Roles and missions for the U.S. military were laid down in 1948 at Key West at a conference chaired by James Forrestal, the first Secretary of Defense. Subsequently approved by President Truman, these accords have remained in place ever since, despite extraordinary changes in the national-security environment. The end of the Cold War, the unification of Germany, the Goldwater-Nichols legislation, the rise of China, NATO expansion, 9/11 and the Global War on Terror, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine all represented seismic shifts. Rapid and dramatic advances in technology do as well. While the basic roles of the military services are fundamentally sound, service missions should be revisited in light of these changes. It’s time for a reboot.
As in 1948, a key point of contention today concerns airpower. In every conflict, concerns resurface about close air support, traditionally the lowest priority for the Air Force. While “strategic” missions maximize the employment of Air Force assets under Air Force commanders, close air support requires close coordination and integration with ground commanders, violating tenets deemed essential for the optimum employment of airpower. Army doctrine depends heavily on airpower, which enables the flexible and powerful concentration of combat power more than any other capability on the battlefield. From the perspective of most airmen, however, CAS is seen as a wasteful dispersion of airpower for tactical and not strategic ends. As Carl Builder noted in his classic Masks of War, “losing the freedom to apply airpower independently to decisive ends is to lose that which pilots have striven so hard to achieve for much of the history of the airplane. Thus, close air support will always be an unwanted stepchild of the Air Force.” Strong and ultimately successful pressure from the Air Force to retire the A-10, its only dedicated CAS platform, confirms this point.
Mindful of these facts, the Navy and Marine Corps fought persistently and successfully to retain control of their fixed-wing aviation at Key West, a consideration denied the Army. Over many decades the Army built up a rotary-wing “attack” community in the form of the AH-1 and later AH-64-series helicopter gunships. Though an important capability, Army attack helicopters lack the speed, range, weapons load, and survivability of the A-10—an airplane the Air Force doesn’t want for a mission it doesn’t like. The Army needs fixed-wing combat aviation for the same reasons that the Navy and Marine Corps do: to provide immediate and responsive air support for service missions. An obvious solution is to transfer both the mission and the platform to the Army, freeing the Air Force to focus on its traditional and favored missions of air supremacy, strategic bombing, air interdiction and air mobility.
Another anomaly is high-altitude air and missile defense. In almost every foreign military, these capabilities reside in the air force, but in the United States, the Army owns these systems and units. They consist of the Terminal High Altitude Air Defense system, which defends against incoming ballistic missiles, and the Patriot air defense system, which can engage and defeat aircraft as well as missiles. The Army provides eight THAAD batteries to support combatant commanders; there are also 15 Patriot battalions and 44 Ground-Based Midcourse Defense interceptors based in California and Alaska. Although a joint function, airspace management and deconfliction is dominated by the Air Force, which normally provides the air component commander and the combined air operations center in military campaigns, as well as the preponderance of air assets. Decades of emphasis by the Army air-defense community on these longer-ranged missions and systems has contributed markedly to the decline of short-range air defense, or SHORAD, in Army brigades and divisions, which have no air-defense units at all. For these reasons, high-altitude air and missile defense should more properly reside with the Air Force, while the Army rededicates itself to SHORAD, including radar-directed gun systems. In the early 1990s, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Merrill McPeak suggested just such a swap, offering the A-10 to the Army in exchange, but Army leaders demurred.
In every major conflict since 1945, the Marine Corps has provided large formations that conducted sustained operations on land alongside Army divisions and corps. Similarly organized as their Army counterparts, Marine divisions with supporting armor and field artillery (as well as very capable organic air support) played major roles in land warfare. Beginning in 2022, the Marine Corps began to divest its tanks and tubed artillery to optimize as an island-based, Pacific-focused service that emphasizes rocket artillery and unmanned vehicles. (The Marine Corps’ “Force Design 2030” blueprint also eliminates one of the Corps’ eight active infantry regiments, six of 32 helicopter squadrons, all bridging assets and all four Marine Air Wing Support Groups.) Criticized by experts as “custom-designed for distributed operations on islands in the Western Pacific [and] poorly designed and poorly trained for the land campaigns it is most likely to fight,” these moves fundamentally alter USMC capabilities, rendering the service unable to support major land campaigns and leaving it poorly suited for missions outside the Indo-Pacific region. Formerly praised for its flexibility and adaptability, the Marine Corps today can offer fewer options across a reduced mission set to the National Command Authorities.
These and other concerns suggest that the time is right for a second Key West conference to examine and update service roles and missions. Here, the passion for service “equities” and autonomy must be ruthlessly suppressed in favor of a truly optimized Joint Force, organized, trained and equipped for lethal, high-technology warfare across all warfighting domains. Now, at the start of a new administration, fresh ideas and innovation are most likely to flourish. Let’s not miss the opportunity.
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