Some days, I long for the world of Ridley Scott's Aliens, where space marines were all you'd need to fend off gigantic carnivorous xenomorphs. I felt that way again this morning when I awoke to news of yesterday's testimony before the Congress by the chiefs of the United States Army, Navy, and Air Force that they couldn't fight a major war under the strictures of sequestered budgets. To paraphrase John McCain, if $470 billion annually isn't enough, the taxpayers are getting ripped off. The good news, I'm alluding, was from General Amos, commandant of the Marine Corps, who would sign up for one war, but not two. Fair enough. Even Leathernecks have limits.
General Welch, the Air Force chief of staff, didn't spend all week on the Hill, of course; he's made a big splash at the Air Force Association meeting at National Harbor, where his Captain Airpower schtick was well-received. But after asserting that his Air Force couldn't do much on the biggest air force budget in the world, as Breaking Defense reported, he got a bit prickly about some recent criticisms of the organization he leads. Showing a briefing slide asserting that the USAF, USAFR, and Air National Guard's 690,000 troops far exceeded the 143,000 airmen in the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps, he complained that
I’m getting really frustrated hearing this 'why do need an Air Force debate'. Let’s just shoot this one in the head.
Of course, he was talking specifically about the forthcoming book Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force by Professor Robert Farley of the University of Kentucky. The book lacks a webpage just yet, but it has a vigorous Twitter feed promoting it. Farley provided a preview of his case on David Axe's War is Boring blog last month. The argument received sufficient attention that Michael Auslin of the American Enterprise Institute replied with a spirited defense of the light blue service.
But let's parse those numbers. General Welch reported 34,000 airmen in the Army, 39,000 in the Marines, and 70,000 in the Navy. Fairly, I don't know how he's counting. Should the crews of aircraft carriers be considered airmen or sailors? Are the USAF's space troops airmen? How about its missileers in the silos? Or the Army's ballistic missile defense troops? I think that the general's numbers were not meant to exaggerate the size of the other services' air arms, but even so, I'm struck by how efficient those other organizations must be. To check, I went to the 2013 Military Balance from the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a common reference for bean-counting exercises like this, and starting counting aircraft (excluding those hand-launched drones, of course). Perhaps the IISS is a bit off, and perhaps I mistyped a figure or two, but generally, the numbers I find are in line with those I hear reported:
Army: 5,016 aircraft
Navy: 2,901 aircraft
USMC: 1,158 aircraft
USAF: 5,368 aircraft
Divide these into the number of people that the chief says that the other services have in the aviation business, and the numbers get painful. Frankly, I can't do this for the Army, because someone must have fed him a nonsensical number for the size of Army Aviation. So think for a moment just about the Marine Corps versus the Air Force: 39,000 Marine aviation troops with 1,158 aircraft works, compared to 690,000 airmen with 5,368 aircraft. That's
34 USMC aviation troops per plane, but
129 USAF airmen per plane.
So I have just one question: what is the USAF doing with all those people?
We know what they don't want to be doing with them. The USAF leadership has told legislators that it wants to dump its A-10 attack aircraft and KC-10 tankers, simply because they're smaller fleets with single missions, but fixed infrastructures. On the other hand, it wants to push its remaining money through the KC-465 tanker, LRS-B bomber, and F-35A fighter-bomber programs. It also wants to pull back from its fleet of Predator and Reaper drones, because it believes that they will not be useful over contested airspace. Audrey Kurth recently supported this view with an article in Foreign Affairs asking why there were no "Drones Over Damascus". But if that's so, I wonder why drones were used so extensively over Kosovo in 1999. Over thirty of NATO's unmanned aircraft were lost in that campaign, as they flew into dense, if outmoded, Yugoslav air defenses. As they were cheap, the losses were admissible, and their work valuable. Still, for real survivability, as General Mike Hostage of Air Combat Command explained at the conference, the USAF wants to buy a stealthier reconnaissance fleet. But that idea of dumping the aging F-15Cs, those other single mission aircraft, before another breaks apart in the air? Hostage was adamant:
I don’t have enough air superiority capability as it is, so I’d be desperately in trouble if I got rid of an entire fleet of F-15Cs. So that’s probably not likely.
Say again all after "I don't have enough"—not enough fighters? What!? Between the USAF, the US Navy, and the USMC, the US has a fleet of over 2,300 fighters and fighter-bombers. Again, by the counts of the IISS—and granted, it's hard to get these right—the next largest fleets are China's roughly 1,650 fighters and Russia's roughly 1,000 fighters. (In all cases, I'm not counting pure ground attack aircraft like the A-10 and the Sukhoi-25; as General Hostage would agree, those aren't actually fighters, right?) And in addition to American numerical superiority, there is also a qualitative edge. However anyone might be stressed by grainy images of Chinese "stealth" fighters, there are so far no actual squadrons deployed.
So, without actually endorsing Rob Farley's views (though I will definitely be reading his book), I want to offer this explanation for why this disestablish-the-air-force talk gets even a little traction. Certainly the service does things in space and with picket radars that the other services don't. But by the raw numbers, the country seems to be getting a raw deal entrusting air defense to the Air Force. Those taxpayers are getting ripped off. And what it wants to do in the future has more to do with what it wants to be than what sort of support the other services would like to get. Rather than just doubling-down on what it knows (every extra dime for the F-35A), it may be time for the service to think hard about how it can most cost-effectively contribute to American security. Its contribution is admittedly huge today; it's just not seemingly well-managed.
General Welch, the Air Force chief of staff, didn't spend all week on the Hill, of course; he's made a big splash at the Air Force Association meeting at National Harbor, where his Captain Airpower schtick was well-received. But after asserting that his Air Force couldn't do much on the biggest air force budget in the world, as Breaking Defense reported, he got a bit prickly about some recent criticisms of the organization he leads. Showing a briefing slide asserting that the USAF, USAFR, and Air National Guard's 690,000 troops far exceeded the 143,000 airmen in the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps, he complained that
I’m getting really frustrated hearing this 'why do need an Air Force debate'. Let’s just shoot this one in the head.
Of course, he was talking specifically about the forthcoming book Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force by Professor Robert Farley of the University of Kentucky. The book lacks a webpage just yet, but it has a vigorous Twitter feed promoting it. Farley provided a preview of his case on David Axe's War is Boring blog last month. The argument received sufficient attention that Michael Auslin of the American Enterprise Institute replied with a spirited defense of the light blue service.
But let's parse those numbers. General Welch reported 34,000 airmen in the Army, 39,000 in the Marines, and 70,000 in the Navy. Fairly, I don't know how he's counting. Should the crews of aircraft carriers be considered airmen or sailors? Are the USAF's space troops airmen? How about its missileers in the silos? Or the Army's ballistic missile defense troops? I think that the general's numbers were not meant to exaggerate the size of the other services' air arms, but even so, I'm struck by how efficient those other organizations must be. To check, I went to the 2013 Military Balance from the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a common reference for bean-counting exercises like this, and starting counting aircraft (excluding those hand-launched drones, of course). Perhaps the IISS is a bit off, and perhaps I mistyped a figure or two, but generally, the numbers I find are in line with those I hear reported:
Army: 5,016 aircraft
Navy: 2,901 aircraft
USMC: 1,158 aircraft
USAF: 5,368 aircraft
Divide these into the number of people that the chief says that the other services have in the aviation business, and the numbers get painful. Frankly, I can't do this for the Army, because someone must have fed him a nonsensical number for the size of Army Aviation. So think for a moment just about the Marine Corps versus the Air Force: 39,000 Marine aviation troops with 1,158 aircraft works, compared to 690,000 airmen with 5,368 aircraft. That's
34 USMC aviation troops per plane, but
129 USAF airmen per plane.
So I have just one question: what is the USAF doing with all those people?
We know what they don't want to be doing with them. The USAF leadership has told legislators that it wants to dump its A-10 attack aircraft and KC-10 tankers, simply because they're smaller fleets with single missions, but fixed infrastructures. On the other hand, it wants to push its remaining money through the KC-465 tanker, LRS-B bomber, and F-35A fighter-bomber programs. It also wants to pull back from its fleet of Predator and Reaper drones, because it believes that they will not be useful over contested airspace. Audrey Kurth recently supported this view with an article in Foreign Affairs asking why there were no "Drones Over Damascus". But if that's so, I wonder why drones were used so extensively over Kosovo in 1999. Over thirty of NATO's unmanned aircraft were lost in that campaign, as they flew into dense, if outmoded, Yugoslav air defenses. As they were cheap, the losses were admissible, and their work valuable. Still, for real survivability, as General Mike Hostage of Air Combat Command explained at the conference, the USAF wants to buy a stealthier reconnaissance fleet. But that idea of dumping the aging F-15Cs, those other single mission aircraft, before another breaks apart in the air? Hostage was adamant:
I don’t have enough air superiority capability as it is, so I’d be desperately in trouble if I got rid of an entire fleet of F-15Cs. So that’s probably not likely.
Say again all after "I don't have enough"—not enough fighters? What!? Between the USAF, the US Navy, and the USMC, the US has a fleet of over 2,300 fighters and fighter-bombers. Again, by the counts of the IISS—and granted, it's hard to get these right—the next largest fleets are China's roughly 1,650 fighters and Russia's roughly 1,000 fighters. (In all cases, I'm not counting pure ground attack aircraft like the A-10 and the Sukhoi-25; as General Hostage would agree, those aren't actually fighters, right?) And in addition to American numerical superiority, there is also a qualitative edge. However anyone might be stressed by grainy images of Chinese "stealth" fighters, there are so far no actual squadrons deployed.
So, without actually endorsing Rob Farley's views (though I will definitely be reading his book), I want to offer this explanation for why this disestablish-the-air-force talk gets even a little traction. Certainly the service does things in space and with picket radars that the other services don't. But by the raw numbers, the country seems to be getting a raw deal entrusting air defense to the Air Force. Those taxpayers are getting ripped off. And what it wants to do in the future has more to do with what it wants to be than what sort of support the other services would like to get. Rather than just doubling-down on what it knows (every extra dime for the F-35A), it may be time for the service to think hard about how it can most cost-effectively contribute to American security. Its contribution is admittedly huge today; it's just not seemingly well-managed.
The only reason the Commandant signed up for just one war is because he's an aviator. If he was a grunt like the Commandant is supposed to be, he definitely would have signed up for at least 2, with an option on a third ...
Posted by: Mickey | 19 September 2013 at 15:46
Could you do a net present value comparison on the cost of the F-35 vs the aircraft it is replacing? If the F-35 is to replace the F-16C/D, A-10C, AV-8B, and F/A-18C/D, what did it cost in current dollars to develop all those aircraft to their modern standards in comparison to the R&D costs spent on all F-35 models to the present?
Posted by: KyNavy | 20 September 2013 at 20:54