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They quote a guy from the Center for Defense Information, that is opposed to the F-22, that they should just “fix it” as if it were a simple matter.

To which I would make two points. 1. “Fixing” a major structural failure in a 30 year old air frame that has been subjected to extreme loads is not a trivial undertaking and 2, I am not aware of any major defense procurement program the CDI has ever supported. Maybe there is one, but I don’t know about it. Can anybody fill in on that?

They quote a guy from the Center for Defense Information, that is opposed to the F-22, that they should just “fix it” as if it were a simple matter.

I have a simple rule of thumb when it comes to articles on defense matters: the moment I see the jokers at CDI cited I stop reading. I don't recall *ever* reading anything by their "analysts" saying that the US needed to do anything other than keep using existing weaponry ... in ever-diminishing numbers. If this was 1975 they'd probably be telling us that we didn't need F-15s because our F-4s were working just fine and dandy.

Back in college the CDI's cute little hour-long weekly informercial "America's Defense Monitor" was piped into the campus's cable TV system (it came by way of our campus receiving WHUT - which is Howard University's PBS station). I used sit around with my roomate (who was going through USMC PLC) and some of his buddies from the various ROTC programs and play drinking games with the show, because their slant on the material was so predictable. I remember them questioning why the US needed the M1 Abrams, when the M60A3 was working just fine. And why the US needed the M2/M3 Bradley when we had FIELDS full of unused M113s. They really had serious issues with US CVNs ... IIRC one of their guys was a retired USN Admiral, a former CBG commander who would wax on about how he'd run exercises with smaller UK and French carriers in the 1970s (the old Ark Royal and Clemenceau/Foch) and the beheamouth USN carriers were complete overkill.

They invariably worked into the program inferences (if not outright claims) of how Reagan really wanted to start a nuclear war with the Soviets ... and how the Soviets would win.