The argument that 'air' is different from 'sea' and 'land' in being only a supporting environment doesn't hold water, if you'll pardon the turn of phrase. People are born, grow up, have families and generally live their lives on land. Ultimately, our interests are those which secure and facilitate our ability to do so in some measure of comfort. In that sense our individual lives are land-centric (unsurprisingly). There are plenty of resources in the sea, and of course it's a great medium for trade, but ultimately trade and resources are just things that make our life on land that much richer. So, taking the pedantic view of 'supporting' vs 'supported' environments, air and sea are both 'supporting' - mediums for trade and providers of resource. Take the 'supported should own the supporting' argument further and the Army should own the Navy, too, which is self-evident nonsense.
I won't contribute to the FJ vs RW vs AT debate other than to observe that the independent role of air power was exercised successfully over the 6 months of the Libya campaign. It was 'independent' in the sense that NATO air power operated independently of NATO sea and land forces. Yes, local forces were able to exploit the situation to conduct land operations. But, I'll observe again, since people are born, reproduce and grow old on land, the final intended effect of everything we do in the military (independently or not) is a change in the course of people's earthbound lives.
Deep breath.... and back to the original topic!
CAS is obviously bang-on with everything he says about the political-military interface, and I don't see it as controversial at all. I haven't seen the full transcript, but I hope that he made a point about the resource implications of making decisions at the last possible moment. This is where politicians' desire for a late decision is in total opposition to their desire to spend no money until the decision has been taken.
Our forces are funded in peacetime to maintain defined readiness states for various types of operations. If politicians want forces held at higher readiness than has been funded, or if they want to have their finger on the trigger of an operation beyond the scope of the planning assumptions, then there is cost involved - but 'operational' expenditure cannot be authorised until an operation is actually declared in progress. On several occasions over recent years, we've marched up the hill, picking up costs within core, only to be marched down again and left to get on with it. Our own senior leadership is complicit to the extent that the answer is more often 'yes' than 'yes, but...'. If there was more recognition that out-of-scope readiness has costs, I think the tensions caused by last-minute decision-making would be somewhat lessened.