heating up now has the same issues heating up as independence did in the late 40s. The bomber Generals won that one, but they are not in the ascendancy these days and the situation is turning against the fighter mafia. I doubt the bomber Generals would win this fight if the conditions that obtain today did then.
The argument of scalability is also an Engineering problem. We will not have the ability to scale up as we did in 40-45. The industrial resources of the country have been destroyed. We can’t build something like as simple as a Destroyer Escort without magnificent cost over runs. We would never be able to do it with aviation which is far more difficult. We’ll go to war with what we have on hand, or we won’t go to war. Given the political conditions, I find the possible consequencs of that chilling.
You may not realize it, but Army Aviation is already the world’s largest Air Force. maintaining the AF as a tactical AF is a huge waste of resources. Given the AF attitude towards supporting the Army, the AF deserves to lose this battle. They’ve had Korea and onward to reform and they’ve refused.
bah. “Psych”
Prolly got spell check on those fancy EMDU’s now anyway.
I thought you meant Physical Sciences.
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