Sounds like somebody at USAF Space Command wants a promotion.
This seems decades late. The USAF has no manned space capability. The U.S. Government once owned the Space Shuttles. They had astronauts. The USAF once had a Space School. That's all gone. Now, they just buy commercial rocket launches.
If anything, the reorganization the USAF needs is to lose the close air support mission, and the A-10 Warthogs, to the Army. The USAF keeps trying to kill off the Warthog, and doesn't want to get involved with smaller fixed-wing aircraft for close air support. The Army needs that low-level aerial firepower. They need it from affordable aircraft they can use in quantity, not rare, overpriced F-35s. There's an old deal between the Army and the USAF, the "Key West Agreement", that the Army would stay out of fixed-wing aviation and only use helicopters. That needs to be looked at again.
(The Marines have their own air, and it works out well for them. Marine air and ground forces tend to coordinate better than USAF/Army combos.)
I imagine that the not-too-distant future of close air support is drones with guns and rockets. These could potentially be operated by soldiers on or near the front lines. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine a soldier with a tablet tapping on things for the drone to shoot at.
Not needing a pilot could make them smaller, cheaper, and able to enter (and remain in) dangerous areas in a way a helicopter or plane never could.
This seems like something the Army could operate themselves.
The organization of the US military really should be mission-based rather than some weird afoot-afloat-aloft separation.
There's no particular reason why air superiority fighters, long range bombers, aerial refueling tankers, and airdrop cargo haulers should all be under the same command just because they all fly. Clearly, two of those are for logistics, and two are for force projection.
I suspect that the existence of the military academies don't help in that respect.
Interesting how this mirrors the debate in many corporations between functional organization (eng/sales/UX/marketing/accounting/HR) vs. product organization (Search/Ads/Chrome/Android/GMail/etc.) The military is organized functionally. Recently, basically every major company other than Apple has found that product organization yields better results, because each individual product can better respond to competitive threats in their market.
Makes me wonder if the U.S. military is the next big institution to be "disrupted" by thousands of tiny startups, we just don't realize it because fortunately, everyone would rather have peace.
> Recently, basically every major company other than Apple has found that product organization yields better results, because each individual product can better respond to competitive threats in their market.
Do you have a source for that? Not because I'm challenging you, but because I'd like to read more on it.
I'm perhaps overselling product organization as having "won" - the choice remains controversial, and the a16z article even explicitly says that it's basically a "pick your poison" situation where whichever choice you make will have drawbacks. But the general principle remains that product organization leads to more nimble products, while functional organization leads to more efficient functions. Perhaps the military's functional organization is a function (no pun intended) of it being peacetime, and the primary goal of Congress being to control costs.
You mean instead of giving the much need financing to the talent that already exists in the thousands of branches that already exist in the US government they are instead pushing for creating a whole new group of administrators who will oversee the 10-20% of the staff who are the actual nerds who output the real value the agency was originally designed to do?
If recent history has taught us anything is that the real issue is those nerds need extensive micro-management and predefined processes designed by committee (/s), and given how most of those nerds are hired through 3rd party contractors these days for 5x the cost, you also need thousands of people to oversee and manage the extensive contracts used to hire them and push out the ever expanding list of project requirements and legal rules to these companies.
It's a perfect recipe for success. Why else would it be repeatedly used?
The fact administrators see the solution to every problem is hiring MORE administrators (who often just happen to be companies staffed by their old friends from school) it's really not that surprising that western governments around the world (not just the US) are consistently failing to accomplish the most basic government projects which were previously a dime-a-dozen at comparable rates of private markets before the explosion of the size of government in the 1950/60s and it became standard practice for everything to cost 10x as much and/or result in endless delays.
It's what happens when administrators take over. Aka the Iron Rule of Bureaucracy. When any failures happen instead of firing these people or holding them responsible, we turn to them to solve the problem, which always turns out to mean either hiring more people just like them or throwing billions more into the same agencies/contracts:
According to the current mainstream narrative only greedy fiscal conservatives who hate governments are the ones who take issue with this approach. So my critiques are largely just going to be pigeonholed into a controversial political ideology rather than being a blatantly obvious issue with modern government agencies across the western world.
The existing systems need to be broken down, critiqued, and lessons should be actually learned. Just throwing more people/money/power at the problem doesn't help solve it. Unless your goal is merely resource extraction and maintaining the appearance of doing something rather than actually solving problems.
From what I have seen anecdotally, quite a lot of military jobs exist for the sole purpose of taking veterans from active duty retirement age, when they become no longer directly useful to the chain of command, out to civilian retirement age, between 60 and 70 years old. Sometimes they are employed gainfully; other times it amounts to a sinecure.
So bona-fide government jobs are created for those folks, who oversee, advise, or consult for all those private-sector companies that work mostly on government defense contracts. Those are the very people who end up telling a bunch of undisciplined geeks how they should be doing their jobs. All those TPS report cover sheets go to them. They have to work really hard to ensure that nobody is ripping off the government, in exactly the same way you have to watch your waiter at the diner like a hawk, to make sure they don't give you fewer french fries than you are entitled to, or put ketchup on your hot dog, or something. They can't do the job, but they pretend like they can make someone else do the job better, mostly by staring at them without blinking, and making the "I'm watching you, buddy" hand gesture.
The reality is that the geeks should be the ones hired directly into the government jobs, but they can't get them, due to hiring preference points. And also, because the pay scales are locked, and cannot compete in the open market.
This is a fall in line bill. In my office on Capitol Hill that was our name for legislation that leadership has agreed to, is all ready to go, and there's little to argue that will go anywhere so...just fall in line. Interesting footnote to history: The Republican leadership, from 94 - 06, steamrolled over everyone with legislation. When the Democrats took over from 2006 - 2010, they turned the tides and began ramming bills through without giving much, if any, time to read and analyze. A Republican pledge after they won big in 2010 was to mandate posting of a bill to the web three days prior to debate on the Floor, and other "time to read" ideas. I guess we've come full circle to Republicans preventing Democrats from reading. I'm afraid to see what the Democrats do when they eventually take over; the cycle of things.
Why, in this day and age, is the US military organized along a structure (Army, Navy/Marines) based on the Elizabethan English military organization (I recognize the USAF was spilt off to avoid a battle between Army and Navy)? For that matter why are dress uniforms based on obsolete English gentlemen's dress?
A bit of rethink based on objective/mission seems well overdue. The 1940s reorganization that lead to the Department of Defense papered over the structural problems.
> Why, in this day and age, is the US military organized along a structure (Army, Navy/Marines) based on the Elizabethan English military organization (I recognize the USAF was spilt off to avoid a battle between Army and Navy)?
Because you make incremental changes (and even then, only based a on clear need, nor rejecting old because it's old) to critical systems unless you have a clear, compelling need justifying a specific more-radical change.
Ground-up replacement based on speculative improvement and theorized benefits is a common recipe for failure.
It's a fairly basic idea in software, but it applies for other kinds of systems as well (in many cases moreso; you can build a ground-up replacement for software on parallel while maintaining the legacy system to mitigate risk and only cutover when the replacement is proven to work; you can't practically build a complete replacement national military in parallel.)
> Why, in this day and age, is the US military organized along a structure (Army, Navy/Marines) based on the Elizabethan English military organization (I recognize the USAF was spilt off to avoid a battle between Army and Navy)?
The USAF was actually split off largely due to the efforts of the bomber mafia to promulgate strategic bombing as a useful method of war. The problem is that strategic bombing doesn't work, and never has, which kind of blunts the purpose of the USAF except as providing largely tactical support for the Army and Marines (note that the Navy runs their own carrier planes, and the Army and Marines also have their own close air support wings).
It's also disingenuous to suggest that the US military is largely based on Elizabethan military terms. The entire concept of the staff system only dates back to roughly Napoleonic Wars (and is most associated with the effective Prussian military). But even beyond that, the US military is largely organized in operational terms under unified (cross-service) commands based on geographical theater, a system that originates in WWII and is pretty much unique to the US (although, to be fair, it's the only country that has the need to work under such a system; however, similar concepts like the Joint Chiefs of Staff don't seem to be particularly widespread in the world).
Yes, the French Levée and the Prussian general staff were modernizing shocks to the system, no question.
But the idea of a separate Navy and Army really go back to a pre-Enlightenment period when the Navy was centrally financed by the crown (and piracy) while the armies were raised territorially. Hence the Navy has aircraft and ground troops while the army has aircraft and watercraft. and, of course turf.
It's also a ridiculous abstraction when you try to build a single "cross-corps" aircraft (F35) and see each service claiming different service-specific requirements when really you do indeed have different mission requirements, some of which are common to multiple services.
I certainly understand the value of incrementalism but I consider it absurd that Cromwell would recognize the structure of today's US military even though its missions would be practically inconceivable to him.
> For that matter why are dress uniforms based on obsolete English gentlemen's dress?
This is getting way off topic, but can you give an example? The Navy officer service-dress blue uniform is basically a business suit with gold-colored buttons and gold sleeve stripes; it's been pretty much the same for probably a century now. [0]
Indeed, service dress and full dress are essentially frozen in the same time as the business suit. Essentially we are still under the influence of the Prince Regent's buddy Beau Brummell. At least the necktie ("cravat") has an actual military origin. But the split into three dress uniforms still apes ancient sumptuary laws and the (thankfully obsoleted) structure of officers coming from the noble and gentle classes and the infantry/sergeants from the lower classes.
Then again the whole white wedding / white (instead of seed) cake weddings come from Victoria.
But it cracks me up to see, say, North Korean generals in uniforms that really just look like Regency clothing!
I think the reference is to the Formal Dress and Dinner Dress Blue/White Jacket uniforms, not the less formal Dinner Dress Blue/White or service dress uniforms.
OK, now I totally want to go to what ever academy they open up for this branch and officially become a Space Cadet! :-)
More seriously, this isn't much different that the Army Air Corps becoming the Air Force, logistically it opens up a branch that can have strategies and priorities that are not constrained by its original branch (the original Air Corps was constantly arguing with the Army over what was more important, tanks or airplanes, for example). It also opens up a bunch of jokes for late night comedians like "Look, it is a new customer for the F35 Joint Strike Fighter, now its required to operate in a vacuum!"
> The Senate Armed Services Committee isn’t calling for a Space Force in its version of the NDAA; and is instead stressing the importance of cyber warfare and a more conservative approach to spending.
Meetings and sub-committee hearings on Space Command... but no time for the same on healthcare... Not trying to start a discussion, just noting the irony.
This seems weird and premature. We will probably need a "Space Corps" eventually, but doing it now when the technology is still in its infancy, instead of being able to leverage the manpower of an existing service, seems unhelpful. Making the Air Force its own thing, instead of part of the Army, was a good decision in 1945 but would've been dumb in 1912 too.
Simple Prisoner's Dilemma - you know that the other nations have signed a treaty against militarizing space, but why would you take anyone else at their word?
The answer is, you don't - you try as hard to militarize the hell out of space before anyone else, because you assume everyone else is doing the same.
The other answer is like the Nuclear Non-proliferation treaty and START I,II. Intrusive verification by international bodies with penalties for non-compliance. It hasn't been perfect, but so far the world hasn't ended.
Sorry by START II, I meant New Start. START II was cancelled before it went into effect in retaliation for George W. Bush cancelling the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) treaty.
Actually, I think they should go the opposite way: they should eliminate the Air Force, and make it part of the Army again. The AF was split off because of the Cold War, and is just a relic of that time. No other modern military force has a separate "air force", because having it separate only complicates things when conducting a conventional ground war. For a while the Air Force even thought they were going to make the Navy obsolete, because they wanted to rely on ICBMs and long-range bombers for everything.
> No other modern military force has a separate "air force", because having it separate only complicates things when conducting a conventional ground war.
Besides the US: Turkey, Syria, Russia, Israel all off the top of my head have air force and ground army (along with, at least, a navy) separate under one "Armed Forces" command.
What modern air forces operate as part of the army, rather than separately (as most navies do)?
That really doesn't sound any different than the US, it's just different naming. In the US, all four services are branches within the "Department of Defense". So US DOD = China PLA.
To properly compare, you need to look at whether the air force has the same level of autonomy from the ground army as the navy does. If it does, it's just like the US. If not, it's not.
But, from one perspective, that doesn't mean they don't have an Air Force as a top level service, it just means the PLA is the aggregate (like “Armed Forces” of many other countries) under which the top-level services exist.
> No other modern military force has a separate "air force"
The UK has the same high level structure as the US (A “Naval Service” including Navy and Marines, an Army, and an Air Force.)
It's a fairly common structure.
The Chinese PLA actually has more services (Ground Force, Air Force, Rocket Force, Navy, Strategic Support Force.)
There probably are modern militaries where one of the top-level divisions isn't something like an air Force, but they aren't dominant among modern, large-scale forces.
I'm guessing that the sci-fi practice was due to the sociological similarities between spacecraft crews and ship crews on isolated, long-term voyages. At present, the US Air Force has been responsible for most high-tech concerns including cyber warfare and space warfare, so it probably was the least organizationally disruptive to bring the new branch in alongside the AF.
plug for project rho! They have some discussion of sci-fi military organization (and nine thousand other things, seriously, it's the TV Tropes of sci-fi)
I always thought that SG being an air force show was unrealistic once the USN RN etc found out "wait there are real star ships" they would want to take over.
Let alone the CIA / SAD / SIS wanting to run intelligence opps of world
USAF actually consulted a lot on the show and later in the series I believe the Stargate operation becomes a joint international civilian-military effort.
Militarization of space notwithstanding, this could be great news for the spaceflight industry as a whole. A lot more contracts handed out for launches and orbital infrastructure, as well as "normalizing" space travel would encourage investment in an industry that has been mostly dominated (and still is) by government entities.
The bill would order the Defense Department to establish the
new corps by January 2019. It would be a distinct military
service within the Department of the Air Force, in much the
same way the Marine Corps operates as a service within the
Department of the Navy. The Secretary of the Air Force would
oversee both the Air Force and the Space Corps, but the new
chief of staff of the Space Corps would be a new four-position,
co-equal with the chief of staff of the Air Force. DoD would
have to deliver reports to Congress in both March and August
of next year on the details of how it plans to set up the new
service.
if i had to guess, i'd guess this is 'out of' lobbying by big govt contractors who want another budget pool, and MIL insiders pushing for this.
Right now airforce satellites for star-wars type initiatives and airforce refueling tankers all fall under the same budget, while serving very different organizational needs. conversely this is why 'innovation' arms/skunkworks get created... because the mothership moves too slow and has too many competing priorities and budgets to innovate and get out of its own way.
This seems decades late. The USAF has no manned space capability. The U.S. Government once owned the Space Shuttles. They had astronauts. The USAF once had a Space School. That's all gone. Now, they just buy commercial rocket launches.
If anything, the reorganization the USAF needs is to lose the close air support mission, and the A-10 Warthogs, to the Army. The USAF keeps trying to kill off the Warthog, and doesn't want to get involved with smaller fixed-wing aircraft for close air support. The Army needs that low-level aerial firepower. They need it from affordable aircraft they can use in quantity, not rare, overpriced F-35s. There's an old deal between the Army and the USAF, the "Key West Agreement", that the Army would stay out of fixed-wing aviation and only use helicopters. That needs to be looked at again.
(The Marines have their own air, and it works out well for them. Marine air and ground forces tend to coordinate better than USAF/Army combos.)