I wouldn’t expect money for a new bomber to be well spent. You see, daddy can’t program manage. 80-100 large bombers most likely means 2 that are unflyable before it is cancelled in an effort to top the U.S. Navy’s A-12 program
Donely, Schwartz and their staff were a big hit on the Hill. They piled out of a little clown car tripping all the way up the steps with their over-sized shoes. The tourists loved it.
Old aircraft are expensive to maintain. And now new aircraft are expensive to maintain. Fools are expensive to maintain.
Rising aircraft maintenance costs also are a huge concern, she said. “New aircraft generally are more expensive to maintain. They’re more sophisticated, they are more software intensive.” The current cost trends are “unsustainable,” she said. To avert a future shortfall in maintenance accounts, the Air Force initiated an “end-to-end assessment of the entire supply chain all the way to the depots.”
Yeah. Seen that one already Darth. AFMC is awash in efficiency studies.How many studies in institutional groupthink have been done?
The overly self-important Williams Foundation has blessed us with a proclamation about what Australia should do about the faulty F-35 program. Procurement should be delayed.
The independent Australian airpower thinktank the Williams Foundation has called for Australia’s acquisition of the F-35 JSF to be delayed to allow the aircraft to mature, in light of recent news that IOC (initial operating capability) for the US Air Force may now be as late as 2018.
This is the first bit of common sense to come from this organization on the topic. Mostly what you hear from them are mountains of unsupportable claims of how great the aircraft will be for the RAAF, even if it will end up being obsolete against the threat.
The rest of their language is worrying. I don’t know how you can keep a classic Hornet “world-class” through and past 2020.
“In the Williams Foundation’s judgment, it would be sensible to wait and see what happens with the F-35, while simultaneously investigating the cost of capability issues involved in maintaining the classic Hornet beyond 2020,” the organisation says in a statement. “An interim force structure based on Vigilair, JORN, Wedgetail, MRTT, AP-3C, C-17, 24 Super Hornets, and up to 71 classic Hornets would still be world-class for the next decade.”
That is a lot of targets that will be lucky to defend themselves if we get into a real war.
The Williams Foundation drags up the bizarre history of how the F-111 was procured for Australia in hopes of giving the impression that things will work out. My thoughts on that are to break out the Ouija board.
I don’t think the organization’s name-sake would be happy to be used in such a way.
As for the “independence” of the Williams foundation, there was a time when their urge to show their rent-seeking colours was more obvious. They used to have a web page linked off of their site that showed their sponsors. One of them—surprise–was Lockheed Martin. The page is still there in a semi-stripped form, and if you mouse-over the white area of the page you can see links demonstrating what was once their original independence before they became today’s independence.
So, the Williams foundation has finally stated one thing about the F-35 procurement process that is right. Kinda. Plans to procure the F-35 for Australia shouldn’t be delayed. They should be cancelled. The only way to fix this mess is to start over with a clean sheet of paper.
There is some good reading about the cost of the new war we are in here at Forbes. In involves some history.
The history discussed is how we went from a nation that stood up a military only when we needed it—long ago we had the time to do this and things were less high-tech—up to today, where we cannot manage military procurement, the economy is in the tank and the War Department in the West Wing along with the spendthrifts on the Hill keep draining our limited resources.
For years, it is all our fault. We elected the people on the Hill and the Presidents. Proper voting might save us; or not.
The Forbes article mentions how post-WWII we had the industrial might to build the military machine to what it is today. What it doesn’t mention much is that some years before the end of the Cold War, we decided (our votes put them there; that kind of “we”) that having a strong home industry is no longer important. We declared war on the American worker. No, I’m not a Teamsters guy, a Democrat or a Republican. I believe in “America first”. I do not believe in free trade. I believe in fair trade.
We decided that gambling on the market—the dot com boom and bust and flipping houses, with a boom and bust—would make our nation healthy. It did not. Today, we no longer have the industry, the science and math people in numbers or much else to maintain the military we have or to create and sustain domestic business. We don’t even seem too interested in protecting our borders or seeing to it the workforce we have has a legal right to be here. “A thousand points of light” and “a new world order” is our undoing. A nation that is too heavy in the service industry is like a football team composed of bench staff. Besides weapons that cost too much and aren’t always that useful, not much of what we have is worth exporting.
Wasteful Federal spending of all flavors and dumb wars for no gain are dead weight we have to eliminate.
If our elected officials can’t take this on board and change our direction, we will never recover.
The Annual List
I really didn’t know what else to call it. That will do.
The U.S. budget is going to get beaten down. The following is only one opinion of what can stay and what has to go for the U.S. military to even consider surviving in a grave budget climate.
The U.S. Navy
Park two carriers and stop production on current carriers.
Keep building Burkes at a low rate.
End the LCS. Existing LCS contracts will go until completed. All existing LCS will be transfered to the U.S. Coast Guard where they will patrol in the Carribean and out of San Diego.
R&D for a nuclear destroyer. The goal is to have a all nuclear powered carrier battle group.
Scrap the DDX.
The submarine program will continue as-is.
The carrier air wing plan will continue minus the F-35 as this program will be cancelled.
The USMC. It will be retired with whatever manpower slots are needed, transfered over into the U.S. Army.
The U.S. Air Force. It will cease to exist in its present form. All flying units will be transfered into the Air National Guard. The U.S. Air Force such as it is, will be nothing more than a management function at the DOD level to see that the Air National Guard functions. It will go by the name; Air National Guard Headquarters. The current U.S. Federal budget used on today’s Air Force (significantly reduced) will feed into their own seperate color of money at the Guard units.
A sample of some of the airframes allowed to exist will be the F-22, the F-15E, the A-10, the C-130, the C-17, the C-5 and the B-2. The B-2 nuclear mission will end. The B-1, B-52 and F-16 will be retired. As the KC-X comes online, half of them will be managed by the U.S. Navy.
ICBMs will be managed as a separate DOD command yet to be named.
Military space systems will be managed under their own command reporting to the DOD.
The U.S. Army. Any kind of manpower asset that exists in the current wars today that is doing ground missions will have those slots moved into the U.S. Army. We do not need 4 land Armies. Large portions of infantry, engineer and aviation skills will be put into the National Guard with Regiments being the prime organic unit.
Keep a watchful eye on Army Aviation to make sure it gets funded and properly sustained.
There will be two types of basic training centers. One for the Army and Air National Guard and the other for the Navy. The USAF Academy will be closed.
Half of all flag ranks will be retired immediately.
Nunn-McCurdy is about as useful as a speed bump. The DOD does not know how to procure major weapons systems.
Rather than press ahead with more mistakes, it would be good if the DOD stopped all major weapons procurement programs for a whole fiscal year while senior DOD project managers and law-makers come up with tougher guidelines that bring sanity to the process.
When the DOD proves that it can estimate costs on large projects, then it can continue. We do not have the money to waste on stupid decisions that have produced $400B in cost blow-outs.
“These trends in Nunn-McCurdy breaches tell us that too many of our weapon systems have costs that are spiraling out of control,” declared Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate federal financial management subcommittee.
Or, just pretend the little tire-patch efforts will work and watch the whole mess come to a dramatic halt when Congress says; “Surprise, your DOD budget for this year is $200B; if it ever gets approved.”
The current system is a disease that can be fixed by amputation. If not, the patient dies
The President in 2007. How things change….
Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Thursday the United States cannot use its military to solve humanitarian problems and that preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn’t a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces there.
Our war leader says that the fool’s errand in Libya is worth it. I don’t agree. There are any number of countries—if you want to call them that—around the world that have all kinds of violence in them. There isn’t anything special about Libya that makes American security interests worth this effort.
We have poor flag ranks that think LCS, EFV, F-35 and so on are good ideas. No wonder they sold this under-skilled President and staff a bill of goods that won’t do anything well. We are engaged in regime change yet we were told for years by this President’s fan-base that we should not do this; that you cannot deliver democracy at the point of a gun, Tomahawk cruise missile, bombing and so-on.
When you engage in any war civilians will get killed. You cannot fire off hundreds of Tomahawks and hundreds of JDAMs without killing some poor slob who’s only crime is that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. This includes women and children. This is why when we engage in wars we should only do so if it is a dire threat to our national security. Libya is not. This President, his advisors and all of his chicken-hawk friends who would have never enlisted in the military for any reason, are guilty for pushing an illegal use of force.
And, who are the rebels? Are they a worse enemy? Similar? Are they just as ugly as what they are trying to replace?
You cannot be half-pregnant in war. To have any chance at “winning” this useless war, we will need ground troops. To get this done quick, we should put troops in Tripoli. It has an airfield. It has a port. It is defensible with the long kill-zone around it with no cover. Most important, it is the capital. Our choices are simple. Stop everything now or land at Tripoli and hold it.
I have nothing but contempt for this administration. Ditto with the last administration. Maybe there will be regime change in 2012 for the U.S. I wouldn’t count on it being a solution. Kind of like this war.
The Lexington Institute’s Lockheed Martin’s Mr. Thompson Baghdad Bob is at it again.
The conventional-takeoff Air Force version will be the most heavily produced F-35, comprising over 70 percent of the domestic production run and almost all of the export sales. The Air Force plans to buy 1,763 conventional-takeoff F-35s, while the Navy and Marine Corps collectively will buy 680 of their two variants. Overseas allies are expected to buy thousands of the planes over the next three decades as they replace aging Cold War fighters and seek a low-cost solution to their requirement for a versatile and survivable tactical aircraft.
Charlie Sheen will clean up his act. The Lions are “on-track” to win the Super Bowl next year. Afghanistan is winnable. The U.S. will see fiscal health by the next election.
“With a few hundred thousand people rioting in London demanding more give-aways from the government that it can’t afford … well … there you go.”
Will the U.S. follow?
