Quote Originally Posted by Umar Al-Mokhtār View Post
...To address USAF and COIN I guess the first challenge is to get the Air Force to culturally realize they are a "support" service first and foremost.
Yes and no. In the air, they are primary; for land warfare they are indeed support and I suggest that dichotomy is a part of their character and thus gives rise to the attitudinal problem.
I'm going to offer an oversimplification here: The only way to completely defeat your enemy, particularly in COIN, is to occupy his land with your people (and by “your” people I mean they can be our troops or indigenous personnel on our side of the COIN). You do not have to kill them necessarily, but you do have to be physically present on the ground. That is the essence of the infantryman...Everything else the military does is done to support him...Having total control of the air certainly makes the infantry’s job easier. But typically in COIN the opposition has no aircraft of note, so it’s a moot point.
True and that is the here and now -- but there's a reason that is true...
“...you may have to accept that if you would like the US and its forces to be able to operate, you might need Air Superiority as a prerequisite.” That depends on where we operate. Air Superiority in not a prerequisite for us to operate, it is something very, very nice to have. When was the last time US ground forces were subjected to sustained air attack? Not that it couldn’t happen in the future.
Having been subjected to enemy air attack, friendly air superiority is indeed nice to have. Very, very nice. I 'm personally a fan of us having all the air superiority we can get. Your points on COIN are correct -- but neither you nor I can guarantee that COIN will be the role we'll always be in or even that our very next war will be a COIN fight. It's important to recall that we are and have been in several COIN fights in recent years in large measure simply because the Air Force, the Navy and the Marines can all mount a successful air dominance battle. I for one would greatly prefer to keep it that way.
I guess I could counter with what relevancy does the F-22/F-35 have in COIN? Who is it we are looking to use the F-22 against? China? Iran? Russia? Lichtenstein? If so, when and where?
Fair question. Do you know the answer?
I do not get to see what our National leadership is really thinking but I do know that at this moment in time we are in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan and not in China and Russia. Our primary focus should be on how we defeat an implacable enemy in those two arenas, an enemy I might note without a single aircraft, before we seek to pick a fight somewhere else.
Wise words. Hopefully our national leadership will heed them. Who's prepared to guarantee that others will play by our rules...

The F22 is necessary; so is the F35 (even more so IMO -- and it will be an F16 on steroids in the COIN fights). More C17s, 130s and re-engining the C5Bs would be nice. Nice and necessary are different. Not to mention that as Cliff and Entropy pointed out, there's a body od folks in the AF who are on board with you on that score (notably AFSOC). DoD and the mil contractors can be faulted for gold plating equipment, excessively long development cycles and poor procurement practices but I'd note that is a DoD wide (EFV, MV22, Commanche, LCS, Virginia class anyone???) problem and is far from Air Force specific. The USAF can be faulted for misplaced priorities off and on over the years and for having an attitude problem but to be fair, they've done a lot more good than harm.