×
Noah at Danger Room has an excellent summary of the Air Force brass firing. In particular:
The Air Force's leadership has been on the brink of open conflict for months with Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England. That's because in the halls of the Air Force's chiefs, the talk has been largely about the threats posed by China and a resurgent Russia. Gates wanted the service to actually focus on the wars at hand, in Iraq and Afghanistan. "For much of the past year I’ve been trying to concentrate the minds and energies of the defense establishment on the current needs and current conflicts," he told the Heritage Foundation. "In short, to ensure that all parts of the Defense Department are, in fact, at war."And adds:
Rumors are swirling of more top-level Air Force officers getting the axe. Stay tuned.Jeffrey Lewis focuses on the nuclear question:
I will repeat, for the third time, my sense that the Air Force has an organizational problem that is not amenable to remedy by firing people.The larger problem, however, is that we have an organization that was born in the Cold War for a Cold War purpose; strategic warfare against the Soviet Union. I don't think that the organization is necessary even for that job, but exploring the birth of the Air Force is helpful in understanding why it's having such a difficult job rethinking its mission. The Army and Navy have both had trouble shifting to a post-Cold War mission, but both also have long and rich traditions that they can draw on, which the Air Force lacks. The Navy has moved towards expeditionary and maritime maintenance models that hark back to the nineteenth century experience of the Royal Navy, while the Army has managed to re-invent itself as a counter-insurgency organization in a remarkably short period of time. The Cold War, however, is built into the DNA of the Air Force, which means that it has tremendous difficulty in thinking about anything other than great power confrontation. Firing the brass, as Lewis notes, won't solve this problem.I should add that the Air Force is considering some organizational remedies. But the real question is “above the paygrade” the Air Force and, even, the Secretary of Defense. The “lack of focus” that SECDEF described reflects the reality that these weapons are largely irrelevant to the day-to-day mission of the Air Force. That we have nuclear weapons we do not need is evident in the day-to-day neglect by those who handle them.
--Robert Farley
