House panel votes to split Air Force, create new U.S. Space Corps

There's no particular reason why air superiority fighters, long range bombers, aerial refueling tankers, and airdrop cargo haulers should all be under the same command just because they all fly. Clearly, two of those are for logistics, and two are for force projection.

I suspect that the existence of the military academies don't help in that respect.

Not needing a pilot could make them smaller, cheaper, and able to enter (and remain in) dangerous areas in a way a helicopter or plane never could.

This seems like something the Army could operate themselves.

The Army wouldn't take the A-10s if they were offered.[0]

>doesn't want to get involved with smaller fixed-wing aircraft for close air support.

But they have[1]. An OA-X demonstration is scheduled for August, of which they're looking to field an off-the-shelf plane.

[0]: http://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/02/25/army-not-inter... [1]: http://www.defensenews.com/articles/air-force-leaders-confir...

If recent history has taught us anything is that the real issue is those nerds need extensive micro-management and predefined processes designed by committee (/s), and given how most of those nerds are hired through 3rd party contractors these days for 5x the cost, you also need thousands of people to oversee and manage the extensive contracts used to hire them and push out the ever expanding list of project requirements and legal rules to these companies.

It's a perfect recipe for success. Why else would it be repeatedly used?

The fact administrators see the solution to every problem is hiring MORE administrators (who often just happen to be companies staffed by their old friends from school) it's really not that surprising that western governments around the world (not just the US) are consistently failing to accomplish the most basic government projects which were previously a dime-a-dozen at comparable rates of private markets before the explosion of the size of government in the 1950/60s and it became standard practice for everything to cost 10x as much and/or result in endless delays.

It's what happens when administrators take over. Aka the Iron Rule of Bureaucracy. When any failures happen instead of firing these people or holding them responsible, we turn to them to solve the problem, which always turns out to mean either hiring more people just like them or throwing billions more into the same agencies/contracts:

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

According to the current mainstream narrative only greedy fiscal conservatives who hate governments are the ones who take issue with this approach. So my critiques are largely just going to be pigeonholed into a controversial political ideology rather than being a blatantly obvious issue with modern government agencies across the western world.

The existing systems need to be broken down, critiqued, and lessons should be actually learned. Just throwing more people/money/power at the problem doesn't help solve it. Unless your goal is merely resource extraction and maintaining the appearance of doing something rather than actually solving problems.

Because you make incremental changes (and even then, only based a on clear need, nor rejecting old because it's old) to critical systems unless you have a clear, compelling need justifying a specific more-radical change.

Ground-up replacement based on speculative improvement and theorized benefits is a common recipe for failure.

It's a fairly basic idea in software, but it applies for other kinds of systems as well (in many cases moreso; you can build a ground-up replacement for software on parallel while maintaining the legacy system to mitigate risk and only cutover when the replacement is proven to work; you can't practically build a complete replacement national military in parallel.)

This is getting way off topic, but can you give an example? The Navy officer service-dress blue uniform is basically a business suit with gold-colored buttons and gold sleeve stripes; it's been pretty much the same for probably a century now. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniforms_of_the_United_States_...

The USAF was actually split off largely due to the efforts of the bomber mafia to promulgate strategic bombing as a useful method of war. The problem is that strategic bombing doesn't work, and never has, which kind of blunts the purpose of the USAF except as providing largely tactical support for the Army and Marines (note that the Navy runs their own carrier planes, and the Army and Marines also have their own close air support wings).

It's also disingenuous to suggest that the US military is largely based on Elizabethan military terms. The entire concept of the staff system only dates back to roughly Napoleonic Wars (and is most associated with the effective Prussian military). But even beyond that, the US military is largely organized in operational terms under unified (cross-service) commands based on geographical theater, a system that originates in WWII and is pretty much unique to the US (although, to be fair, it's the only country that has the need to work under such a system; however, similar concepts like the Joint Chiefs of Staff don't seem to be particularly widespread in the world).

"Healthcare" is not.

http://www.nti.org/learn/treaties-and-regimes/treaty-princip...

Which reflects how in real life the Air Force does have more to do with space than the Navy.

Right now airforce satellites for star-wars type initiatives and airforce refueling tankers all fall under the same budget, while serving very different organizational needs. conversely this is why 'innovation' arms/skunkworks get created... because the mothership moves too slow and has too many competing priorities and budgets to innovate and get out of its own way.