Abolish the Air Force

[Norfolk]

I'm very much in support of what the Air Force COULD BE. But for the last year and a few months, we've had Air Force officers, and Air Force retirees as military contractors, pushing CAS like a drug dealer pushing crack to schoolkids in a COIN fight.

The current line is to "use CAS first" to prevent casualties, even if it means killing everyone on the objective, women, kids, whatever. Maneuver Commanders are being ripped apart in AARs by a [] retired Air Force Colonel/General if they take a casualty on the objective, attempting to lessen civilian casualties, ILO dropping a JDAMS on the house.

As a long-time fan and critic of the USAF, this bugs me more than a little.

Much agreed 120mm. Six months or more of on-the-ground pain, suffering, fighting, losses, and slowly achieving an understanding with the local population by the Army or the Marines, and one bad Air Force CAS strike undoes it all in an instant. A great way to conduct COIN.

I very much hold to the view that CAS is a necessary function for the Army (just as it is for the Marines), and therefore its should devolve in its entirety from the Air Force to the Army. Let the Air Force concentrate on what it does better than anyone else - Air Superiority, Strategic Aerospace Defence, Strategic and Tactical Bombing, etc.

Strategic Airlift is debatable, and may be better off with the Army than the Air Force. Unless of course, the Air Force discerns a Navy-like requirement for ground forces of its own to seize and hold bases (as well as a strategic/operational role for the Airborne - as it has with the Army, just as the Marines have with amphibious operations), in which case the Airborne theoretically might be better suited to Air Force rather than Army requirements, and then Strategic Airlift may be better off with the Air Force.

I'm not in favour of abolishing the Air Force, but I do think that if the functions and roles of the Air Force were not substantially revised along the lines of what I have written here, it would have been better for the Air Force to have remained a part of the Army in the first place.