Abolish the Air Force

[Ender]

And, as long as there are aerial threats, the Air Force remains important.

I agree and am more sure of it now than I was a week ago. The F-22/35 combo may both appear to be very pricey but what they offer in terms of apparent effectiveness far outweigh their cost.

Nonetheless, this is the Small Wars Council, and not the Grand Strategy Council. We need to remember that we are currently fighting a very small war, in the scheme of things. Restructuring our entire military around a small war would be very unwise.

Some would say Grand Strategy is but a series of Small Wars nonetheless, I agree if we were to restructure our entire force composition only on the basis of this apparent "small war, in the scheme of things," we would be very unwise. If however, this Small War were not so small, and if in the scheme of things, these things: Small Wars, Big Wars and the varying shades of strategy that float in between both, were not separate entities but in fact directly diluted with one another I would say perhaps we could (and should) armchair this one. What does theory cost here? No one loses anything with bad ideas and we stand to gain so much with fresh, good ones.

China is gonna be big and it appears as though their two new national sports are cyber warfare and reverse engineering...and where the hell is Russia going these days? These are just a few of my favorite things that make me remember Great Big Wars have started from much smaller factors than we are talking about now. (Where's the Archduke FF when you need him?)

Nothing should be sacred. Nothing should be safe and nothing should be off the table as it were. Not any of our branches, doctrines, not the Air Force or the Marines, not COIN or conventional warfare...We should be mentally laying in the weeds on everything we think and do if we seriously want to poise ourselves for success in the next 100 years. The more lines we draw in the sand, the more we define, the more there is that separates this from that, only means we are the more fractured and divided and harder to unite for it. I think it is our business to make sure these wars stay small and that they are fought and won on our terms if we want to avoid (or fight?) the big ones on our terms. If the whole WWIII, Apocalypse as We Know it thingy didnt look so, I don't know, POSSIBLE these days I would say let's march on. If avoiding that reality requires (theoretically) smashing the status quo and REALLY thinking outside the box then lets do it... we live in a reality where a soldier and a sailor (for example) with the same jobs, could not talk to one another, face to face, about their jobs without the need of a translator or some serious time and patience. How does that work out on the radio when your encryption is one second off (and slipping), 50 miles away and under fire? This is not a "Blue Deck vs. Green Floor" debate...

We need to face it. This is a brand new world and the game is changing faster than we are. Not one of us has a handle on this and as a very junior member of this community who has (at least) another 40 good years to give I have to admit that when I look at the threats I am going to have to face in my distant career and then compare it to the force structure many "wiser and older" are handing me to combat those same threats I only see disaster. If it were not for the fact that we are now playing for very serious stakes (Read: ALL IN) these future conditions would make me really not wanna play. There is a great big thundercloud out there on the horizon gentlemen and you smell it as well as I do or we would not be here.

I had not posted on here for some time because I thought that more would be served (on both sides) by my listening and learning instead of talking and teaching but that does not mean I haven't been here. After months of ah... "lurking" I am convinced, more than ever of two things. The first is that SWC is one the hottest and most relevant things going and the second is it seems as though we tend to confuse massive educations, egos, or perceived age and experience with actual experience, or serious practical contribution to the discussion of "fighting small wars." I am all for sharing ideas and giving equal weight to all but certain concepts have to take precedence. I think the higher up we go, the more impressed we become with minutiae. I agree, "God is in the details" but our capacity to humanly process and rationalize even a fraction of the information we have been handed in the last 200 years or so has not increased nearly as quickly as the data has. I will say it again, we need to go back to basics. There are laws, they are written in blood and I firmly believe a great number of us, myself included have forsaken some of those basic laws for the complexly sexy. Carving a niche and becoming a specialist may ensure job/contract security but the corporate mindset has to stop when it comes to National Defense.

Not one thing is separate from the other here and there are no boxes. I would guess that there is only one degree of separation between any one of our Small War concepts and any of the Grand Strategy ah.."concepts." <-(my addition and how many can there be and if we have more than one "Grand Strategy" can we please make the G lower case or call them Grand Strategies??)

Signed,

Not On the NSC (Yet)