via War is Boring...
Last week at Foreign Affairs, U.S. Air Force Col. Robert Spalding III offered a response to my earlier article “Ground the Air Force.” I’d like to thank Col. Spalding for his contribution, and to offer the following response to several of his points.Read it all here.
Colonel Spalding opens with a revealing anecdote:
When ground commanders controlled aircraft, the results were disastrous. As Col. F. Randall Starbuck writes in Air Power in North Africa, 1942–43: “One example, relayed by Gen. [Jimmy] Doolittle, was the incident where a ground commander asked him to provide a fighter to cover a Jeep that was going out to repair a broken telephone line. He refused. The plane that would have wasted its time on that mission shot down two German Me-109s.”
Was the jeep ambushed? Were communications restored? How critical were these communications to maintaining offensive momentum? Did anyone bother to ask? Maybe Doolittle did, and maybe he had good reason to believe that, on that day, one of his planes could catch and kill two Bf109s.
Col. Starbuck doesn’t tell us, and Col. Spalding doesn’t seem to care.
And this, in short, is why some people don’t trust the Air Force with airpower.
In my opinion, Farley scores a flawless victory. The USAF needs a better "spokesmen" or else they're gonna have a rough ride in the out years. Things look rosy now. The huge (and largely unrealized) cost of the F-35 coupled with horror stories of how experienced, combat Soldiers and Marines are being tossed on the street will get the attention of the public and Congress.
The pie might be reapportioned in the future and the USAF will only have themselves to blame.
