Try This One Weird Trick to Cut Organizational Redundancy!

Over at Medium: War is Boring, I take another unhinged screed at the Air Force:

With the Iraq War over and the fighting in Afghanistan winding down,why does the United States need to maintain two large land armies, the Army and Marine Corps? The question seems perfectly reasonable given the apparent absence of large terrestrial threats, but it leads us down the wrong path. 

The United States military is all about redundancy; in addition to two armies, it also fields two navies — the Navy and the Coast Guard — and five or six air forces, depending on how you count the aerial arms of the various branches. 

The real problem isn’t that the Army is marginally more or less useful that it was 10 years ago, but rather that the institutions that were designed in 1947, when the Army and Air Force split, are insufficiently flexible to negotiate the modern security landscape.

This serves as a backdoor announcement that Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force (in lieu of a webpage, I've set up a twitter feed), will be published this spring by University Press of Kentucky.  The introductory piece has generated a couple good responses, first from Michael Auslin:

The other services may indeed use their air arms to support their missions, but fulfilling the strategic objectives of the United States will depend ever more heavily on an independent Air Force that is able to exploit every advantage from the air domain, just as the Navy exploits every advantage from the sea. To expect global airpower without the Air Force is a fantasy, especially in today’s budget environment. If Mr. Farley wanted to be truly radical, he would have called for abolishing the Army and Navy’s air wings and folding them into the only airpower service that can make the full use of their ability.

And from Robert Goldich:

There are some very practical reasons why an independent Air Force is a good thing. First, not all airpower is used in support of operations over land or water. Strategic air and space power, whether with manned aircraft or missiles, most notably our strategic nuclear forces, can be employed in support of ground and naval operations, but need not be. Furthermore, strategic air and missile forces are projected from the continental United States, not from an overseas theater of operations. To assign the strategic airpower function to either the Army or the Navy would make no sense. Second, we need a central repository for doctrine to manage the air battle in a theater of operations. To assign that responsibility to aviation assets of the Army or Navy would create an unbalanced situation where the interests and concerns of one service outweighed the other.