Perhaps surprisingly, I am at least unsure that more F-22s at a third of a billion apiece should have been bought.
Now the F-35 is rising in cost to over $130 million each. That’s each !
Add to that that we have not lost an aircraft in an aerial battle since the Vietnam war, and that the fighter pilot is becoming something like the cowboy … an icon of a certain period in our history, but a fading folk hero.
Recent graduates of the fighter pilot schools are not going to our dwindling fleet of F-16s, but to the drone control rooms in Nevada.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to justify a large fleet of air combat vehicles, because there is no credible potential adversary out there.
Now, that does not mean that we do not need a robust military force; it means that if our adversaries are guys in ragged burnouses carrying AK-47s, there may be little for the billion dollar weapon systems to shoot at.
Yes, we need to keep our eye on China, and Iran is, indeed a credible threat, especially to our ally, Israel, but the probability of what was considered a classical threat… a thousand armored vehicles leading twenty thousand mobile infantry seems a fading possibility.
It may well be that the final armored battle in history was fought against Saddam’s Russian built tanks in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
New weapon systems are appearing, such as small, autonomous flying vehicles that attack anything that moves in swarms and are expendable, but cost in the five or ten thousand dollar range.
I think our real vulnerability may lie in our electronic systems, all of which can be rendered useless instantly by an electromagnetic pulse weapon.
Imagine that one detonates over Kansas, destroying everything up to a thousand miles from ground zero.
That’s everything electrical or electronic, including all vehicles, computers, bank records, communication devices, cash registers,etc., etc.
Within a couple of days all the people in that  geographic area would be out of food, immobile and totally helpless.
That’s the kind of warfare we will face in the near future.
Now, I am not convinced that Obama and his people are thinking like that.
I really believe they are rank amateurs and naive as Hell about all things military, and that the Admirals/Generals either cater to them or retire.
So the threat is two fold: The unbelievable naivete of the Obama-ites, and the willingness of many top military career officers to “accept the inevitable”.
The only thing that seems likely to reverse these trends is a real, rising Chinese threat .. and I do not think the younger generation of Chinese will have any interest in waging nuclear war against the USA.
Economic, and perhaps even electronic war? Perhaps, though I’m even skeptical about that.
They are far more likely to be enjoying their arrival at the top of the world’s economic heap.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 15th, 2010 at 5:13 pm and is filed under Aviation, History, Military. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.