Grounded: The case for abolishing the United States Air Force, by Robert Farley
| Author | Srdjan Vucetic |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020702014563034 |
| Date | 01 March 2015 |
| Published date | 01 March 2015 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
the soldier’’ (292). The men and women of the Canadian Armed Forces have been
‘‘without apology, the world’s best peacekeepers’’ and, Conrad concludes, ‘‘now is
the exact time that we should renew our faith with the UN’’ (292).
Robert Farley
Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force
Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014. 272 pp., $26.95 (cloth)
ISBN 978–0–8131–4495–5
Reviewed by: Srdjan Vucetic, University of Ottawa
The future of the US military may be in Canada’s past, contends Robert
Farley, who is assistant professor at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and
International Commerce at the University of Kentucky. In his recent book,
Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force, Farley argues
that an independent air force has a negative impact on US defence and security.
Every branch of the military has its own parochial interests, but those of the US
Air Force (USAF) are the most damaging because they are the most anti-
Clausewitzian, meaning that they are most likely to ignore: (1) the ‘‘fog of war’’;
(2) the need to disarm the enemy; and (3) the fact that politics always supersedes
military action.
According to Farley, the idea of airpower as a strategic fix has helped legitimize
the USAF as a stand-alone service while perpetuating the myth that almost any
political objective can be achieved by the right application of force from above. Put
differently, if airpower itself makes the US stronger, then the appropriation of
(strategic) airpower by the USAF detracts from this strength by distorting the
proper understanding of warfare. As the author notes, the list of those who
bought into ‘‘the promise that airpower can deliver quick, cheap, decisive victories’’
(2) is long and not exclusively American; it begins with Winston Churchill and
ends, for now, with Bill Clinton and ‘‘most other NATO leaders’’ during the 1999
Kosovo war (43) or, indeed, with the Israeli policymakers in charge of campaigns
against Hezbollah in 2006 and Hamas in 2009 and 2014.
Farley discusses other reasons why it would be rational for the US Army and
Navy to swallow up the USAF’s missions and assets, but Clausewitzian theory is
the main one. Searching for a more rational design of military institutions, he
examines both Soviet and Israeli experience, but finds most promise in the path
blazed by Canadian defence minister Paul Hellyer half a century ago that saw the
unification of Canada’s tri-service structure. The author’s policy recommendation
comes in full awareness of the great Canadian military reform’s failures (174–179)
and of the fact that the USAF stands no chance of actually being abolished in the
future, barring some unpleasant black swan event (184–187).
Farley loves to provoke and polemicize, but his is not a book like Thomas P.M.
Barnett’s The Pentagon’s New Map (New York: Putnam Publishing Group, 2004).
Rather, it is a work of careful scholarship, whereby the author reaches provocative
164 International Journal 70(1)
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