This article first appeared on Aviation Week’s Ares weblog

The extended op-ed by Robert Farley about disbanding the Air Force is now online in full, and revealed for what it is: a rather ill-structured and highly selective recycling of old arguments.

Selective? Consider this: continued production of the F-22 Raptor is an absurdity during the course of two counter-insurgency wars, says Farley. Maybe, but how much use is this...

...against the Taliban? (Apart from lashing them to the periscope, or torpedoing them when they charter a ship for a cruise vacation.)

Old? We can argue the effectiveness of the World War 2 strategic bombing campaign until we are all blue in the face. I would merely suggest that, in the absence of any plan to fire-bomb Tehran with B-29s, it's of limited relevance.

The question is not "Why do we need an Air Force?" because in classic terms that "begs the question" - that is, it implies that there is some reason that the Air Force rather than any other service is expendable.

For example, Farley would abolish the Air Force but adds that "some elements of tactical airpower would pass to the Marine Corps." If the United States does not need its own air force, why the bloody hell does the US Navy's own army need its own air force?

Of course, in the world of DC, that question has a simple answer: any proposal that the Marines don't like stands as much chance as Barney in the velociraptors' cage.

The question is actually this: how do we organize military forces to do what we want them to do, which is to deter wars and, if necessary, win them, so that violent actors outside national control don't harm us?

To do this, military forces need to be able to act against those enemies wherever necessary - on land, on the sea, in the air and in space. Another crucial task is to gather information that is otherwise denied: the military has been assigned this job of intelligence-gathering. (That, by the way, is a huge and often overlooked role that largely falls on the USAF.)

Now, all those military tasks have several components, but there are some that are screamingly obvious if you aren't obsessed with intra-service conflicts.

First is operational skill. For example, the Nelson-era Royal Navy's operational expertise, expressed through tactics, training and the constant operation of sailing ships in areas of interest throughout the world, made it a dominant force.

There's also a technological element. You'd rightly be regarded as a cretin if you suggested that the Navy should be put in charge of the development of the next tank, or that that the Air Force should manage the next submarine program. (Although, oddly enough, the Royal Navy was an early promoter of the tank.) There is specialized knowledge that is crucial to the successful development of complicated systems. But tell people that the Army should build fighters, or that the Navy should take over space launch, and you're a visionary.

How you package and label all these things within a hierarchical organization is secondary. What is important is to avoid two errors. You don't want to duplicate efforts and organizations more than necessary, and you don't want to try to develop expertise and technology under leaderships that don't understand them.

So what is wrong, in that case, with having organizations within the military that specialize in operations and technology in different physical elements? As Eliot put it:

Again I must remind you that/A dog's a dog, a cat's a cat

An airplane is not a tank. It requires different technologies to build it and a different skill-set to operate it. The same applies to submarines and spacecraft, or to frigates and rifles.

It's worth noting that the most recent roles-and-missions spat between the Air Force and the Army centers on the latter's Warrior UAV... which would not exist were it not for the USAF's initiative in adopting a CIA-developed system, equipping it first with a laser designator and then with missiles, and integrating it into large-scale air-land operations.

The Army quite literally never thought of that. Army people are not trained to think in those terms. The Army's home-developed UAVs are broadly comparable to Israeli technology. As in Israeli technology of 20 years ago.

Meanwhile, as the Navy's Littoral Combat Ship program falls apart, and the Army's Future Combat System grows into a sort of Von Neumann machine dedicated to eating the defense budget, I would seriously question the head-set of anyone who thinks that either of them is going to run the next satellite program or the next airlifter better than the USAF.

Farley wants to split air three ways, between the Army, the Marines and the Navy, who'd get the strategic bombers. (Who gets the tankers? Who wants them?) He wants to give space assets to the Navy. Why? No reason is advanced - but if the Air Force is abolished someone has to do it.

Dividing different skills among different sub-organizations within the defense system makes sense. Arbitrarily assigning them to one command or another does not.

I may not wholly approve of the way Boeing or American Airlines do business; but that doesn't mean that I would be better off flying on Google Airlines in a jet built by General Motors.

... and by the way, we have been here before.