By The Diplomat Staff
The Diplomat speaks with Robert Farley about his case for abolishing the U.S. Air Force.
One of our long term Flashpoints contributors, Dr. Robert Farley of the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky, has recently published a book titled Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force. In it, he makes the provocative case that the United States no longer needs an Air Force (as a separate department of the U.S. military at least). We sat down to ask a few questions about the argument and its relation to Asian history:
While you concentrate your book on the Royal Air Force and the United States Air Force, the argument would seem to hold for any independent air force. What do the major Asian air forces look like?
This is a very interesting question. Most post-colonial Asian states take the model of their former colonizer; Pakistan, India, and Malaysia all have independent air forces on the model of the RAF, for example. Revolutionary states tended to adopt the Soviet or Chinese models, in which the air force was subservient to the army. This includes China, Vietnam, North Korea, and Indonesia. The Japanese case is complicated, but the JASDF is more or less an independent service within the Japanese Self-Defense Force.
The PLAAF is, in particular, a very interesting case. Historically, the PLAAF has been the very model of a subservient Air Force, committed to support of PLA ground operations. However, the PLAAF has also been tasked with air defense, producing a different model than in the Soviet Union, which had distinct ground support and air defense services. The Vietnam People’s Air Force was designed along similar lines. An air force that focuses overwhelmingly on air defense is a bit more defensible in practice than the sort of all-encompassing air force we see in the US and the UK, because there’s less need for collaboration with ground and naval assets.
As with all terminology, there are some definitional issues. Most every country has some service or branch termed an “Air Force,” but the important questions are the extent to which that service has sufficient autonomy in planning, procurement, and training to be termed “independent.” Today, the PLAAF is taking on more aspects of an independent air force, but I don’t think that it yet carries the political heft of a fully independent service.
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