March 10, 2015
(Editor’s Note: The below is a lightly edited excerpt from the book Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force which has just been released in paperback.)
Bureaucracy may be boring, but it matters for policy. The modern state has grown into a vast collection of bureaucratic institutions, each tasked with certain critical jobs. Inside and outside the state, individuals, interest groups, and bureaucratic organizations strive against one another for influence and resources. In the United States, Congress, the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon, the various organs of the intelligence community, and each of the military services contributes to national security policy. The arrangement of these organizations matters for how the policymaking process plays out.
While the fundamental purpose of foreign policy and military organizations is to disarm enemies, deter aggressors, safeguard commerce, pierce the fog of war, and defend whatever other interests are deemed crucial to national survival and prosperity, each organization sees the world in a particular way, and each tends to seek to maximize its own influence and autonomy. The importance of specific organizations for policy often depends on the personality and background of the executive as well as the relationships between major policymakers. However, the simple fact of an organization’s existence can grant it a “seat at the table,” through which it can have an impact on policy. Institutional design thus privileges certain foreign policies and forms of war at the expense of others. Organizations working together suffer from what Clausewitz terms “friction,” the inability of the component parts to function together seamlessly.
The American system for managing airpower is best described as the result of evolution rather than intelligent design. When the air force left the army in 1947, the services tried to settle the distribution of air capabilities between them. However, changes in technology, not to mention bureaucratic turf fights, have caused extensive changes over the years, changes often resolved by political power rather than careful analysis.
The themes of organizational conflict and airpower culture have played out in the recent history of U.S. airpower cooperation. While airpower parochialism may seem a theme of the distant past (dead arguments by dead men), the organizational structure of the U.S. military continues to support a vision of airpower that creates substantial problems for U.S. war fighting, procurement, and international influence.
The Justifications for Air Force Independence
Air force independence was controversial from the start. The appendix of a British Air Ministry memorandum of June 1921, entitled “Some Arguments for and against a Separate Air Force,” detailed seven arguments against independence. In this section, I boil these arguments down to five rationales for air force independence. Some of these rationales speak directly to the idea of an independent air force, while others justify bureaucratic division in a more general sense. The most important rationales for air force independence are that operations in different mediarequire different services (the division between earth, air, and water means that we need three services); that service differentiation should depend on the ability to plan and conduct independent campaigns; that the need for redundancy in critical capabilities should guide division of service responsibilities; that states should follow the leaders, looking for international cues regarding how to organize their defense establishments; and that national and organizational tradition should inform service divisions. In this section I examine all of these rationales, arguing that none can fully justify the existence of independent air forces.
The Medium Makes the Service
Airpower advocates have long argued that the medium of the air requires a different set of professional and strategic skills than the media of land or sea. There is much to recommend this argument. Military professionals specializing in air operations do indeed require different skills than artillery officers in the army or submarine officers in the navy. Maintenance and procurement of equipment also depend on knowledge of the technical details of flying. Pilots have a better sense of what makes an aircraft or weapon effective than a soldier who has never flown.
However, airpower advocates take this argument too far. First, every modern military service includes a number of jobs that require distinct professional skills. For example, the submariner in the U.S. Navy cannot easily transfer to the surface fleet without considerable training. Armor officers in the army have different skills than infantry or artillery officers. These officers are capable of working in the same service because while their professional and technical skills differ, their military skills are compatible and substantially similar.
Robert M. Farley is an assistant professor at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky.
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