However, its senior leadership is way off the reservation on the definition of air power.
Despite production delays for the F-35, Air Force Secretary Michael Donley insisted the government remained fully committed to the program and to purchasing a total of 2,443 of the aircraft as planned.We may be in trouble for the long term if this is not turned around.
'This is a must-do for our armed forces. It's the future of the fighter force, not only for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps, but also about 12 other international partners as well,' he said.
7 comments:
Are you sure these idiots were not nurtured and trained by the DMO?
Edmund Burke said,
‘The only thing necessary for the triumph [of evil] is
for good men to do nothing.’
We are in trouble for the long term. History all to often shows us that when forces obtain supremacy, they ultimately suffer from over-confidence and arrogance. There has not been true competition (in the context of actual war fighting) in the air for decades. Until the real threat emerges and there are real losses, the folly will generally continue. It's a natural cycle of history.
As a rebuttal to my own comment, I want to add, Where has all the leadership gone? across the board. The US has military budgets in the range of $600 billion per year. That is a a tremendous amount of money. At times it looks more like a TARP program than a military one. Contractors have become all to comfortable draining the system for more profit, while the leadership just pays more. It's the tail wagging the dog.
Canuck Fighter, you ask: "Where has all the leadership gone?". In these days of the corporate military, (to coin a phrase), I fear that many of not most of those with get and go do just that - feeling utterly stultified in the corporate culture that seems to pervade the system today (even moreseo, it would seem, than in my days in it) - they get up and go, leaving too many people behind on the climb up the greasy pole who, almost to a man, have learned very quickly that the one way to guarantee you'll make it to the next rung is NEVER to rock the corporate boat.
From some of the replies I have seen from (apparently) relatively junior officers on this and other sites, this trait seems to be ingrained into the serving officer's psyche very, very early in the piece today.
Your probably right. I wonder how many air force types have received or will receive jobs from LockMart or others.
Institutional momentum. And it's the only game in town. If the DoD types don't hurray the F-35 Congress might have ideas ...
Agree with Canuck Fighter.
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