America Does Not Need The Air Force -- War is Boring
But it sure does need air power, as Rob Farley explains
With the Iraq War over and the fighting in Afghanistan winding down, why does the United States need to maintain two large land armies, the Army and Marine Corps? The question seems perfectly reasonable given the apparent absence of large terrestrial threats, but it leads us down the wrong path.
The United States military is all about redundancy; in addition to two armies, it also fields two navies — the Navy and the Coast Guard — and five or six air forces, depending on how you count the aerial arms of the various branches.
The real problem isn’t that the Army is marginally more or less useful that it was 10 years ago, but rather that the institutions that were designed in 1947, when the Army and Air Force split, are insufficiently flexible to negotiate the modern security landscape.
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My Comment: The last time that a U.S. soldier was killed on the ground by an opposing air force was during the Korean War 60 years ago. That is an excellent track record. If one wants to change the structure to find economies of scale and efficiency .... I understand .... but be careful on what may be the consequences of such a reorganization by changing something that works.
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