What If Apple Designed an iFighter?

Wall Street Journal ^ | July 23, 2012

[nickcarraway]

In a time of tight budgets, the Pentagon needs to free up the defense-contracting business for a new era of competitive enterprise—like the one last seen in World War II.

Mitt Romney has been touting his experience at Bain Capital as a qualification for fixing Washington and the economy. Certainly there's one part of the federal government that desperately needs a president with business savvy: the Pentagon. Should they rise to the challenge, Mr. Romney and his defense-policy team can learn a lot from the last time businessmen took over from the bureaucrats in arming this country, in World War II.

Seventy years later, we need help again. Despite the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on defense over the last decade, our armed forces are desperately in need of modernization. Most of that money was spent fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not replacing fighters, helicopters, ships and submarines that often date back to the 1980s and '90s.

The F-35 program began in 1996 but has had so many requirements piled on it that the jet still is not operational.

People used to joke about the B-52s (last produced in 1962, despite numerous upgrades) being older than their crews. Now that's coming true for those faced with the computer-software designs that power our planes and ships.

But that modernization isn't going to happen until the Pentagon reinvents how it buys the weapons and equipment it needs. This is especially true as defense budgets inevitably will shrivel over the next decade, with or without the automatic cuts of sequestration. If we're going to maintain our military technological edge over current and potential foes, it's time to take a second look at World War II, the most rapid and successful modernization of forces in history.

[DesScorp]

We'd be better off if they took a lesson from Colonel John Boyd and his fighter mafia!

The biggest enemies of Colonel Boyd's philosophy are not peaceniks, but the Pentagon itself, which eschews anything that isn't big and expensive. We have the military industrial complex that Ike warned us about.