The U.S. Air Force, also known as USAF, is the American aerial warfare service branch that ensures the welfare and safety of the citizens. It is impossible to overestimate the significance of this uniformed service. However, since national defense budgets always force service leaders to make difficult choices, it may become necessary to make large cuts in one of the core missions of the service.
In my opinion, it is possible to reduce the budget for the third core mission – rapid global mobility. Nowadays, with the help of modern technologies, it is getting easier and easier every day to move throughout the world. However, it requires significant amounts of money to update the aircraft or buy new ones, while the budgets are tight. Unfortunately, it is impossible to spend less on the mission of air superiority since researchers consider this mission the basis of the other four.1 According to researchers, “air superiority not only allows coalition and joint force operations to exploit the air domain, but also grants those friendly force operations freedom from attack on the surface.”2 Achieving this mission allows several others to be accomplished, too; therefore, making massive cuts in the air superiority mission may have devastating results.
At the same time, if the U.S. Air Force spends less money on the core mission of rapid global mobility, it is unlikely that there will be significant changes. Moreover, cutting costs will not make global mobility slower. Achieving other core missions, especially command and control, will ensure that mobility is rapid, timely, and successful.3 Simultaneously, if service leaders decide to reduce the amounts of money spent on other missions, rapid global mobility will not be able to compensate for the lack of, for example, intelligence or air superiority.
Bibliography
Bender, William J., and William D. Bryant. “Assuring the USAF Core Missions in the Information Age.” Air & Space Power Journal, (2016): 1–7.
Grynkewich, Alex. “An Operational Imperative: The Future of Air Superiority.” Mitchell Policy Papers 7, (2017): 1–19.
Venable, Heather. “More than Planes and Pickle Buttons: Updating the Air Force’s Core Missions for the 21st Century.” War on the Rocks. Web.
Footnotes
- William J. Bender, and William D. Bryant, “Assuring the USAF Core Missions in the Information Age,” Air & Space Power Journal, (2016): 5.
- Alex Grynkewich, “An Operational Imperative: The Future of Air Superiority,” Mitchell Policy Papers 7, (2017): 2.
- Heather Venable, “More than Planes and Pickle Buttons: Updating the Air Force’s Core Missions for the 21st Century,” War on the Rocks, Web.