US Air Force and Navy Cut Weapons Programs

American politics has mistaken quantity for quality for generations. An iron law of the game is to promise more spending, presuming that if one spends more the country gets more. Increased spending on welfare programs does not necessarily make the poor better off, bigger budgets for education don’t always yield a more knowledgeable populace, and giving the Pentagon ever more cash doesn’t necessarily make the country safer. The recent cuts the Air Force and Navy have announced are excellent moves, and one only hopes that Congress goes along.

The Air Force has announced that it won’t be buying as many F/A-22 Raptor aircraft from Lockheed Martin as originally planned. With 28 currently in hand (one crashed on December 29), 160 looks to be the full production run instead of the 277. With development costs factored in, the Raptor will come out to be $256.8 million apiece. Without those costs, each one is a mere $133.3 million. This will not leave America any less secure, though. America’s enemies don’t have an air force – they hijack jet liners and set off car bombs.

Meanwhile, the Navy has come up with significant cuts of its own. The aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy is to be retired, bringing the number of aircraft carriers in the American arsenal to 12 (until the USS George H.W. Bush, currently under construction, is completed around 2009). In addition, Navy will reduce the number of destroyers it buys in the next six years. This is a savings of $1.2-$1.4 billion a pop – and a good move since the enemy has no submarines or surface fleet. And the ever loyal Marines will get fewer LPD-17 San Antonio-class amphibious landing docks and Osprey aircraft (which Vice President Cheney himself tried to kill when he was Bush the Elder’s secretary of defense).

The US Army, however, is still working on “up-armoring” its Humvees, which in English is “adding additional armor to their all purpose vehicles”. The Humvee was never thought of as an armored personnel carrier, but that’s what it is used as in Iraq. A year and a half after President Bush announced the end of major combat operations, US troops are still dying because they are traveling in unarmored vehicles when they need greater protection. Perhaps a little more spending is in order here.

Of course, it is not enough for the professional warriors at the Pentagon to decide on the tools of their trade. Congress holds paramount power in spending decisions, a body whose members are mostly lawyers not warriors (although Senator McCain of Arizona knows the profession well, and Congressman DeLay of Texas was an exterminator before he was a politician – so he knows something about killing for a purpose). These expenditures mean jobs and campaign contributions in many congressional districts. So, the military may still get weapons it doesn’t want.

© Copyright 2004 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.

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