So first, a little anecdote. Just last Friday, I was chatting with an office mate of mine who is an Air Force major. He was telling me about the big "force shaping" measures underway in the Air Force, and how he and many of his peers were very worried about being RIF'ed. I joked with him that he should look into Blue to Green Program, and he said he was seriously considering it. A bit later he mentioned that he felt uncertain as to the future viability of the Air Force, that it would both shrink from "force shaping" and from being strapped maintaining extremely high budget items like F-22 in a COIN era where defense budgets would shrink, and thus at some point it would become untenable for the Air Force to support this and maintain all the necessary logistical, administrative, etc. infrastructure and manning that enables it to be an independent service. At that point the Air Force would bow to the inevitable and consent to being folded back into the Army. I was surprised to hear this from an active duty AF officer, but there it is.

There does seem to be a strong tone of desperation, and Dunlap's absurd article about airpower and COIN certainly smacks of it. So maybe this idea is being taken seriously in the Air Force, in some quarters at least?

Of all the services, ISTM that it is the Air Force and only it whose existence as an independent service is not self-evident. People live on the ground; ships can stay at sea for months, even years. But an airplane can stay aloft for a day at most, usually a span of hours? It is entirely logical then to view airpower as an adjunct to the service that controls where it is based: the Navy at sea (and they kept their air force) and the Army on the land. The Air Force's aggressive budgetary behavior and its attempts to poach broad competencies from other services (air and missile defense; UAVs) could be seen as behavior driven by a sense of existential insecurity.

I think Dr. Farley's article has some merit, but unfortunately his proposal is so jarring to the defense status quo that many do not get past the "abolish the Air Force" part and seriously consider what he is saying. He certainly does not advocate fully dispensing with the capabilities that the Air Force brings to the fight, but that they find better homes under the purview of the other services. I think he has a strong analysis of the reasons the independent air force came to be and why those assumptions are no longer valid, if they ever were. And if those assumptions that go right to that service's reason for coming into existence no longer hold, then it is not unreasonable to question its continued independent existence. I don't think his argument should be breezily dismissed, in any case.

I think the existence of an institutional Air Force has had baleful effects on the development of American strategy since WW2 (not to mention the development of the military-congressional-industrial complex) and has whetted an appetite for the ill-advised and ill-considered exercise of military power since its advent. Its outlook does nicely track the popular tendency in our country to believe that at the end of every problem, no matter how profound, there is a gizmo waiting to be invented that will neatly solve it, but that tendency is bad enough without having so great an institution to promote it. Better perhaps to constrain the fly boys in institutions that at least partially look beyond strictly technological approaches to war and peace.