The Lexington Institutes’s Loren Thompson has a piece in UPI today which paints a pretty bleak picture of the Air Force and its ability to counter conventional threats.
The decay is most pronounced in the U.S. Air Force, the service that would have to take the lead in coping with urgent threats posed by Russia, China and other industrialized countries. After 20 years of neglect, the Air Force’s fleet of combat aircraft is older than the Navy’s fleet of warships. During his four-year stint as defense secretary, current Vice President Dick Cheney killed the service’s cold-war fighter programs, terminated the next-generation B-2 bomber at a mere 20 planes, slashed the future C-17 cargo plane program, and decimated every other facet of U.S. air power. Clinton’s defense secretaries added back some planes that Cheney had cut, but delayed and decreased the next-generation F-22 fighter that was the centerpiece of plans for future air dominance. Then Preident Bush’s long-serving Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld launched the entire U.S. Department of Defense on a leap-ahead trajectory to military transformation that ignored air power for another six years.
The end result is that the U.S. Air Force now flies 45-year-old aerial refueling tankers using a plane retired by commercial airlines a quarter-century ago; its F-22 fighter program has been cut 75 percent even though the aging fighters it would replace are so old they operate under flight restriction; its production lines for C-130 and C-17 transport planes are scheduled for closure despite lack of adequate airlift; and the service has canceled its planned family of aircraft for replacing cold-war radar and reconnaissance planes. The only bright spot on the horizon is the tri-service F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, but Navy efforts to slash funding for JSF suggest the Air Force can’t even count on that program coming to fruition.
You can read the rest here.
