Posted on 06/06/2008 10:58:17 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
By Bob Deans
WASHINGTON BUREAU
Saturday, June 07, 2008
WASHINGTON — In April, Defense Secretary Robert Gates traveled to Maxwell Air Force Base near Montgomery, Ala., to address an elite group of majors and colonels attending the Air War College in preparation for promotions to command positions.
For months, Gates had been at odds with Secretary of the Air Force Michael Wynne and Gen. Michael Moseley, the Air Force chief of staff, over how to increase the use of unmanned aerial vehicles to spy on insurgents and monitor roadside bomb sites in Iraq.
The Air Force brass, Gates confided, had been dragging its feet.
"I've been wrestling for months to get more intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets into the theater," Gates told the war college students. "Because people were stuck in old ways of doing business, it's been like pulling teeth."
On Thursday, Gates fired Wynne and Moseley, saying that inspections after two embarrassing nuclear arms mistakes in the past year revealed systemic weaknesses in how the Air Force takes care of the country's most dangerous weapons.
Behind the firings, however, lay a more fundamental battle over the future of the Air Force, service officers and analysts said, and a broader divide between a service set up to defend the country against a Cold War threat and a White House bent on defeating terror groups.
"There was a deep cultural rift between the U.S. Air Force and the office of the secretary of defense throughout the Bush presidency," said Loren Thompson, a defense analyst with the Lexington Institute, a security policy think tank in Arlington, Va.
"The Bush administration was determined to transform the military into an information-age military, and it defined that goal in terms that didn't have much to do with the goals of the U.S. Air Force," Thompson said. "As a result, year after year there were arguments."
Moseley and Wynne, by some lights, represented an old guard that fought for expensive manned aircraft like the $142 million F-22 fighter jet. Some officials said the two leaders were perceived to be slow to make the transformational changes Gates envisioned to create an Air Force that would rely less on pilots and more on technology to fulfill a mission centered on intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.
"It wasn't just the nuke issue," said a senior Air Force officer.
Gates is likely to recommend to President Bush that he nominate a former Air Force executive, Michael Donley, to the service's top civilian post, a senior defense official said Friday. Donley, who was acting secretary of the Air Force for seven months in 1993 and served as the service's top financial officer from 1989 to 1993, would replace Wynne.
Additional material from The Associated Press.
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Yes, and when Loren Thompson at the Lexington Institute changed his tune from “shut-up Boeing and stop yer belly-aching” (http://lexingtoninstitute.org/1260.shtml), to “hold-on a second, something doesn’t smell right here” (http://lexingtoninstitute.org/1268.shtml), that is very telling.
Word is, Loren is none to happy about being played by deceptive and misleading information.
So here’s a question: is there still a need for an independent air force?
It's not like there was a war on or anything with American lives, mission success and American prestige at stake.
Remember folks. Wynne was a Bush appointee. When folks get on me about my views of the incompetence this administration's appointees, it is this stuff that really gets me angry as hell. How many years did we flounder around in Iraq before we started to get it together? And how much of this floundering was a bunch of good 'ol boys more concerned about nest feathering than any semblance of doing their jobs?
And $3.5 Trillion in debt and a war that has dragged on for years, losing a Republican majority wasn't enough to break the backs of this? They actually had to go out and loose some nukes to get the axe.
Thank you for one of the more informative posts I have seen on FR in a long time! Good show!
You make excellent points and I support this perspective. Unfortunately, however, getting through "now" is important to getting to the future. It is an incredibly expensive now, and a lot of bungling got us bogged down in this now for a lot longer and a a lot higher than was necessary.
This is a brilliant [warning - deep sarcasm] strategy and you see agencies try it all the time in DC. Of course, Congress is happy to take the savings they have identified off the table for their own pet [pork] projects. They cannot whine when Congress takes money they said they didn't need. But Congress will just keep the money, blame them for wasting it in the past, and tell them they still have not justified their new program. So they lose the money. [Warning - do not try this strategy at home with your wife. No woman is THAT dumb] [/deep sarcasm]
Good question. I think that we really do need an Air Force - but a different organization than we have now. The USAF we have now seems to be frozen in the 50s and 60s, but with better (and far more expensive) equipment. They seem to be oriented towards fighting the Russkies and occasionally lifting some equipment and dreaming of weaponizing space but also seem to never read a newspaper to see where the world is going now. They'd almost serve as a museum display, except they cost so much..
The realy criminal part is their desertion of the Army's need for close air support. When you can really get the Joint Air Forces Component Commander to shake a few sorties loose from all of the scheduled missions, they bomb from way up high and a long ways off (except for the A-10s which happily bomb and strafe us - can anybody in the Air Force bother to learn what our vehicles look like?). Really a shame - and since they insist that they "own anything that flies" the army is stuck with only rotary wing support.
I suspect that the only solution is to fire anybody above the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and completely rebuild the Air Force as a supporting institution - supporting the ground-gaining arms - as it always should have been.
Unfortunately with a shortage of Priest and 11 Places to serve Airforce Chaplin services one sometimes two Camps.. The Other Catholic Chaplin services the rest... They are Bad!
Agree that we need the missions the air force performs today. But the Key West agreement is long past its useful life.
Leave the nukes a unified command. Divide transport between the Army and the Navy. Bomb droppers and air superiority to the Army.
Despite all the rhetoric and doctrine [sic] air power alone will never be sufficient to win a war.
Not a bad idea, but there is ample precedence for NCO pilots...Flying Chevrons
Thank you, I appreciate the comment.
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