Posted on 02/19/2007 8:40:37 AM PST by Excuse_My_Bellicosity
We should not only seriously ramp up the F-22...rather than terminating it arbitrarily at the end of this year because of a seriously erroneous conjecture that the F-35 will be able to "substitute" for it someday...BUT...we should also be restoring production of the prematurely-aborted production run of the B-2.
We should be doing both. If we are going to fly F-15s we whould be keeping them up-to-date. It is a maxim of defense economy. And it is the honorable thing for their pilots.
But in this program, it said that on two different occassions one Raptor had downed five f-15's in mock combat.... A couple of these planes could handle a whole squadron of anything the Chinese could put in the air. Made a believer outta me, tell you that.
Good. And you're judgement is correct. But we do need numbers as well. And the Administration is arbitrarily terminating F-22 production at the end of this year. The thinking evidently is that the F-35...a still-unproven...and vastly less capable plane in terms of the interception mission...is a cheaper alternative. "good enough" is their conjecture. When there is already a hot assembly line for the best solution.
It should also be pointed out that the twin-engine F-14, which was forcibly retired without a serious replacement last year, could only be replaced by a navalized twin-engine F-22. Not a single-engine F-35.
And this is all being driven by a fundamentally misplaced sense of priorities. Despite being at war...and its associated funding which doesn't contribute to the lasting defense infrastructure that gives us real protection...we are still seeing the same Defense Holiday mindset being practiced by the Adminstration which promised to fix this.
Plus, the underlying assumption that the F-35 (which takes a number of F-22-developed legacy technologies...without having the cost thereto added to its baseline cost) will stay at the promised budget caps is already an assumption that may prove to be a huge mistake.
Further, this constant stop-and-go, and premature aborting of production, indicates a profoundly weak managerial process. It represents indecision, and flux, waffling over picking the horse you are going to go with, uncertainty which is extremely unwise, unproductive, and wasteful industrial policy for defense procurement. Not very grown-up. And I don't attribute the immaturity to Rumsfeld. Far from it. I have a number of evidences that he was ordered to do these poor decisions by his boss. Bush should not be micro-managing these kinds of things...especially where he clearly has no idea what is the best way to go.
While a young Marine Corporal, I used to occassionaly sneak into the Officer's club at Kadena A.F.B.... I'll not reveal how those recon's were accomplished in case other young Marine Non-coms use the same technique. Nice Club.
The Air Force has a carefully crafted campaign to denigrate the F-15 and extol the F-22 - they're very good at PR and the sole goal of the Air Force is to get lots more F-22s.
Not that it isn't clearly a better aircraft but I have a strong suspicion that some of the excercises against countries with Russian equipment like India that have been "lost" by F-16s and F-15s were basically rigged so that would happen - makes both the USAF and the other country happy.
Nav system with problem around w/E 180 should have been found in house qual test ---- what else did they miss--not a warm feeling.
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