Rather than mothballing the planes and sending the pilots off on other gigs, we should retrofit a part of our air force into a global humanitarian crisis response unit.

Our airlift and airpower capabilities are awesome, and we could do a lot of good if we focused efforts in this way. Evacuations, aid delivery, transportation of aid workers, etc.

The idea that drones have completely outdated the air force is of course ludicrous on its face, but it is tru tat we have way more air power than we need, much like with the navy.

I agree that the F35 is a fucked project but eliminating manned fighters is foolish. Drones are nice for our current enemies but I guarantee you China and Russia are both working on tech to break our connection to our drones. If (when?) we have to actually fight a real country again we're going to want an airforce with real pilots for when our connection to S Dakota goes down.

That said, we spend way too much on our military in general. We need large cuts and far more accountability in our military.

I think Air Force types would probably tell you that drones are too easy for properly equipped foes to shoot down. That's just a guess but the point is that Drones vs Fighterplanes is a technical question and James K Galbraith doesn't have any more expertise than I do.

Separate Air Force or not is an institutional question. Separate Air Force will behave differently, as an institution, than one that's part of the Army.

Dr. Farley is on the case

If there's no Air Force I won't get the perverse satisfaction of bitching about the Blue Angels every year.

While I appreciate Gailbraith a good bit, and am no fan of the out of control pentagon budget (right-wing tax-and-spend redistribution system), this is a silly question simply designed to be provocative.

First, there's no reason to have any particular service or branch organized as a separate service or branch - you might just as well ask why we have Marines and an Army, or a Coast Guard and a Navy. The Air Corps did originate within the Army, and the Navy and Marines have had pilots and planes for quite a while. These branches/services are mostly artifacts of legacy evolution and bureaucratic turf wars than anything else. There's no good reason to have Special Forces (Army), SEALS (Navy) and then Marines.

Second, as @3 suggests: drones, no matter who's flying them (CIA included) hardly replicate all the functions piloted aircraft perform.

Neither of these issues touch on why the JSF is such a stupid project (except to the extent that the JSF is a do-everything-and-nothing-well solution, kind of like what you are proposing Charles).

It's a great thought experiment to question how we might restructure for efficiency - consolidate branches - but not a lot more.

For as much as the US government uses manned aircraft to murder civilians, drones and cruise missiles are far worse in terms of the collateral damage they inflict. Simply put, they are just less accurate and shittier than manned aircraft.

Harpers has an excellent article on the Air Force's rush to retire the A-10 Warthog ( http://harpers.org/archive/2014/02/tunne… paywalled sry) and replace it with this stupid new superjet and how the resulting reduction in human involvement in bombing will result in more innocent civilians getting blown up.

Missiles and drones are certainly cheaper than people flying airplanes, and in that sense more 'efficient', if the goal is just indiscriminately exploding shit in the third world.

We always prepare for the last war--which means the next generation of drones will be faster, smarter, stealthier, etc. At least some of the weapons they carry will actually be less lethal but much more precise--reducing collateral damage.

The interesting thing will be if the next generation of drones are of any use if we get into a massive force on force conflict with, say, China who has been furiously building an air force that is plainly meant to defeat the only enemy that really matters, the USAF.

@6, the Blue Angels are part of the Navy, not the Air Force.

@3 is correct. In fact he doesn't go far enough - logistics is MORE important than combat strength, and always has been.

@11 beat me to it. Though apparently they are a joint venture of the navy and marines.

we need an AF, but just not so much AF. like 2/3 less AF.

2/3 less of the entire DoD, and our budget woes are solved.

Why do we have artillery? I was just in Lawton OK, near Ft Sill Army Post, and you can hear them practicing. I thought at the time -- why? Why not just drones?

Not that I am a fan of war. But sometimes, you just gotta. Hitler wasn't going to be stopped any other way. We need to be prepared for the next crazy person. But enough already, right?

@12 - LIke I said: Legacy Evolution. It's worth re-examining today. Personally, I think the marines are the ones who are most redundant. But I'm not a military expert.

@15 - Drones don't carry 155mm Howitzer shells, which are also a lot cheaper per-round than the bombs we drop from various aircraft.

Drones can only do their missions as long as we have fully operational and accurate satellite telemetry/data to guide them (frankly the accuracy of drone strikes has been somewhat appalling).

The most important strategic issue is that more and more countries are gaining the ability to knock out satellites. Knock out the satellites and you ground your drones.

Piloted fighter bombers are back up.

Eventually most roles will be remote or pilotless once they figure out how to defend satellites or give the machines better AI. But that is many years away.

Drone technology works fine at present for air-to-ground strikes, but we don't have unmanned fighters just yet that are capable of dogfighting. Yes, we can intercept enemy aircraft with ground-to-air batteries, but the point of having fighters in a defensive role is that you can intercept enemies from further away, forcing them to go further while under fire in order to reach their target. Additionally, as Root said in #2, drones are inherently vulnerable to cyberwarfare. If you jam the communications of a manned fighter, the pilot can still maneuver, defend himself, and execute simple tactics reasonably well. If you jam the communications of an unmanned drone, it's dead in the water; it'll cruise until it runs out of fuel, hits something, or is shot down. There is the option of building better tasking into their machine brains, but that's not an option that will be taken. Why? Because it means allowing the drone to target and fire autonomously, and we ABSOLUTELY require human confirmation before letting machines open fire, for reasons relating to Terminator.

Well they're paying for my PhD right now, so I can't complain too hard (And there's pretty much no way in hell my research is weaponizable).

The Navy should be in charge of interstellar combat, the Coast Guard for patrolling the Solar System, and the Army for everything Earthside.

Also: only Hufflepuffs in the Army, Ravenclaws in the Navy, Grffendors in the Marines, and Slytherins in the Air Force.

#9, it is true and makes sense if you think about it. The difference is in the distance between the munitions and the target. Shortening that distance increases accuracy and reduces the time between launch and strike (the battlefield can change in that length of time).

#20, The newer models of drones (small light bombers) are designed to create their own multi-node redundant network on the battlefield, creating a real time recon bubble around the region. Which means jamming is highly ineffective.

Charles, current drones are capable of carrying IIRC 2 Hellfire missiles and in the above mentioned prototypes 3 bombs capable of taking down tank style targets. We need air power for larger bombs like bunker busters (a MOAB is superior to all currently designed bunker busting artillery) and fighter engagements (since drones are almost exclusively air to ground).

As far as the JSF, we really don't need it. The F-23 is superior to it in every way, and has superior handling than the F-22. Sure, the additional vectored thrust capabilities added millions to the price tag of each one, but when they'll be in the air 30 years later that doesn't really matter.

The F-23 is the new F-14/F-16 workhorse fighter. But we're not building it for political reasons (anti-war people balk at the price tag, and the military industrial complex has a vested interest in promoting new airframes to keep their profits up).

@25: I'd be inclined to listen to you except that a MOAB is sort of the opposite of a bunker buster. It's not good against heavily armored targets like an underground bunker; it's an air burst munition that just wrecks everything at the surface.

Charles, why in the fuck can't you just stick to things you actually know something about? Criticizing the F-35 is one thing, yet your conclusion is to get rid of all manned aircraft? Why not talk about the unneeded procurement Congress forces on the Navy and the Army as well, and conclude that they too don't need any more manned ships or vehicles? Why don't you bother to address the issue of logistics as so many others have mentioned here?

We all see the waste our military creates, yet no one else comes close to concluding that we should just fire all the pilots. You look at a single MQ-9, and you claim that that once politics are removed, it will make every other aircraft redundant? Do you honestly believe that an MQ-9 will replace a C-17 or a VC-25? Do you even know what those are without the use of Google?

The worst part here is that unlike real intellectuals, Charles won't bother to respond or further substantiate his thesis. He obviously didn't perform any research. He won't defend it with things like "examples" or "facts". He just shits out a few short paragraphs and calls it a day. Occasionally, he'll complain that "you can't please everyone" and leave it at that.

Charles, when did you stop caring about your professional integrity?

Thank you Charles, the War Nerd will take it from here:

http://pando.com/2014/12/18/the-war-nerd…

@15 - its instructive to note that in 1941 we were in no way prepared to do war with Germany (or Japan for that matter, and certainly not both). We ramped up our industrial capacity to meet the need and within 2 and 1/2 years had both Japan and Germany (with a massive assist from Russia) on the run. Unfortunately we never really ramped that effort down. We don't maintain a massive standing army any more, but we do maintain massive expenditures on absurdities like the F35 and aircraft carriers. There's a lot of money to be made for us to maintain our aggressive military posture and thats largely why we've been constantly at war since WWII and never once for a good reason. Its the ultimate flustercluck of our time that just having a large military actually becomes a reason to use it.

#26, MOABs are designed for bunker busting, specifically using the shock wave to collapse entire cave systems and kill everyone inside with either the rubble or hydrostatic shock. Bunker busting artillery makes a deeper hole, but it is much smaller. Think of it as a pick axe vs. a boulder. The pick axe makes a hole in the ground, while the boulder simply compresses the ground, removing all the air and water. The boulder does the better job of ground penetration, even if it doesn't move the topsoil.

Air burst penetration is proving more useful in the modern military than explosive penetration. Unless you cluster bomb your EFPs, accuracy and efficacy are questionable (putting a finger sized hole in a tank is cool, but if nothing integral is near that finger sized hole the attack has failed). The concussive force of modern air burst weaponry is massive, and being used to good effect in many arenas.

EFPs are certainly being used, but mostly in clusters or on the tips of guided munitions. Air burst is the tech seeing much wider spread adoption and implementation.

Did somebody really just say that it is okay if wars kill 12 people a year as long as it gives the USA cheap petroleum?

Surely our world has not fallen that far down the jaded path.

#33, I misread your post. My apologies. Most of that should have been aimed at #8. Cruise missiles are horrible in terms of collateral damage, but drones have a very low collateral damage potential. The collateral damage we see from drones is due to human misuse, not the technology itself. Firing upon targets in the open with mixed insurgent/civilian populations using a Hellfire is a bad idea, but long range/cruise missiles would take out an entire city block indiscriminately.

@30: that's not what wikipedia says, and according to wikipedia we've never used a MOAB, and only have 15... It says that the MOAB is explicitly not a penetrator.

"The MOAB is not a penetrator weapon and is primarily intended for soft to medium surface targets covering extended areas and targets in a contained environment such as a deep canyon or within a cave system."

From wikipedia. Penetrator weapon in this context refers to EFPs, or explosive force penetrators. It is a very specific technology involving high explosive charges and liquid metal projectiles. The MOAB doesn't have one.

@35: They actually developed the AGM-176 Griffin as a replacement for the AGM-114 Hellfire for those kinds of anti-insurgent uses. It's got a smaller radius of lethality, so while it's not as useful against, say, an army, it's very useful against irregular forces that hide out near civilians.

@37: Read your own Wikipedia quotation. It says explicitly that the MOAB is designed for use against large numbers spread out at the surface, or for enemies in a confined space that will reflect and concentrate the force of the blast. Dude, just let it go.

"Reflecting and concentrating the force of the blast" is what I was talking about when I mentioned hydrostatic shock.

In the end, we're saying the same things, but because you don't like my choice of words I am somehow wrong.

@43: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunker_bust…

MOAB is not a bunker buster. It may have uses, but it is explicitly not a bunker buster.

/sigh

While it is true that the MOAB does not have the BLU118/B Thermobaric Armor Penetrating Warhead, The sheer size of the MOAB creates a thermobaric explosion. This is how fuel-air bombs have been used as structure penetrating weapons since the 1990s. The "sustained blast wave" (if you're following on wikipedia) is what causes the hydrostatic shock I keep talking about, which is why thermobaric bunker busters are used against cave complex bunkers. This is one of the things the MOAB is designed to do. You know, the Massive Ordinance AIR BLAST? In fact, the only bigger bomb, the Russian ATBIP, is explicitly solely designed for thermobaric explosion.

You're going to need to try a lot harder just to keep up here.

Mudede has stumbled on to a good point, although he doesn't fully understand it. We're not at a point where phasing out manned aircraft altogether is feasible. But we should still get rid of the Air Force as a separate agency; air power should be folded into the Army and Navy. Air power should play a complementary role for other services in modern warfare. Giving the Air Force bureaucratic independence leads to waste, redundancy, and a group of people ideologically committed to a strategic vision that vastly overstates the importance of air power and have great political influence. The book linked @5 lays out the case clearly and powerfully. (Also, the Air Force hierarchy is far more infected with unprofessional wingnuts and extreme Christianists).

I still want to hear how an MQ-9 will replace a C-17 or a VC-25.

As a serious answer to the rhetorical question:

Communications between ground control and the drone can be compromised. We can not afford to operate under the assumption that the USA will be #1 in the encryption game forever.

A large reserve of conventional, human-piloted aircraft for the air force will always be necessary to hedge against the possibility of drone command signals being hijacked or outright blocked by a sophisticated opponent.

@43: The way language works is that when we use words to convey meaning, we have to use words roughly in accordance with their commonly-accepted meaning. A blast wave being concentrated by a confining space is NOT 'hydrostatic shock'. That term instead refers to the propagation of a pressure wave through the circulatory system of a gunshot victim, causing injury remote from the site of the wound.

@45: The MOAB does NOT penetrate. The MOAB is explicitly an air-burst weapon, as seen in the acronym. It is useful against fortifications in cave systems only because you can drop one on the cave mouth and the blast wave will be channeled into its depths. This is not true of man-made bunkers, which tend to have much smaller entrances blocked at intervals with heavy doors. There is a very big difference between a munition being useful inside a bunker and it being a bunker-buster, and that difference is getting it in there.
Neither is the MOAB a thermobaric explosive; it has its own oxidizer included rather than relying on the oxygen of the air. For crying out loud, its warhead is made of H-6, which is used in torpedoes, sea mines, and other underwater explosives! That is NOT what a thermobaric weapon is made of!

I can't believe we're even having this idiotic discussion with you. If you want to be taken seriously, stop throwing out false claims and misusing well-defined terms. Fuck sake.

A better question is why do we still have Marines?