A Force at Razor’s Edge

There will be no margin for error, said senior Air Force leaders at AFA’s Air Warfare Symposium. In years just ahead, the Air Force will maintain bare minimums of sufficiency in manpower, programs, and systems, and it will stay in that unhappy situation at least until the American economic situation improves.

As a result of this, the service can no longer tolerate programmatic delays. It will cancel nonperformers and will invest mainly in new systems it considers sure things—and relevant—throughout the near- to mid-term.

These were the tough messages delivered in February by top Air Force leaders at AFA’s Air Warfare Symposium in Orlando, Fla. Fresh from a two-day meeting of the service’s four-star generals, they described the Air Force as pulling its weight in the ongoing conflicts overseas but fighting a pitched battle against aged equipment, multiplying missions, and slack resources.

“It remains our No. 1 priority to prevail in today’s wars,” Air Force Secretary Michael B. Donley said in his keynote address. He ranked USAF’s top three contributions to the war effort as “projecting US power at great distances through air mobility,” closelyNun integrating air forces with ground units, and partnering with other air forces.

With the destruction of our manufacturing base over the last 20 years, the all out attack on small business by the government, and the piling on of government debt over the last 10 years, our economy can no longer afford to maintain the military at current levels.

The Soviet economy and government collapsed trying to sustain military parity with the US in the 1980’s to counter the Reagan buildup. While we are not in an arms race with another nation today, we have overwhelmed our productive capacity with a mountain of debt, not unlike the state the UK found itself in at the end of WWII. In the five years after WWII the UK retrenched from a global superpower to a second tier player, giving up its colonies and redirecting its investment in military power to social programs.

The US became a military superpower by having the world’s largest and most productive industrial base. Our decision to open up our domestic market and outsource our manufacturing base has resulted in the loss of our industrial strength and with it millions of middle class jobs. We are incurring trillions in debt, not to purchase productive assets but to build a huge government bureaucracy and fund domestic programs that contribute nothing to the future economic development of the nation. Spend 50 million to build a factory and you have a productive asset that will provide jobs for 20 years. Spend that same 50 million on welfare payments or salaries for bureaucrats and that same 50 million is gone forever. Unfortunately, we borrowed the 50 million so while the productive potential of the spending is gone, the debt stays with us and continues to increase as we borrow more to pay the interest as well as fund the next year’s social payments.

We are no longer creating wealth in America, we are destroying it. The reality is we are beginning the defunding of the US defense infrastructure. We will not fund a domestic anti-missile defense capability. New fighters have been scrapped. Our space program has been essentially terminated. No doubt when troops are withdrawn from Iraq and Afghanistan (we can’t afford to keep paying to sustain them) we will decide to reduce the number of carrier strike forces with some noise about the absence of need.

Europe pays for its social welfare state by not funding a military capability sufficient to defend it. Until the fall of the Soviet Union the Europeans enjoyed the security of the US nuclear umbrella and hundreds of thousands of US troops stationed in Germany. The resources those nations should have been using for defense was diverted to social welfare programs. Essentially the US subsidized the European social states by giving them free defense from the Soviet Union.

With the passage of health care, we have now put in place the full cost of the European social democratic state at a time when our economic power is waning due to the outsourcing of our industrial base. Economics will force us to cut our military to third world status, just as the outsourcing of manufacturing is killing off most middle class jobs.

We are now experiencing the cumulative effect of a number of bad decisions since the end of Reagan’s second term. Had Obama not been elected, we would have reached the end of our resources. His election only ensured we would reach the tipping point faster.

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