This Is Why People Don’t Trust the Air Force With Air Power

Meh. It's sad how many "military" blogs get attention by slamming the military. Controversy sells, even if you have to manufacture it.
 
"Ground the Air Force"
by Robert Farley December 18, 2013

Source:
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140574/robert-farley/ground-the-air-force

The United States needs air power, but it does not need an air force.

In fact, it never really did. The U.S. Air Force, founded in 1947, was the product of a decades-long campaign by aviation enthusiasts inside the U.S. Army. These advocates argued that air power could not achieve its promise under the leadership of ground commanders. With memories of the great bombing campaigns of World War II still fresh and a possible confrontation with the Soviets looming, the nation’s would-be cold warriors determined that the age of air power was upon them. But it wasn’t. Advocates of an independent air force had misinterpreted the lessons of World War II to draw faulty conclusions about air power’s future.

Their mistake produced a myriad of problems. Modern warfare almost invariably demands close cooperation across air and surface units. In naval operations, all of these assets -- submarines, surface ships, and aircraft -- belong to the same service. In the case of the army and the air force, however, the component parts end up being divided -- or needlessly replicated -- by separate bureaucratic organizations, each with its own priorities. As a result, the services tend to plan operations and procure equipment based on their own needs rather than those of the military as a whole. When they ask lawmakers for funding, moreover, they tend to concentrate on missions that they believe they can accomplish on their own. Finally, during wars, the services often struggle to cooperate by scaling the bureaucratic walls they constructed in peacetime.

With the benefit of hindsight, the United States should fold the U.S. Air Force back into its two sibling services, the army and the navy. Done properly, such a reform could improve military readiness, cut mounting and unsustainable defense costs, and refocus the Pentagon on preparing for the fights of the future.

FAMILY FEUDING

More than anything else, the creation of the U.S. Air Force after World War II sowed conflict between the U.S. military services. The air force had (and continues to have) a particular preoccupation with autonomy. Its boosters argued that air power would realize its full potential only if liberated from the parochial attitudes of ground and naval officers, who did not appreciate the ability of independent air operations to win wars.

Supporters of the air force used the relatively new concept of strategic bombing to buttress their case. Strategic air power focuses on destroying enemy cities and infrastructure to pre-empt long, high-casualty land campaigns. In the early stages of World War II, air power devotees argued that strategic bombing of the German homeland would make it unnecessary to open a second front in France. In the end, the punishing bombings of cities such as Dresden killed nearly half a million civilians but failed to compel a German surrender. Even so, the army air force managed to trade on the notion that its bombing campaign had been decisive and that future, possibly nuclear, warfare would require a bomber force entirely unfettered from army commanders on the ground. The widespread acceptance of this idea ultimately led to the air force’s independence.

The creation of the force concluded one bureaucratic battle but spawned many more. The new service immediately squabbled with its older siblings, helping to kill the navy’s first super-carrier, the U.S.S. United States, in a dispute over the most effective way to deliver nuclear weapons. The air force, however, managed to win funding for the B-36 Peacemaker heavy bomber, a slow-moving behemoth that never saw combat and was abandoned less than a decade later. The first 20 years of air force independence saw many more bitter conflicts with the army over responsibilities for transport, helicopters, and close air support.

The battles were most pronounced during the war in Vietnam. Initially, the air force had been bullish on its prospects for beating North Vietnam into submission through a bombing campaign. But the air force soon discovered that bombing was not enough to win, and that it lacked the appropriate training and equipment for dogfights against a determined adversary. U.S. fighter aircraft, which were designed to hunt and kill large, slow Soviet bombers, couldn’t keep track of North Vietnam’s small, quick interceptor aircraft. The air force had made the mistake of thinking that any war worth fighting would inevitably escalate to a nuclear conflict. The navy, which still took conventional conflict seriously, did much better. For example, for every one of its air combat losses in the 1972 Linebacker operations, the air force shot down two North Vietnamese fighters. The navy, on the other hand, enjoyed a 6:1 ratio of kills to losses.

The situation improved after Vietnam, as the cult of the strategic bomber waned and air force officers looked more realistically toward the future. In 1991, the army and the air force collaborated brilliantly in the Gulf War to limit the Iraqi army’s mobility. Even victory, however, bred disagreement. Some within the air force argued that the ground campaign against Iraq had been unnecessary, and that precision bombing alone would have forced Saddam’s government to collapse. Meanwhile, the army maintained that the mobility and fighting spirit of the Iraqi army’s best units had survived the air campaign, necessitating their destruction through traditional armored maneuvers -- including the army’s famous “left hook” attack that met, and defeated, several Republican Guard and Iraqi army heavy divisions in the desert to the northwest of Kuwait. Later, air force boosters wildly overstated air power’s role in the complex ending of the Kosovo conflict.

In Afghanistan and Iraq, the army and the air force eventually performed well enough together, but neither conflict required flashy strategic air power. Instead, sophisticated air force bombers were relegated to such duties as striking small groups of Taliban insurgents -- a task later carried out by drones. Indeed, the Pentagon limited the air force to carrying out missions that its founders would have considered abhorrent, including reconnaissance and flying artillery. And as the demands of these conflicts recede, the partnership will probably unravel once again, with peacetime service prerogatives returning to the fore.

PIVOT POTENTIAL

Despite its name, the U.S. Air Force has never held a monopoly on American air power. In fact, the United States has at least five air forces -- the army, navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard aviation divisions and the air force (you could also count the air assets of the CIA). Thus the question of whether the air force should exist depends on the role air power will play in the future -- as a decisive force in its own right, or as a means of supporting other forms of military force.

At least for the foreseeable future, the United States is likely to keep its military focused on two major missions: fighting international terrorism and balancing Chinese military power in eastern Asia. Both aims will require air power to play a supporting role in operations on land and sea. Joint operations sound appealing and workable in theory, but parochial concerns continue to guide the air force’s procurement and doctrine in practice. Its leaders still conceive of air power as an independent, decisive force, and will cling to that vision in the face of any efforts to push the services into closer partnership.

Abolishing the air force looks, at least in the short term, unlikely. Creating the air force required backing from powerful political coalitions in the public and the uniformed military. Although many in the Pentagon and Congress are concerned about the dwindling defense budget and the risks of strategic drift, they have yet to seize on the idea of abolishing the air force as a potential solution to either problem. Folding 690,000 personnel and 5,500 aircraft into the other services would also represent a tremendous bureaucratic and logistical challenge.

Nevertheless, the prospects for reform in the medium and long term are not altogether bad. It would undoubtedly be difficult to reintegrate the air force into the other two services. But the current security system is in need of reform in other areas, too, for it reflects a series of post-9/11 kludges on the existing Cold War bureaucracy. There are good reasons to consider such a wide-ranging reorganization, given the current economic situation of the United States and the emergence of complex strategic threats in the Middle East and eastern Asia.

And now is the right time. The United States is in the midst of a strategic shift away from traditional priorities in Europe and the Middle East toward new ones in the Pacific Rim, a move that will force the navy and the air force to work more closely. That the public has recently become even more disenchanted with the national security bureaucracy suggests that proposals for significant reforms, including reorganizing the air force, might meet less political resistance than they have in the past. And although Republicans and Democrats are loath to work together, most everyone knows that defense spending is unsustainable at its current levels. To be sure, the upfront cost of dissolving the air force into the army and navy would be immense. But it could very well save billions in procurement and administrative costs down the road, as projects such as the Next Generation Bomber come under greater scrutiny.

Moreover, although such major reforms to the national security sector are rare, they are far from unprecedented. The National Security Act of 1947 completely reorganized the security bureaucracy after World War II. The Goldwater Nichols Act of 1986 improved the incentives for joint preparation, changed the roles of the service chiefs of staff, and established a new set of organizational priorities for the armed forces. Finally, the reforms of the post-9/11 era, halting and incomplete as they were, nevertheless created a new executive department (Homeland Security) and redistributed a vast number of key responsibilities.

Taking on the air force would likely prove too politically costly for an American president to attempt anytime soon. It may be possible, however, to reduce the air force’s role in some critical missions without upsetting the larger Pentagon system. For example, funding the next generation of the so-called nuclear triad -- land-based missiles, aerial bombers, and submarine-launched missiles -- will pose a tremendous budgetary challenge. During the Cold War, the triad provided a strong nuclear deterrent, as destroying all three legs in a first strike would have been nearly impossible. But maintaining the triad will require huge investments in each of its three legs, all of which are now growing old. Next-generation heavy bombers could cost upward of $800 million apiece, and new SSBN-X nuclear submarines would probably cost around $6 billion to $8 billion each.

Historically, the triad has been bound up in inter-service politics, with the air force taking up ballistic missiles only to prevent the army and navy from monopolizing them. With all three legs of the triad aging, and without a strong strategic rationale for maintaining all three, the Pentagon should give some consideration to retiring the bomber and land-based missile elements. This need not be a controversial undertaking: the air force’s interest in the nuclear mission has diminished over the years, and readiness and professionalism in the nuclear force have consequently declined. Since the United States no longer faces tens of thousands of Soviet nuclear warheads, the shift to a post–Cold War nuclear force structure is long overdue.

Similarly, analysts should study the feasibility of shifting particular air force responsibilities, such as those in outer space, to the other services. Given that the army and navy already fly huge numbers of drones, relieving the air force of the burden of operating unmanned vehicles could open space for technological and tactical innovation.

So there are two possible futures. In one, the air force maintains its independence, still clinging to the idea that air power can win wars on its own, but tighter budgets would exacerbate destructive conflicts between the navy and the army. In the other, the air force abandons the dream of having its own unique strategic value in favor of close cooperation with and support for the other two services. The process of eliminating the air force would be slow and halting. But the United States has enacted reform of this scale in the past, and there is no reason it cannot do so in the future.
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Did anyone take the time to read it?


I can see some good arguments for integrating air force assets into the army, particularly given the likely future engagements the US faces. Its not "anti-military" to argue a different way of structuring the armed forces.
 
"Off Target Disbanding the Air Force Would Be a Huge Blunder"
by Robert S. Spalding III
January 8, 2014

Source:
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140636/robert-s-spalding-iii/off-target

Robert Farley (“Ground the Air Force,” December 19, 2013) is so far wide of the mark that he brings to mind the difference between the miss-by-a-mile bombs of World War II and the precision-guided bombs of today that fly through windows. The defense establishment is certainly in need of new ideas. But getting rid of the U.S. Air Force will do nothing to make the Pentagon more efficient or effective. In fact, such a move would do grave damage to our national security.

Farley argues that Pentagon planners pushed for an independent air force because they had “misinterpreted the lessons of World War II” to conclude that strategic bombing -- massive air raids on enemy cities -- represented the future of warfare. But military leaders favored an independent air force because of what they had learned from the North African campaign: When ground commanders controlled aircraft, the results were disastrous. As Colonel F. Randall Starbuck writes in Air Power in North Africa, 1942–43: “One example, relayed by General 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.”

The problems in North Africa were so significant that U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt actually revamped the chain of command at the Casablanca Conference in 1943, just as the Allies agreed to ramp up its bombing campaign against German cities. U.S. General Carl “Tooey” Spaatz became commander of all air forces in North Africa, charged with carrying out two missions that still belong to the U.S. Air Force: defeating enemy air forces and supporting ground campaigns. After the change in command structure, the German military leader Erwin Rommel noted: “Hammer-blow air attacks . . . gave an impressive picture of the strength and striking power of the Allied air force.” The Pentagon created the air force primarily to correct past failures, not, as Farley claims, based on “faulty conclusions about air power’s future.”

Farley criticizes the U.S. Air Force for waging bureaucratic battles against its sister services. But those battles were inevitable as the nation turned toward a Cold War strategy. In spite of the country’s war weariness in the aftermath of World War II, the newly formed air force grew quickly -- and for good reason. U.S. President Harry Truman, who staunchly opposed big military budgets, sought an inexpensive path to countering Soviet aggression and deterring a nuclear confrontation. He concluded that nuclear bombers provided the most cost-effective means of doing so. Even if deterrence failed, air power could blunt a conventional Soviet attack on Western Europe. Indeed, air power became a crucial component of U.S. power during and after the Cold War. Since 1953, no U.S. soldier has died from an enemy air attack. Does it really matter, then, that increases in air force budgets left the other services feeling bruised?



Farley also claims that the U.S. Air Force’s performance in Vietnam laid bare the ineffectiveness of strategic bombing. Yet it was the force’s strategic bombing campaign against North Vietnam that brought the Viet Cong back to the negotiating table. Farley also glosses over air force successes in Kosovo, which because no U.S. ground troops were involved, demonstrated the immense value of air power in the post–Cold War era. Although some analysts argue that Kosovar fighters were a de facto ground force, those fighters would not have survived without help from the air. Once the air campaign focused on hitting regime targets, air power alone created the conditions that persuaded Serbia to negotiate. That does not mean that air power is sufficient to win every war. But in Kosovo, it was.

Farley believes that the United States would be better off without the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and bomber legs of the nuclear triad. This has been a frequent argument since the end of the Cold War. Some believe that when the Soviet Union dissolved, the threat of nuclear weapons ceased. This assertion neglects the fact that China and Russia are both modernizing their arsenals. In fact, Russia intends to rely heavily on its nuclear arsenal for future self-defense.

Farley claims that he wants the U.S. Department of Defense to save money by eliminating the air force’s two legs of the nuclear triad but evidently does not realize that they cost less than three percent of the overall DoD budget. Neglecting cost, the bombers provide the only visible demonstration of U.S. will. This fact necessitated the use of B-2s to show resolve when North Korea was threatening nuclear attacks on the United States earlier this year. Furthermore, ICBMs are the United States’ most cost-effective nuclear deterrent and provide the most strategic stability.

Farley’s recommendation for the other services to assume responsibility for space and remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) shows a profound misunderstanding of current U.S. Air Force capabilities. While RPAs get the most attention, the air force’s real contribution is behind the scenes: It has built an enormous worldwide collection and fusion network. The air force fuses and analyzes terabytes of data each day to provide actionable information to the warfighter. Its relentless commitment to speeding the “find, fix, track, target, engage, assess” process means that there is no service better postured to manage this global kill chain.

Farley’s analysis also fails to properly contend with the future. U.S. President Barack Obama’s commitment to a pivot toward the Pacific requires some capabilities that only the U.S. Air Force provides; its global focus makes it supremely suited to deal with the vast distances in the Pacific region. Massing troops in such a vast area takes time. The air force can do it in hours.

Farley concludes his article by arguing that the air force has become an unnecessary anachronism. Yet it has built the most sophisticated worldwide network for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance in the world, quickly ramping up to more than 60 around-the-clock Predator/Reaper drone patrols, all to support troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. Since the conflict in Kosovo, U.S. soldiers and Marines on the ground have come to rely on air force eyes overhead at all times. Troops in combat can expect their calls to be answered in minutes if not seconds. Air force medical evacuation teams are able to reach critically injured troops within a “golden hour.”

Finally, the air force also plays a central role in maintaining some of the nation’s most critical infrastructure and most basic military capabilities. Every 90 seconds, an air force plane takes off to deliver cargo somewhere in the world. Air force satellites keep U.S. forces alerted to everything from the weather to nuclear detonations. Most important, the air force, unlike the other services, can strike any target on earth within a matter of hours or minutes depending on the location. The air force provides precise command and control over all of these activities -- 24 hours a day, seven days a week. No other nation possesses such capabilities. In short, air power provides the United States with an irreplaceable asymmetric advantage over its foes, and an independent air force is the key to maintaining it.
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"The Drone War"
By Rebecca Grant
Contributing Editor
July 2007

Source:
http://www.airforcemag.com/MagazineArchive/Pages/2007/July%202007/0707drone.aspx

SAF is locked in a battle with the other services over the management and operation of unmanned vehicles.

In the Global War on Terrorism, Air Force Predators and other unmanned aerial vehicles are constantly in action. They have become principal providers of critical intelligence-surveillance-reconnaissance data and have played a combat role, too. Now, Washington is in the grip of an unusually nasty and public war over who will have responsibility for medium- and high-altitude UAVs.

Gen. T. Michael Moseley, Air Force Chief of Staff, touched off the conflict on March 5 by distributing a memo to Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, the Chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the service Chiefs, and all the theater combatant commanders. (See “Editorial: A Better UAV Flight Plan,” April, p. 2.)

The memo proposed that the Air Force take over as executive agent for all UAVs designed to operate at or above 3,500 feet. If approved, the move would give USAF significant control over the development, planning, funding, and operational concepts for unmanned aircraft, defensewide.

Army Brig. Gen. Stephen D. Mundt, director of aviation for the Army’s deputy chief of staff for operations and plans, fired the opening shots in an interview with Defense Daily. “We absolutely disagree, and every other service does, too, and the Joint Staff does as well,” Mundt said.
“Someone explain to me when a line in the sky became a service core competencies [sic]. My helicopters fly above 3,500 feet,” Mundt continued. “That does not mean they belong to the Air Force.”

Air Force Brig. Gen. Jan-Marc Jouas, commander of the Air Intelligence Agency, shot back in a March 28 service commentary. Mundt “recently disparaged” the Air Force’s efforts to improve ISR and UAV capabilities, Jouas wrote. “Mundt’s caustic comments, reminiscent of an era prior to the maturation of jointness and service interdependence, would have been better aimed at reducing competing UAV programs and mission redundancies.”
Mundt described the Air Force plan thusly: “You give me the responsibility for everything above 3,500 feet, I’ll sign up for a $15 billion program and cover everything that needs to be done.” Mundt added, “The fact is, they can’t.”

“A lot of us were just flat caught off guard,” claimed Mundt.
“This issue is not a surprise,” said Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, Air Force intelligence director, in an interview with Air Force Magazine. “The Army and the Air Force have been talking about this subject over the last two years.”

Indeed, the Air Force two years ago had formally proposed that it be given UAV executive agency, but the Joint Staff shot down the idea at that time. (See “Washington Watch: The UAV Skirmishes,” June 2005, p. 11.)

In his controversial memo, Moseley proposed a plan to increase the interdependence of medium- and high-altitude UAVs “beginning with establishment of the Air Force as executive agent (EA) for them.” The proposal encompassed five primary ISR platforms: USAF’s MQ-1 Predator, RQ-4 Global Hawk, and MQ-9 Reaper; the Army’s MQ-1C Warrior; and the Navy’s Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) system. Smaller UAVs designed to operate with units and at lower altitudes were not part of the proposal.

Moseley proclaimed a need for a joint, theaterwide ISR strategy for everything flying above 3,500 feet. High on the list of benefits was a potential savings of around $1.7 billion to be gleaned from executive agency consolidation of the various programs.
End the “Stovepipes”
“It is reasonable to expect that the present [medium- and high-altitude] UAV investment budget could be reduced perhaps by up to 10 percent,” stated an Air Force fact sheet. “DOD cannot afford the inefficiencies that result from individual service UAV stovepipes.” (The word “stovepipe,” a pejorative term, refers to an artificial walling off of an activity so as to prevent the involvement of others outside of the organization.)

Of specific interest to the Air Force is a potential merger of the closely related Air Force Predator and Army Warrior programs, and a similar consolidation of the Air Force Global Hawk and its Naval sibling, the BAMS. USAF’s plan would transfer procurement authority for all of these systems to the Air Force to save on costs, eliminate duplication, and direct investment to areas where it would be most useful.

Army objections stem from a belief that its systems need to be developed by ground force personnel (otherwise, they might not be suitable to ground force needs) and under tactical control of ground force commanders (otherwise, they might not be available at times when Army units need them).

The Air Force in recent years has been expanding its UAV capabilities. For example, it led the development of the Remotely Operated Video Enhanced Receiver, or ROVER, the popular laptop downlink system. Using this method and hardware, the Predator can push its video data down to battlefield airmen, special operators, and soldiers in the field.
To Moseley, “designating the Air Force as the EA for medium- and high-altitude UAVs is the step we can take now to increase combat effectiveness” worldwide.

“If I sound emotional about this, it’s because I believe there is a way to fight a joint and coalition fight much more effectively, much more efficiently, and afford these systems,” Moseley told a group of defense writers in April.
The Army’s Mundt countered with the case of the Army Shadow. Shadow is a light, tactical UAV with a range of some 75 miles. It is designed to give about four hours of coverage over a brigade’s full area of interest. Shadow shapes up as “the eyes and ears” of a commander in a tactical fight. It has a service ceiling of 16,000 feet. “Under their plan,” said Mundt, “I give them the Shadow, [and now] I have to put my request in and compete to get that same capability back, which is ludicrous,” Mundt fumed.

The institutional Air Force is, of course, not seeking to micromanage actual use of the UAVs; operational control would go to the air component commander at the combined air operations center in a combat theater, the best place to centrally coordinate and parcel out the capabilities. The air boss is usually, but not always, an Air Force officer, and he answers to the theater commander, not to service officials.
The Air Force believes that executive agency would provide a coordination benefit. “All UAVs operating above the designated coordinating altitude must have common, interoperable systems to facilitate ... safe and seamless operations,” explains an Air Force fact sheet on the subject. “As EA for MHA UAVs, the Air Force would be postured to integrate these requirements into the UAV programming and acquisition process at the outset.”

The Army immediately took the point in resisting the Air Force plan. Yet the first reactions from the Navy and Marine Corps were not warm, either. “I’ve seen the memorandum,” Adm. Michael G. Mullen, Chief of Naval Operations, said March 29. He suggested further discussion, adding, “As I read it, I’m not supportive.”
The JCS Chairman, Gen. Peter Pace (a Marine Corps officer), lent partial support. “It makes absolute good sense to me that things flying above 3,500 feet should be part of an ATO, air tasking order, so that there’s deconfliction of the airspace,” he told Washington reporters in April.

His support came with a caveat: Pace said that different armed forces would need different payloads on UAVs, so “we need to be careful not to override the needs of the troops on the ground by some kind of a generic package.”
After the initial furor, Moseley reopened the debate. Referring to some of the previous comments from members of other services, he raised the prospect that “what their staff says, or what some people say in an emotional moment, may not necessarily be what a service Chief thinks.” The real debate is about “meeting the joint land, maritime, special ops commanders’, [and] component commanders’ requirements,” Moseley went on. “This is no different [from] close air support.”

The heart of the issue is how to provide responsive ISR for a wide range of users. Here, the Air Force believes it has a compelling case for better authority.
Predator combat air patrol orbits have risen dramatically over the past several years. They doubled from six aircraft airborne at all times in 2001 to 12 in 2007, with a plan to reach 21 CAP orbits in 2010. Meanwhile, additional orbits are dedicated to special operations forces and to other government agencies, such as the CIA.

Lt. Gen. Michael W. Wooley, commander of Air Force Special Operations Command, noted in May that he has a requirement for 30 Predator orbits a day in the US Central Command area and that the military is “having a hard time” reaching half that number. The UAV resources are all badly stretched.
Deptula explained, “When you get into the medium- and high-altitude systems, like Predator, like Global Hawk, there are a finite number of systems that we have available today.”

Given this situation of scarcity, the big question comes down to this: Who will provide ISR to the Army’s tactical units? The Army says it should. The Warrior UAV, an enhanced Predator derivative, gives the Army an organic capability. Warrior could operate at altitudes up to 25,000 feet and remain airborne for as long as 36 hours. The Army wants to buy up to 132 of these extended range, multipurpose UAVs.
The problem is that the Army Warriors are available for tasking through the land component only. If this approach were taken to its logical conclusion, every division might own its medium-altitude UAVs for ISR and strike operations, but it would make none available to any other division. Warrior UAVs would deploy as part of a division’s equipment set, just like Stryker vehicles, and then rotate home with the rest of the force.

Thus, assigning medium-altitude UAVs such as Warrior to ground units takes those valuable platforms out of the pool for joint ISR and unmanned strike operations. “Part of the frustration now,” said Deptula, “is that not every unit on the ground gets Predator video all the time. That’s because of the rack and stack of the priorities.”
Don’t blame the Air Force—the problem lies with the joint system. The process for allocating Predator coverage begins with the joint combatant commander. “Every operational Predator that the Air Force has is currently assigned to Central Command,” said Deptula. The joint force commander, through the air commander, “divvies those up between ... major areas of operation, principally Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Needed: Central Allocation
Next, the joint task force commanders for Afghanistan and Iraq—both currently Army general officers—set priorities for UAV tasking, then hand orders down to the joint force air component commander for execution.
“The system we have allocates medium- and high-altitude UAVs to combatant commanders to execute, and it works very, very well,” Deptula said.

Deptula said the goal is “ensuring that small units have the most responsive ISR coverage that is physically possible.” And in that respect, Army ownership would make responsive assignment harder, not easier.
“Folks at organic levels, at small unit levels within the Army, want to have control of their own Predators, because of the information that it provides,” Deptula explained. Predator, however, does not cover a wide swath of the theater: It’s famous for its “soda-straw” view of the world, which is big on detail but narrow in aperture. Covering a dispersed battle area in detail takes a lot of assets.

Central allocation is the key. “Any particular small unit might only need the ability for a certain number of minutes [of coverage] out of every hour,” Deptula said. “But by virtue of the fact that the unit owns it, they’ll keep it occupied.”

One division might hoard its UAVs while another division had a greater need for that capability. Under JFACC control, commanders are able to better shift around the assets to meet combat needs.

Airspace management is another benefit of centralized control. The problem of collisions is growing steadily. Although most near-misses happen at low altitudes, where hordes of small UAVs are buzzing around, Wooley noted that he “loses sleep” over the prospect of “beak-to-beak” collisions between his SOF aircraft and unmanned aircraft. The mid- and high-altitude UAVs in question regularly operate in the airspace where AFSOC normally flies.
Today, only CENTCOM has the Predator in regular operation, but other combatant commanders want them, too.

The MQ-9 Reaper is of particular interest in Korea. Gen. Paul V. Hester, commander of Pacific Air Forces, has said he would like to base some of the UAVs on that heavily armed peninsula. In some scenarios, the Predator, Reaper, and other UAVs may go into action without ground forces. There is risk in limiting access to a major share of the nation’s medium- and high-altitude UAVs by locking them into the Army force structure.
Ground commanders will not back off from their need for responsive ISR, because it is central to current operations and to future force concepts. It may be up to the Air Force to demonstrate how UAV executive agency can save money and better deliver combat capability.

Deptula drew an analogy. “GPS [the Global Positioning System] is 100 percent owned and operated by the Air Force, yet its effect has become so ubiquitous that it’s depended upon by all the services without any concern. We can do that with medium- and high-altitude UAVs,” he testified in April.
At least two combatant commanders are strong supporters of the USAF plan. Adm. Timothy J. Keating, head of US Pacific Command, told Congress he believes the Air Force is the best choice to be executive agent for fielding and integrating and operating UAVs. A week later, the Air Force got support from Marine Corps Gen. James E. Cartwright, commander of US Strategic Command, who declared, “I would agree with Admiral Keating.”

“I know that people that wear this uniform may not agree with me,” said Cartwright, referring to other members of the Marine Corps, but Air Force executive agency, in his opinion, was “exactly right.”
Deep Roots
Chairman Pace left the door open, too. “It’s not a bad idea to take a look at all UAV operations to see who ought to be on the control stick, so to speak, for those operations. And if that’s a place where the Air Force could free up Army troops to do other things, it’s worth a discussion.” This willingness to discuss the issue was significant, for it was Pace, as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who signed the memo rejecting the Air Force’s previous EA proposal in 2005.

Today’s UAV imbroglio has its roots in problems left unsolved during the rush to develop multiple UAV systems in the 1990s. The US military began using UAVs routinely during conflicts in the Balkans. The Air Force led breakthrough developments in combat employment. “Remember, it’s Air Force initiatives and Air Force programs that brought us the laser on the UAV, that brought us the big sensor suite on the UAV, that brought us an armed UAV, that brought us the ROVER ground station,” said Moseley.
Critics in the 1990s usually urged the services to speed up. “Members of Congress and segments of the defense community have criticized DOD for its seeming inability to develop and field a tactical UAV,” charged the Congressional Budget Office in a 1998 report. And during NATO’s Kosovo war of 1999, USAF accelerated Predator systems to provide better target coordinates. The Balkan postwar stability operations saw the Army bring in Hunter UAVs, while Marine Corps Dragon Eyes saw action, too. Most complaints in those days centered on the need for more.

Soon after, the Joint Requirements Oversight Council began deconflicting some service programs. The JROC directed the Army and Navy to pursue tactical needs in different ways, a move leading the Army to field the Shadow. By then, as CBO pointed out, there were budding concerns about cost and control.
“When the demand for UAVs outstrips their availability,” said CBO, “the needs of tactical commanders may be sacrificed to those of higher echelons. That would probably not happen if the tactical commanders had their own, exclusive UAV systems.”

Unity was not on the agenda. The Army moved swiftly to expand and develop its own unmanned systems as its appetite for UAVs grew. Ground warriors took a traditional view of the upstart platforms. The main mission for UAVs would be surveillance. Brigade or division commanders would put UAVs over their unit’s operating area and move the UAVs forward with the ground maneuver unit. Army-owned UAVs could provide intelligence, spot targets, and feed damage assessments back to headquarters.
The notion of division-controlled surveillance was irresistible. Tests in Army wargames at the National Training Center made soldiers quick converts. “I will give up a tank battalion for a UAV company,” Maj. Gen. Paul J. Kern, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, said after a 1997 exercise.

By 2001, the Army was programming for multiple unmanned systems to support ground maneuver commanders. Experience in Afghanistan and Iraq further increased the Army’s appetite for the systems—and for ownership.
Major impetus for UAV development came from Operation Anaconda, an unsuccessful March 2002 Army-led operation staged in Afghanistan. In Anaconda, Army troops were inserted into high mountain landing zones only to be attacked by al Qaeda fighters based nearby. “If we had had more UAVs on landing zones prior to us going in there, we would not have had this problem,” noted Lt. Gen. Robert W. Noonan Jr., head of Army intelligence. “We don’t have enough organic UAVs,” Noonan told Defense Daily. “We feel very strongly that all of our brigades have got to have UAVs.”

“Infantry, scout, intelligence, aviation, artillery, maneuver, and even medical units benefit from the availability of UAVs,” claimed a 2004 brief prepared by the Association of the United States Army.
Then, in 2005, the Army set up a UAV Center of Excellence at Ft. Rucker, Ala., its goal being to “ensure that all Army UAV activities are cohesive, coordinated, and in support of current and future warfighting requirements,” Brig. Gen. Jeffrey J. Schloesser said at the time.

Airspace Problems
By that summer, a total of 574 UAVs of all types and from all services were operating in Afghanistan and Iraq. Most of them, however, were tactical systems belonging to the Army. (See “The Chart Page: That Giant Droning Sound,” March, p. 10.)
Airspace was becoming a problem. “We’ve already had two midair collisions between UAVs and other airplanes,” said Gen. John P. Jumper, then USAF Chief of Staff. “We have got to get our arms around this thing.”

The Air Force’s first executive agency request was made shortly thereafter. It drew immediate fire from the other armed services, and Jumper retreated a bit. Referring to executive agency, Jumper said, “Let’s not use that [term], but let’s get everybody under the same roof and make sure [we are] organizing these things so we can get them where they are needed.”
USAF’s request was denied on July 5, 2005. The Joint Staff instead ordered the creation of a Joint UAV Center of Excellence at Creech AFB, Nev. The Air Force moved to support the new joint center, which sprang up a few blocks from USAF’s UAV battlelab. (See “Smashing the UAV Stovepipe,” February 2006, p. 50.)

Things rocked along for the next two years, but, by 2007, looming operational and fiscal problems made it impossible to put off a search for a permanent solution. Specifically, it was the mounting overlap between Predator and its Warrior variant—both in operations and in acquisition plans—that forced the issue.
The Air Force is ready to keep taking the heat generated by the UAV imbroglio. The service is “dead serious about UAVs, and dead serious about delivering this effect to the joint force commander,” said Moseley. Still, more than two years after this matter became an urgent program, it is still unclear if or when the Air Force actually will take control of UAVs.
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sferrin said:
sublight is back said:
Well this certainly does not help their cause....
Click to expand...

And one could just as easily find cases of Army personel misbehaving. Maybe we should integrate the Army into the Air Force instead. There's a reason they were seperated out as their own service back in the day.
Click to expand...

I would argue the USAF since its inception as a separate service has been the most successful branch of the military as well as the most dominant branch globally with the Navy a close second. Of course this kind of includes Naval aviation when they operate in the same theater of operations.

IMHO the USAF has operated in threat environments like North Korea, Vietnam & Iraq that were heavily defended by anti-air assets 'resembling' peer competitors. The Army and Navy did not face the same threat environment in those conflicts.

I would even argue that the USAF should be expanded and de facto treated above the other services with higher funding.

These are my opinions only.
 
The article posted by Sublight is a follow-up to this article:

"Does America Have Any Naval Strategists Anymore?"
by James R. Holmes
January 12, 2014

Source:
http://thediplomat.com/2014/01/does-america-have-any-naval-strategists-anymore/

Mahan, we hardly knew ye. Does America still have any maritime strategists? Not so according to former U.S. State Department official and International Assessment and Strategy Center analyst John Tkacik.

Washington Free Beacon reporter Bill Gertz contacted Tkacik to comment on China’s new restrictions on foreign fishing in much of the South China Sea. What he says is largely exceptional, but Gertz closes by tossing out a morsel of red meat. “As China’s navy grows stronger — and the U.S. Navy shrinks — Washington’s options will run out in a few years,” notes Tkacik. “I don’t know that anyone in Washington, either at State or the Pentagon, is thinking this challenge out beyond a year,” he added. “It is America’s misfortune that it no longer has any real maritime strategists.”

Zounds!!

Chances are this was an off-the-cuff remark that Gertz reproduced to boost web traffic. It happens. Still, it is a serious charge, with a big enough truth quotient to justify parsing it in some detail. In one sense doing so is a trivial task. Tkacik makes a categorical statement, that this fine republic of ours is home to zero real maritime strategists. To rebut such a stark claim, all you have to so is produce one contrary example. I’d like to think I look at a real maritime strategist in the mirror each morning. (Otherwise, why confront this face made for radio??) Or, my department houses around forty strategists, some of a nautical bent. Outside Newport, there’s Paul Kennedy down at Yale, Bernard Cole at the National War College, Admiral Mike McDevitt at the Center for Naval Analyses, or Bryan McGrath and Seth Cropsey over at the Hudson Institute. Harumph.

But Tkacik’s words — particularly his reference to “State or the Pentagon” — suggest that what he’s really lamenting is a shortage of maritime strategists in positions of authority, not the extinction of scribblers in academe or the dark subterranean realm of think tanks. He’s also lamenting a lack of foresight — a cardinal virtue for any strategist or statesman, quoth Thucydides — within officialdom. Hence the crack about how few think downrange. This is, or may be, closer to the mark.

Being a bear of small brain, I would break the question down into its simplest components — “strategist” and “maritime” — and work from there. A strategist is someone accustomed to harnessing resources to accomplish big goals. It’s certainly true that the exigencies of naval service work against thinking above the level of tactics and hardware. Ships and aircraft are intricate creatures. Learning how to operate and maintain them takes time, and lots of it.

That’s why the U.S. Navy mantra is that sustained performance at sea is the way to ascend the ranks. Couple that outlook with career incentives and disincentives — promotions, awards, plum assignments — and you have a powerful bureaucratic signal warning officers to lock their gaze on their immediate surroundings, and on the immediate future. Strategic thought is an opportunity cost imposed by naval culture, as transcribed into bureaucratic routine, and indeed by the intensely technical nature of seafaring in the machine age.

Which is why officers attend the Naval War College or some other graduate school around midcareer. (In theory they attend such institutions twice. While it’s not uncommon to meet students with degrees in other subjects — I had a student with two MIT master’s degrees a couple of years back — I have yet to meet a dual NWC graduate.) By exposing them to the strategic theorists you encounter in places like, well, the Naval Diplomat, and by using those concepts to try to figure out what various historical figures did right and wrong in long-ago conflicts, we try to encode the habit of strategic thought in our graduates’ intellectual DNA.

Does this educational enterprise take? Tough to say. I hope Tkacik is wrong about the shortfall of strategic thought within the national-security community, but it’s tough to gauge one way or the other. As Clausewitz notes, schooling is only the beginning of education. All we can do in the schoolhouse is supply the basic concepts and try to fire students’ enthusiasm for their own lifelong self-education. We do the former and try to do the latter.

Graduates leave NWC with the tools, then, but education takes self-maintenance. One hopes there’s a copy of Clausewitz, Thucydides, and the rest of the theory bunch on every graduate’s bookshelf, and not just to provide ballast. Some officers and civilian officials really take to strategy, judging from the occasional email dispatch I receive from the field, or happenstance meeting with a former student. Many report putting their education to work. These are heartening datapoints. But again, naval officers have to fight against bureaucratic imperatives if they want to reach the highest ranks. It may take a cultural revolution to make the U.S. Navy as friendly to strategic thought as are, in my experience, the U.S. Army and Marines. What stimulus would it take to bring about such a revolution? I shudder to think. Something big and bad, most likely.

What about the maritime dimension of strategy? Sea power ranks at the bottom of Admiral Wylie’s four schools of strategic thought (land, sea, air, Maoist), best I can tell from classroom interactions. Part of this is because one of our two major sea-power theorists, Mahan, makes for tough reading. (As Mahan himself admitted, late in life.) Part of it is because we have so little time to spend exploring Mahan’s vast body of work. The curriculum scants the geopolitical dimension, focusing mainly on the basic attributes of sea powers and some of the big ideas, such as concentrating the fleet for action. Much escapes notice. Corbett’s work is better-written and explicitly Clausewitzian, so it finds favor in the classroom. All is not lost. But still.

The other factor is the geopolitical setting around us. Ground-force officers may be more receptive to strategic thought simply because they’ve been fighting for most if not all of their careers. Warfare is part of their daily lives. Thinking about it deeply is second nature. The popularity of counterinsurgent theory with our students, accordingly, can be no coincidence. That’s not to say the U.S. Navy has been twiddling its thumbs since 9/11. Just the opposite. In a real sense, the navy is always at war once at sea. Routine steaming differs little from wartime steaming, except that weaponeers load up exercise ordnance for the one and live ordnance for the other.

And yet, the navy fought its last fleet engagement seventy years ago this coming October, at Leyte. And the sea services have been enjoying a prolonged strategic holiday since the Soviet Navy evanesced two decades ago. The lack of a scary peer competitor tends to dull the strategic mind, making it easy to concentrate on the next inspection, exercise, or shipyard overhaul — mundane events of immediate consequence for one’s career. Keeping an engine or pump running demands attention now, whereas China and Iran are remote, abstract-seeming foci for finite mental energy. On which would you spend scarce time if forced to choose?

So John Tkacik is wrong to say America has no real maritime strategists. He overstates the problem. He’s right to say America needs to do more to nourish the right habits of mind within the naval service and its political overseers. Trotsky supposedly quipped that you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. The maritime world is an increasingly competitive, hardscrabble world. Our navy needs to think strategically about its return to history — before history comes a-knocking.
Click to expand...
 
bobbymike said:
sferrin said:
sublight is back said:
Well this certainly does not help their cause....
Click to expand...

And one could just as easily find cases of Army personel misbehaving. Maybe we should integrate the Army into the Air Force instead. There's a reason they were seperated out as their own service back in the day.
Click to expand...

I would argue the USAF since its inception as a separate service has been the most successful branch of the military as well as the most dominant branch globally with the Navy a close second. Of course this kind of includes Naval aviation when they operate in the same theater of operations.

IMHO the USAF has operated in threat environments like North Korea, Vietnam & Iraq that were heavily defended by anti-air assets 'resembling' peer competitors. The Army and Navy did not face the same threat environment in those conflicts.

I would even argue that the USAF should be expanded and de facto treated above the other services with higher funding.

These are my opinions only.
Click to expand...

Thank you for your opinion, however I take great umbrage with your comment “The Army and Navy did not face the same threat environment in those conflicts.” Having flown in combat and having lost some friends in those wars, I will opine that the Army and USMC have faced far more threat than the USAF in over a decade of war. One only has to look at the sortie generation rates to see who is flying combat more. To be sure that the INITIAL combat environment for those wars was indeed very tough, still the USN was in the fight every bit as much as the USAF from the start. Recall who “opened the door” at the beginning of Operation Desert Storm. In Kosovo Army Aviation intelligence aircraft were in stacks sweating SAM calls just like the other services. So frankly I find the assertion as inane as any call to divest with a specific air service.

Most of the pundits these days will tell you that while big wars are possible, they are by a great margin the least frequent. How do you propose to use the USAF to solve the Central African Republic debacle? How will the USAF deal with an extremist organization exerting control over a population in a city?

You will not find a senior soldier who has to think about how to fight wars who does not appreciate that in almost a century not one bomb has been dropped on them by an enemy aircraft. I certainly wish that the USAF as the premier air service in the world could by itself quail threats, however to date that has not been true.
 
Before anybody posts anything else, can we please not turn this into "Air Force vs. Navy no holds barred"?

Shrinking budgets are making people do desperate things. No need to personalize it.
 
sublight is back said:
I see where all this is going. There are "hit pieces" now on the Navy too....

Is this a preemptive PR move as both of those services vie for chunks of the budget pie?
Click to expand...

I am not sure what you mean by "hit pieces", Sublight. This article, and the one proceeding it, seem to be critical of the United States Navy's recent shift of emphasis to the littorals while the People's Republic of China has been building a blue-water navy. Are Navy commanders prepared for the possibility of a clash of fleets?
 
George Allegrezza said:
Ran across this high-voltage anti-USAF screed over on War is Boring. Thought you might enjoy it given the zeitgeist around here.


https://medium.com/war-is-boring/1a7733c66b52
Click to expand...

Isn't this article by Robert Farley, and the one proceeding, yet another salvo in the battle between the United States Air Force and the United States Army over the use of air power and the oft-stated criticism that the Air Force does not do enough to support ground commanders?
 
Sublight I agree that it would be nice not to go to defcon 1. I think I kept my disagreement civil. I also think that these initial "reconnaissance by fire" efforts will pail in comparison to the battles that are surely to come.
 
yasotay said:
bobbymike said:
sferrin said:
sublight is back said:
Well this certainly does not help their cause....
Click to expand...

And one could just as easily find cases of Army personel misbehaving. Maybe we should integrate the Army into the Air Force instead. There's a reason they were seperated out as their own service back in the day.
Click to expand...

I would argue the USAF since its inception as a separate service has been the most successful branch of the military as well as the most dominant branch globally with the Navy a close second. Of course this kind of includes Naval aviation when they operate in the same theater of operations.

IMHO the USAF has operated in threat environments like North Korea, Vietnam & Iraq that were heavily defended by anti-air assets 'resembling' peer competitors. The Army and Navy did not face the same threat environment in those conflicts. I would even argue that the USAF should be expanded and de facto treated above the other services with higher funding.

These are my opinions only.
Click to expand...

Thank you for your opinion, however I take great umbrage with your comment “The Army and Navy did not face the same threat environment in those conflicts.” Having flown in combat and having lost some friends in those wars, I will opine that the Army and USMC have faced far more threat than the USAF in over a decade of war. One only has to look at the sortie generation rates to see who is flying combat more. To be sure that the INITIAL combat environment for those wars was indeed very tough, still the USN was in the fight every bit as much as the USAF from the start. Recall who “opened the door” at the beginning of Operation Desert Storm. In Kosovo Army Aviation intelligence aircraft were in stacks sweating SAM calls just like the other services. So frankly I find the assertion as inane as any call to divest with a specific air service.

Most of the pundits these days will tell you that while big wars are possible, they are by a great margin the least frequent. How do you propose to use the USAF to solve the Central African Republic debacle? How will the USAF deal with an extremist organization exerting control over a population in a city?

You will not find a senior soldier who has to think about how to fight wars who does not appreciate that in almost a century not one bomb has been dropped on them by an enemy aircraft. I certainly wish that the USAF as the premier air service in the world could by itself quail threats, however to date that has not been true.
Click to expand...
I was not trying to disparage anyone or any service nor serivce members. That was why I was very specific in my wording 'threat enviroment 'closest' to a peer rival' and I did give kudos to naval aviation if you read my post fully. Notice how I did not include A-stan which had no anti-air capabilities. Many Army leaders talked about the how the occupation in Iraq and the war in A-stan was not what they trained for (massed armoured warfare), in effect, conceding my point (same as Vietnam) Korea was a more traditional form of warfare but still considerably different with massed 'human wave' attacks.


Each service faced 'threats' in general and many brave soldiers died I WAS NOT addressing that point and take umberage that you equate my comment with not resepcting the sacrifice of the men and women OF ALL services.

My point was that the anti-air environment faced by the air force was similar or a closer resemblance to what would have been faced over China or the USSR at the time. The Navy did not face hordes of submarines or Backfire bombers loaded with anti-ship missiles nor any legitimate threat to 'The Carriers' and the Army did not face mass assaults from divisions of T-55 or T-64 backed with hundreds of thousands of troops in IFVs like potentially in the Fulda Gap. For the Army, Iraq was a phenonminal success and was backed with a 30+day air bombardment that seriously degraded the Iraqi army.
 
Thank you for the clarification. I will accept that I shot from the hip.
 
yasotay said:
Thank you for the clarification. I will accept that I shot from the hip.
Click to expand...

Rereading my first post it does not come across as clear as I wanted and for that I apologize. Every day is seems we 'civilians' grow farther apart from the sacrifices made by our service men and woman as they become a smaller and smaller portion of the total population. I try never to forget the sacrifices they have made AND may make in the future.
 
bobbymike said:
IMHO the USAF has operated in threat environments like North Korea, Vietnam & Iraq that were heavily defended by anti-air assets 'resembling' peer competitors. The Army and Navy did not face the same threat environment in those conflicts.
Click to expand...

North Korea's air force was the only legitimate peer competitor at the time of the conflict, primarily because there wasn't yet a buttload of high-tech in the USAF in 1950. MiG-15 vs. F-86 was the closest thing to parity going.

Vietnam and Iraq? Vietnam: the USAF's advanced technology was hampered by ROEs and ineffective weapons, but it was still well beyond what the NVA was fielding. Iraq: not even close, despite misreporting in the media constantly spouting otherwise. In terms of a SAM threat Iraq didn't field anything remotely resembling a modern IADS, and while Vietnam did have a SAM network that wasn't too out of date for the time they weren't using the latest systems either.
 
SOC said:
bobbymike said:
IMHO the USAF has operated in threat environments like North Korea, Vietnam & Iraq that were heavily defended by anti-air assets 'resembling' peer competitors. The Army and Navy did not face the same threat environment in those conflicts.
Click to expand...

North Korea's air force was the only legitimate peer competitor at the time of the conflict, primarily because there wasn't yet a buttload of high-tech in the USAF in 1950. MiG-15 vs. F-86 was the closest thing to parity going.

Vietnam and Iraq? Vietnam: the USAF's advanced technology was hampered by ROEs and ineffective weapons, but it was still well beyond what the NVA was fielding. Iraq: not even close, despite misreporting in the media constantly spouting otherwise. In terms of a SAM threat Iraq didn't field anything remotely resembling a modern IADS, and while Vietnam did have a SAM network that wasn't too out of date for the time they weren't using the latest systems either.
Click to expand...

I agree with what you say and why I used 'resembled' since the air defense networks were set up with Soviet weapons by Soviet military advisors 'resembled' is an accurate statement. You could add Kosovo and Libya although not so much for the same reasons and in the future Syria and Iran?

There were 'battles' in North Korea, Iraq I and II that also 'resembled' Soviet tactics and the Army performed brilliantly. But my comment was one of 'degrees' and not one of 'absolutes'.

I can put 22 people in football equipment and have them run the New England Patriots playbook where they would really 'resemble' the Patriots BUT I doubt they would beat Denver this Sunday.
 
Triton said:
Isn't this article by Robert Farley, and the one proceeding, yet another salvo in the battle between the United States Air Force and the United States Army over the use of air power and the oft-stated criticism that the Air Force does not do enough to support ground commanders?
Click to expand...
Yes, pretty much.

And I'd tend to agree that the USAF does not do a good job supporting ground commanders.



SOC said:
North Korea's air force was the only legitimate peer competitor at the time of the conflict, primarily because there wasn't yet a buttload of high-tech in the USAF in 1950. MiG-15 vs. F-86 was the closest thing to parity going.

Vietnam and Iraq? Vietnam: the USAF's advanced technology was hampered by ROEs and ineffective weapons, but it was still well beyond what the NVA was fielding. Iraq: not even close, despite misreporting in the media constantly spouting otherwise. In terms of a SAM threat Iraq didn't field anything remotely resembling a modern IADS, and while Vietnam did have a SAM network that wasn't too out of date for the time they weren't using the latest systems either.
Click to expand...
Wish I could remember where I'd read the comment from either an older officer or a civilian that the Vietnamese Air Force wasn't exactly the Luftwaffe...

IIRC it was in the context of a big debrief and bragging that the USAF pilots were flying into the toughest air defenses since Berlin 1945.
 

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