May have been posted already, but clip from an article in Foreign Affairs journal by Robert Farley

Ground the Air Force?
“ The United States needs air power, but it does not need an air force. In fact, it never really did. The U.S. Air Force, founded in 1947, was the product of a decades-long campaign by aviation enthusiasts inside the U.S. Army. These advocates argued that air power could not achieve its promise under the leadership of ground commanders. With memories of the great bombing campaigns of World War II still fresh and a possible confrontation with the Soviets looming, the nation’s would-be cold warriors determined that the age of air power was upon them. But it wasn’t. Advocates of an independent air force had misinterpreted the lessons of World War II to draw faulty conclusions about air power’s future. Their mistake produced a myriad of problems. Modern warfare almost invariably demands close cooperation across air and surface units. In naval operations, all of these assets -- submarines, surface ships, and aircraft -- belong to the same service. In the case of the army and the air force, however, the component parts end up being divided -- or needlessly replicated -- by separate bureaucratic organizations, each with its own priorities. As a result, the services tend to plan operations and procure equipment based on their own needs rather than those of the military as a whole. When they ask lawmakers for funding, moreover, they tend to concentrate on missions that they believe they can accomplish on their own. Finally, during wars, the services often struggle to cooperate by scaling the bureaucratic walls they constructed in peacetime. With the benefit of hindsight, the United States should fold the U.S. Air Force back into its two sibling services, the army and the navy. Done properly, such a reform could improve military readiness, cut mounting and unsustainable defense costs, and refocus the Pentagon on preparing for the fights of the future”

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/1...ir_force-000000

our Airforce spends money like crazy ... gotta have the most expensive fighters....

So no country needs a separate air force?

I see their point but I think it's almost a matter of semantics. Even if air power was controlled by the army, the guys who specialize in tank warfare, etc., wouldn't be the people deciding strategic bomber needs - there'd be a separate group for that, who could focus on the air requirement.

I can see arguing that the Pentagon needs to get things more coordinated across the branches, but either way you're still going to have different groups thinking their tasks are the most important and wanting as much funding as they can get, so I don't see it being much different than separate branches.

What rubbish....

A very sizable mission the air force is responsible for resides in space. In fact they have an entire branch devoted to it known as Space Command (go figure). Not to mention a substantial ICBM force. Do do we just mothball the nukes and forget about satellites? Or just transfer their control over to the army and navy? Yes, it's the gold plated fighters that get the press but most of the air forces missions lie outside of air superiority.

No other country has ten aircraft carriers, each capable of supporting several dozen front-line combat aircraft. And how much use has our strategic bomber force gotten in their own element in the last 30+ years compared to tactical strike aircraft?

Bullish!

If we didn't have an Air Force, we would not have won both Iraqi Wars.

That's exactly how the Air Force came into being. At that time it was intra service rivalry vs inter service rivalry now.

There is so much wrong with that argument, I am surprised it managed to get published.

Such a stupid argument. Guess we dont need the marines either. Let the army do that as well.

The amount of knowledge and information you need to run a successful bombing campaign across various platforms is alot. And as someone said, the air force is not only worried about the Air, they have space and cyberspace that they control as well.

Actually, Cyberspace is a joint command- all the branches, not just Air Force any longer.

Hey, count yourselves lucky yanks. At least your army controls its own rotary wing aviation. In Canada, our helicopters are all run by the air force - every one of them. Both land based and sea based. Trying to get them to cooperate with land units is literally an inter-service level matter.

Seems just a rehash of an older one, from the NY Times

Matt Dorfman

A budget overhaul will go a long way toward improving our national security, but more can be done to meet this long-term goal: creating the right military for the 21st century.

Not since Henry Stimson’s tenure from 1940 to ’45 has a defense secretary been faced to the same degree with simultaneously fighting a war and carrying out far-reaching reforms. Yet there are three major changes Mr. Gates should add to his agenda, and they deserve President Obama’s support.

First, the Air Force should be eliminated, and its personnel and equipment integrated into the Army, Navy and Marine Corps. Second, the archaic “up or out” military promotion system should be scrapped in favor of a plan that treats service members as real assets. Third, the United States needs a national service program for all young men and women, without any deferments, to increase the quality and size of the pool from which troops are drawn.

At the moment, the Army, Navy and Marine Corps are at war, but the Air Force is not. This is not the fault of the Air Force: it is simply not structured to be in the fights in Iraq and Afghanistan. While Army, Marine and Navy personnel have borne the brunt of deployments, commonly serving multiple tours, the Air Force’s operational tempo remains comparatively comfortable. In 2007, only about 5 percent of the troops in Iraq were airmen.

Yes, air power is a critical component of America’s arsenal. But the Army, Navy and Marines already maintain air wings within their expeditionary units. The Air Force is increasingly a redundancy in structure and spending.

War is no longer made up of set-piece battles between huge armies confronting each other with tanks and airplanes. As we move toward a greater emphasis on rapid-response troops, the Army has tightened its physical fitness regime and the Marine Corps has introduced a physically grueling Combat Fitness Test for all members. Yet an Air Force study last year found that more than half of airmen and women were overweight and 12 percent were obese.

Next, the current military personnel system is a peacetime bureaucratic construct that serves neither national security nor those who wear the uniform. Congress sets the level of manpower for each military service. Within this constraint, military planners have to decide how many riflemen, mechanics, cooks, medics, pilots and such there should be within the military’s job types, known as Military Occupational Specialties. Then the Pentagon has to decide how many people will be retained in the ranks or promoted.

The result is an “up or out” system that demands service members move up the ladder simply to stay in the military. Any soldier passed over for promotion twice must leave or retire.

Treating service members like so many widgets — in particular, the enlisted men and women who make up 85 percent of the ranks — is arbitrary and bad management. I have seen many fit, experienced officers and enlisted Marines arbitrarily forced out because there were only so many slots into which they could be promoted.

The military should develop a new accounting and personnel system that tracks the cost of developing its human capital and tallies each service member as an investment with a fixed value based on his education, training, experience and performance. This would reflect the departure of a valued service member as an asset lost, not a cost cut. Why are fit men and women who have served in combat, a human experience that a million dollars can’t buy, being pushed out instead of retained for 15, 20, 30 years?

Last, Mr. Gates should urge President Obama to confer with Congress and introduce national service at age 18 for all Americans. Under such a system, young people from all classes and backgrounds would either serve in the military or do other essential work like intelligence assessment, conservation, antipoverty projects, educational tutoring, firefighting, policing, border security, disaster relief or care for the elderly. The best qualified would be assigned to the military.

The 1.6 million Americans who have served in the current wars represent less than one percent of all citizens. We need to spread the risk and burden of fighting our wars. If more of our national leaders had been in uniform, or knew they might have children at risk in war, their decisions during military confrontations might be better. And this is not just about the struggle against terrorism: would New Orleans reconstruction have lagged so long if we had had a national service program in natural-disaster recovery?

President Obama has the political capital to make these critical changes. Given the urgency of war and money available under the economic recovery plan, now may be our best chance for decades to truly modernize America’s defenses.

Paul Kane is a Marine veteran of Iraq and a former fellow with the International Security Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

RAF armchair snipers are moving towards a different kind of air force which will mean standing down an increasing number of our conventional squadrons. Coffee, anyone?

The strategic bomber force seems likes its still somewhat tied up in the nuclear delivery mission and also has been heavily short changed by the fighter mafia since the '60s.

Nevertheless I believe its delivered a high percentage of ordnance through several wars.

Exactly.

If there was no "Air Force" there would be an "Air Corps" of the Army that would be just as large as the current "Air Force".

So since we've not used it recently we will never use it again? That's part of that "last war mentality" military planners warn against.

Disagree, we could have won without air but it would have been much more costly.

The second most powerful airforce in the world is the US Navy. Give the missiles, transport land based UCAVs to the Army. Get rid of the large bombers and give the rest to the Navy. Close the Academy. The taxpayers will not be any less safe while keeping some of their money.

The USAF's main mission over the last 30-something years has been trying to get rid of the A-10...unsuccessfully, I might add.