I'll bet it was awesome, albeit no Phoenixes were launched as in this photo:
You likely will appreciate The F-14 Tomcat Association
Posted on 08/23/2006 2:57:22 PM PDT by Paul Ross
I'll bet it was awesome, albeit no Phoenixes were launched as in this photo:
You likely will appreciate The F-14 Tomcat Association
Bottom right picture I think was taken off my ship {AMERICA} a few years after I left LOL... It's a real picture and the man standing with his hands behind his back is an Admiral. The Tomcat wasn't as close as it looked though.
I agree with this suspicion. The possibility needs to be publically...and seriously... explored by conservatives. The explanatory power of this thesis really does tend to tie together a rather large number of the destructive and politically suicidal positions taken by the Administration. You just have to start connecting dots. The connections may not be always visible, but a lot of the dots are.
For one thing: it would also be historically consistent with what the elder Bush is believed to actually subscribe to.
Also, its easier to believe the ulterior "selfless Liberal" motivation of this particular President in this regard...who is constantly trying to emote, and "out-feel" the previous Prevaricator-In-Chief...[ who he has also all but Pardoned in practice...and rehabilitated ]. Rather than instead believing that policies which keep leading to Globalist submergence of U.S. supremacy are somehow merely accidental. If these were mere accidents, then some of them would break our way. This also requires assuming he is either stupid or merely corrupted. I wouldn't believe either of those assumptions. The President is above average in intelligence, although not in verbal fluency. I'm sure he is sincere in whatever he is striving for.
But it is equally clear that his motivations remained veiled. This is one of the reasons why so many find his speeches so unsatisfying, and people find that "something is missing." They are not what he purports to affirm, albeit sometimes things slip out. Such as the multiculturalism that Lawrence Auster identified in his column My Bush Epiphany.
The multiculturalism identified is something which I believe would be an absolute prerequisite of a Globalist Elitist/Fanatic. This fanaticism of his tends to support the suspicion of the corrollary fanaticism of the One (New) World Order.
Those who wish to defend the patriotic purity of the President's motives have a difficult task, and so they usually don't try, so they usually just disparage those who have raised the alarm with aspersions and ad hominem attacks. And they run away from the substantive evidences like scalded cats.
I think it is time for the President himself to get a lot more specific about rejecting "global tests" than he did for public show with John Kerry. And prove it with concrete budgets.
I can believe that. Of course, the F-14 is a big bird. The range that extra size lends means it can do things like this...go way out at supersonic speeed, to intercept and then slow down to "escort" a lumbering Bear past the carrier battle group...all beyond the Bear's own weapons range...
The moral of that little example of course was not lost on the Soviet bomber pilots. The tomcats made our superiority look complete...and effortless.
Heh. Well it is about time I hit the sack, and fortunately I won't have any carrier deck operations going on over head. But we can dream of these beauties in action...
I think that he and the ultra rich powerful supporters of the Global view really believe this is the only way to eventually bring about their utopia world of stable markets and reasonable a peaceful world where no one is able to act militarily or disturb the status quo without the approval and support of the other partners.
All they are doing is setting up a situation that the right[or wrong ]man can step in and take over.
The United States and its Constitution has been the one thing in the way to keep this from happening.
What they have been waiting for has been a big enough or made to seem serious enough World/US crisis of either a financial or security nature or both that would convince enough American people to give up enough of their freedom and power to the government.
They also needed someone who believed that Globalism and the Corporate World was the answer to most of the world's problems, someone that the American people trusted enough with this power.
The time the conditions and the man has come.
9/11,Iraq, Iran and world terrorism etc. has provided the security crisis that is being hyped for all it is worth.
Big oil, the media, and the insane over spending of billions of dollars on everything that even looks like a legitimate excuse or crisis is going to bring about the deliberate financial crisis and finish putting us so far in debt that we do an instant reply of what happened to the Soviet Union.
We are bing put in the same economic bondage with China the Saudis and Arabs have had us for years.
Iraq is being used to do to us the same thing that we did to Russia, spend us into a downsized member of the Global community where no independent super powers are allowed.
Iraq is the last time we will act militarily as an independent nation.
There's close to a trillion dollars and our soldiers blood that's been sunk down that black hole that won't gain us one friend.
It's going to end up in the hands of some Mullah as bad or worse than Saddam that will preach hate and destruction to us and our allies.
Bump. Globaloneyism appears to be his real creed...which he has kept masked...but it comes out when he gets huffy over "free" trade.
Vector of change alert. The earlier forecast that we would be surpassed by China's Navy in 2015 just got dated. Looks like the Navy is being forcibly shrunk by the Administration even faster than the earlier forecast would have predicted. [ The forecasts 3 years ago was that we would decline to 290 navy ships by 2006. We now have only 281... ]
Another form of "dis-savings", and "living off the seed-corn"?
Agreeing more and more. Covers W's unexplainables. Requires titanium balls on our part.
WSJ.com OpinionJournal
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Our Small Defense Budget
This is no way to fund a war.
Friday, October 20, 2006 12:01 a.m.
Congress recently passed a record defense-spending bill for 2007, and critics lost no time adding it to their list of woes caused by the Iraq war. The real story is more interesting: to wit, how relatively little the U.S. now spends on national security, notwithstanding a war on terror and especially compared with previous periods of global conflict.
It's true that overall defense outlays for fiscal year 2007 are on track to surpass--in dollars adjusted for inflation--defense spending at the height of the Vietnam War. It's also true that defense spending has already increased by some 40% since 2001, when President Bush came to office. War opponents cite such figures to suggest that the Iraq campaign is too great a burden, and is sucking up funds better spent on domestic programs.
Less talked about is that the $528 billion spent on national defense in fiscal 2006, which ended on September 30, equaled only 4% of U.S. gross domestic product. Historically, that level is far more in line with peacetime military spending. Many Americans might be surprised to learn that current U.S. defense spending isn't all that much above the 3% share of GDP that prevailed from 1999-2001 and was a postwar World War II low.
The top chart nearby tracks defense spending as a share of the economy since 1940, when it was 1.7% before the mass mobilization of World War II. It reached a postwar high of 14.2% in 1953 during the Korean War, 9.5% in 1968 at the height of Vietnam, and 6.2% in 1986 at the peak of the Reagan re-armament that showed the Soviets they couldn't win the Cold War. Defense spending then took an especially rapid plunge from 4.8% in 1992, falling to 3% by the end of the 1990s. Some of this "peace dividend" was warranted after the Berlin Wall fell, but letting the security budget fall so far is also one of the ways in which the Clinton era was a holiday from global history.
This huge defense drawdown is also the real story behind President Clinton's ballyhooed deficit reduction. The GOP Congress gets some credit for slowing the rate of growth in domestic spending in the mid-1990s. But nearly all of the decline in government spending in the Clinton years came from defense. Only toward the end of the 1990s did the GOP Congress begin to agitate for modest defense increases, which Mr. Clinton accommodated in return for more spending on his own domestic priorities.
Sooner or later this trend had to stop, and it did with the jolt of September 11. President Bush needed to find more resources to fight the war on terror, and he has done so by increasing defense spending by a full percentage-point of GDP over his six years in office. More than half of the fiscal 2006 budget deficit of 1.9% of GDP can thus be attributed solely to this rebuilding of American defenses after the Clinton drawdown.
Today's relatively modest defense buildup is also apparent if you look at defense spending as a share of all federal outlays. (See lower chart.) Nearly half (46%) of all tax dollars went to national security during Vietnam, and 28.1% as recently as 1987. But spending for the war on terror, including Iraq and Afghanistan, has only lifted defense to 19.8% of all federal spending today. We have less to spend on guns because we are spending so much more than we once did on the rest of government, especially health care.
In retrospect, Mr. Bush missed a historic opportunity after 9/11 to ask government to spend less on non-essential programs so it could spend more on security. Instead, overall federal spending grew by nearly 50% in Mr. Bush's first five years, as he allowed Congress to spend more on just about everything. At least Mr. Bush avoided the trap of asking for a tax increase, which would have slowed the economic growth that we have seen throw off record amounts of revenue in the past two years, and thus fund spending on both guns and butter (or, too often, pork).
The larger point is that America remains a long way from a state of "imperial overstretch," as critics of an assertive foreign policy like to put it. U.S. defense spending remains at modest levels, probably too modest given the threats we face and the overseas deployments by our servicemen and women. In addition to hot wars in the Middle East and against terrorism everywhere, the U.S. must maintain its air and sealift capacity to deploy to other regions if needed. Weapons built during the Reagan era must be upgraded or replaced, and the Pentagon will also have to invest in new technologies to deter any future enemies. And all of these priorities must compete with the ever-larger share of the defense budget consumed by health care and salaries for the volunteer force.
Our own judgment is that the U.S. is going to have to increase defense spending to meet these challenges, and that the time to begin such a debate is now.
Further update...showing if anything the problem was understated: We are down to ten ships fewer than forecast for this timeline:
Today the U.S. fleet numbers: 280 shipsThe hemmorhaging continues.
The rot is being accelerated.
Yeah...
Maybe soon we really will have an 'Army of one'.
:-(
(Thomas L. Friedman)(Thomas P.J. Barnett)The world is flat! There has never been a war between two countries that have the Golden Arches! Future wars will be between we, the "core," and the few rogues and non-state actors in the outlands!(/Thomas L. Friedman)(/Thomas P.J. Barnett)
The globalist view is a nice comfort zone. It is like a Sunday afternoon, where you can pretend that all is peaceful, and that life is a bowl of cherries. I know. I was there. 15 years ago that was my comfort zone. The wall had come down. We had "won" the Cold War. On to a 1000 years of new strip malls being built from Inner Mongolia to Angola! The globalist view feeds the innate tendencies of beancounters and even the part of all of us who own securities that wants smooth sailing and endless appreciation. Hobbit like in its innocence, it is also a dangerous poison that goes straight to the instinct of self preservation. Wolves and orcs love it.
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