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May 12, 2003
Putting a Stake in the Heart of Interservice Rivalry
Note: this is a post recovered from my old blog, before it died of an insufficient backup. Any comments/trackbacks on it have not been brought over, but can be seen with the original. The date is that of the original posting.
The A-10 Warthog is the most amazing aircraft in our arsenal, and it may be scrapped by Air Force politics. While I can't agree with Trent that "what is good for the USAF Brass (bomber pilots then and fighter pilots now) is bad for America, and vice versa," it is certainly true that the Air Force has too disparate a group of missions to fly. The Air Force's missions include strategic nuclear strike, air superiority, deep attack, tactical air support of ground forces, reconaissance, electronic intelligence gathering and warfare and a host of other missions. This is too broad of a mission set, and what ends up happening is that the "sexiest" jobs - fighter pilots - get to make all of the rules, and oddly enough they keep making rules that favor fighters over everything else.
In the area of actual warfighting, Goldwater-Nichols fixed the problem of inter-service rivalry. Since all theaters are commanded by a joint warfighter, to whom all elements report, the various military organizations operate as a single team. This is a huge improvement over earlier eras, where (for example) troops on the ground couldn't talk to their air support, because the radios were different. However, the various services still are in charge of deciding what equipment to buy, how to train the forces, what to actually send to a particular theater and so on. This leads from time to time to situations where a combatant commander wants a certain resource, say A-10s, and it is denied to him or watered down, largely in order to prevent that resource from gaining acclaim which would make it harder to kill off in favor of, say, more fighters. For some reason, the Air Force is really bad about this kind of thing.
It seems to me that we need another reorganization similar to that which followed Goldwater-Nichols. In this case, though, what we would want to do is look not at how we fight, but how we prepare to fight. What I would suggest as a first cut is looking at the military in terms of where it fights and what it needs to fight well. We fight in four arenas currently: inland, at sea, in the air and in the littorals. We could soon add in space to that list. Services and capabilities needed to fight well divide into those things that we must do before we decide to deploy troops, those things which are necessary to deploy troops and sustain them after they are deployed, and those things other than combat forces which are necessary to allow them to fight effectively. Those things that are necessary before we decide to deploy include procurement, administration (including legal staff, accounting and the like), doctrine and training, rear-area medical facilities, family support and so forth. Those things that are necessary to deploy and sustain troops include capabilities to move troops and supplies, as well as management and distribution of the supplies themselves. Those things which enable the combat forces to fight effectively include intelligence, psyops, reconnaisance, field medical support and the like.
The would lead to the combat forces dividing much as they are today: Army for inland combat, Navy for deep-water warfare, Air Force for air superiority and deep strike/strategic bombing and Marines for fighting along the coastlines. I see three minor changes to mission that would be involved in implementing this. The Army should take over the ICBMs and related strategic and theater nuclear missiles, on the grounds that these are no more aerial weapons than is a bullet. They go from the ground to the ground. The Army should also take over the CAS role currently provided by the Air Force (the Marines already have their own CAS, and would keep it). This means integrating the A-10s into the Army, as well as any other aircraft used strictly for close air support. The Marines would absorb the Coast Guard, whose mission would expand rather dramatically - closer to its WWII mission than its current mission.
One thing we need to be careful of is multirole capabilities. For example, we currently have a lot of aircraft which can switch roles. In the early days of a war, while we are gaining air supremacy, we need the F-15s and F-16s to fight enemy fighters and counter-air missions. Later, these can be incrementally switched to support of the ground troops. This is a useful and cost-saving way to implement the capabilities, and we don't want to lose it. It turns out that this distinction is fairly easy to draw, though. We simply would use the Army's aircraft for operations in areas where the Army forces are operating; Marine aircraft for where Marine forces are operating; and Air Force aircraft for interdiction and deep strike. F-16s could still plink tanks; they would just be doing that to units not actually in contact with Army or Marine units.
The non-combat forces could be put into three "services:" joint administration and readiness, covering the things we need to do before we deploy; logistics, covering deployment and sustainability; and joint combat support, covering those non-combat capabilities which enhance the theater commander's ability to employ his combatant units.
This would be a large shakeup, to be sure, and would be politically messy to implement. I think, though, that it would focus the non-combat parts of the military more on how to support our ability to fight, rather than on what got them to where they are. In other words, it would not be a fighter jock deciding if fighters could do it all, but rather a procurement officer deciding what capabilities are necessary and in what amounts to allow the Army's combatant forces to do their jobs as well as possible.
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