Two decades of decay

[unhappycamper]

Two decades of decay
BY LOREN THOMPSON

The Air Force begins its sixth decade in circumstances that aviators elsewhere might consider enviable: unrivaled for global air dominance. But that is not the way Air Force leaders view their situation. They see a decrepit air fleet in which the average aircraft is older than the average Navy warship and which is rapidly approaching a breaking point as a result of continuous use in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Every category of airframe operating in Iraq and Afghanistan is suffering from metal fatigue, corrosion, parts obsolescence and other age-related maladies that diminish readiness and raise safety concerns. And yet, timely replacement is not assured.

How did the air fleet fall into such a state of disrepair that only 60 percent of the planes could be airborne quickly in a national emergency? Why has there been almost no purchase of new aircraft since the Reagan years? To answer those questions, it is necessary to look beyond the collapse of communism and the "procurement holiday" that followed. Every war is followed by a downdraft in weapons outlays, but when defense spending recovered in this decade, it produced surprisingly few benefits for the Air Force. The problem, it seems, is that at precisely the moment when fleet modernization became urgent, a new crop of policymakers appeared who didn't share Air Force views about the future of warfare.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. When Republicans won the White House in 2000, the recent triumph of U.S. air power in the Balkans had captured the popular imagination. Defense intellectuals were speculating that a new era in war fighting had arrived. Bush administration rhetoric about military transformation, combined with the traditional Republican affinity for weapons spending, led Air Force backers to believe the service would be able to move out smartly on "recapitalization" of its Cold War fleet. But the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks drastically rewrote the national security agenda in ways that tended to favor ground forces, and it soon became apparent that the Bush administration's concept of transformation favored networks over traditional combat systems, spacecraft over aircraft and unmanned vehicles over piloted airplanes.

The stage was thus set for continuous bureaucratic warfare between the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and the Air Force. In 2001, they argued about whether more B-2 bombers were needed. (The Air Force said no.) In 2002, they argued over whether the F-22 fighter was needed. (OSD said no.) In 2003, they argued about how to replace Cold War radar planes. (OSD wanted to do the mission from space.) And in 2004, they argued over Air Force plans to jump-start tanker modernization by leasing planes. (OSD went silent when it encountered congressional opposition.) So by the time President Bush's first term ended, the enmity between advisers to then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and proponents of air power was palpable and unremitting.

Rumsfeld found the Navy Department far more tractable in pursuing his ideas for transformation and responded by rewarding sea service representatives with most of the top jobs at combatant commands and on the joint staff. This trend was reinforced by the discovery of contracting irregularities in the Air Force, which cast a pall over some of its candidates for joint billets. But the larger problem Air Force leaders faced was that policymakers running the Pentagon simply didn't share their enthusiasm for air power. In fact, if all the Rumsfeld efforts to terminate aircraft programs had been successful, only one fixed-wing production line would have remained by early in the next decade: the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Rest of article at: http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2007/09/2923793


Loren Thompson is chief operating officer of the Lexington Institute in Washington, D.C.



uhc comment: Just for giggles, I went to their web site --> http://lexingtoninstitute.org/ & clicked on an interesting 'story.'

TROOP SURGE FAILS TO YIELD POLITICAL PROGRESS -- IN AMERICA
Sep 12, 2007

Iraq isn't the only place where a recent change in military strategy has failed to produce political reconciliation. In Washington, Republicans are singing the praises of General Petraeus while some Democrats call him "General Betray-Us," providing the latest evidence of how polarized American politics has become. The public is not pleased. A New York Times-CBS News survey finds that 68% of the public thinks the military is better equipped than the political parts of the government to fashion an acceptable outcome in Iraq, while only 21% put their faith in Congress and 5% in the President.

These findings are consistent with other polling data placing the popularity of the President and Congress at the lowest levels recorded in modern times. Presidential approval has fallen to levels not seen since the Watergate scandal, while the Gallup Poll finds 18% approval of the Congress and 76% disapproval. The disaffection with political institutions is approaching a point where America seems more like Weimar Germany than Jefferson's Republic. How can this be happening at a time when the economy is growing and American culture is admired around the globe?

It isn't just the war in Iraq, which has claimed fewer American lives in four years of fighting than smoking claims every four days. The more fundamental problem is that the two major political parties can't seem to agree on anything anymore, including the need to produce a federal budget. Their philosophies of government are simply too different. And while their views of global affairs are little more than extensions of their domestic values -- individualism versus collectivism, realism versus idealism, etc. -- a look at the divergent ways the parties approach national security makes you wonder how they can continue to co-exist in the same political system.

There are five basic precepts underpinning Republican security policies. First, Republicans believe in peace through strength, which means spending generously on the military. Second, they believe in self-reliance rather than depending on the good intentions of others, an implicit justification for unilateralism in global affairs. Third, they believe American values are the only suitable basis for human progress, and therefore must be spread around the world. Fourth, they believe that national interest is the key driver of state behavior, and that collective security arrangements like the United Nations are doomed to failure. Finally, they prefer concrete, tangible solutions to security challenges, like missile defense, rather than abstractions like deterrence or the balance of power.

Democrats seem to inhabit a different world. They want to address the root causes of security problems, such as grinding poverty and denial of human rights, rather than resorting to military force. They favor the collective action of like-minded nations over unilateralism, and think that morality must come ahead of national interest in defining America's policies abroad. And they believe that the security concerns defined by traditional power politics are being superceded by non-traditional challenges such as climate change, the spread of infectious diseases, and the proliferation of technologies of mass murder.

The tensions between these contending worldviews can be contained as long as prosperity persists at home and the stakes in foreign wars are not overwhelming. But if the U.S. economy nosedived or national survival were on the line, the Weimar analogy might look like more than a rhetorical flourish.




Sure looks like PNAC or some variant thereof.