So, Who'has read all the way through Obama's Budget?Follow

This proposal will resemble the finial budget about as much as I resemble Scarlett Johansson

Shuttle scrapped after 1 additional ISS assembly flight. The new Ford class carriers limited to 1 ship, other 2 (whihc are already in pre production materlals aquisition) pushed out 5 years and scrapped, respectivly. Zumwalt class destroyer program scrapped. Missile defense scrapped. Nuclear sub acceperated production (needed to prevent newport news from laying off huge amounts of skilled shipwrights and nuclear certified workers) put on hold. F-22 program capped at 135 aircraft. F-35 program pre production on hold until after flight test, delaying the entire program and foreign orders by at least 2 years.


I restate my previous claim of "you stupid bastards, you've killed us all."

But hey. They'll make sure that homeless people will get bussed in to vote for Democrats. That's something, right? ;)

I said nothing about reducing our military, nor did I suggest we not spend on other military technology.

Unmanned drones seem to be all the rage in the Air Force and are zero risk to our men and women. Wouldn't that be a better project to invest in than planes that are expensive to maintain?

Edited, Feb 27th 2009 6:15pm by baelnic

pg. 61

Reforms Acquisition. DOD’s new weapons
programs are among the largest, most expensive
and technically difficult that the Department has
ever tried to develop. As a consequence, they carry
a high risk of performance failure, cost increases,
and schedule delays. The Administration will
set realistic requirements and stick to them and
incorporate “best practices” by not allowing programs
to proceed from one stage of the acquisition
cycle to the next until they have achieved the
maturity to clearly lower the risk of cost growth
and schedule slippage.

Now I dislike the idea of making our military used out of date equipment, I have friends that work for some of the largest defense contractors and jobs depend on getting funds each year, while other friends complain about lack of funding for their departments. What I like to see is policy that looks for results, not who can spend the most on Lobbyists.

NASA has been underfunded for years now and I love to see it doubled so we can see the same type of results we did during the Apollo program. Then I'm still waiting for my jet backpack and vacation package on the moon.

pg. 110

Completes the International Space Station
and Advances the Development of New
Space Transportation Systems. NASA will fly
the Space Shuttle to complete the International
Space Station and then retire the Shuttle in
2010; an additional flight may be conducted if it
can safely and affordably[sic] be flown by the end of
2010. Funds freed from the Shuttle’s retirement
will enable the Agency to support development
of systems to deliver people and cargo to the International
Space Station and the Moon. As part
of this effort, NASA will stimulate private-sector
development and demonstration of vehicles that
may support the Agency’s human crew and cargo
space flight requirements.


I'm not happy over this at all, but then I realized I have the choice to try to chance policy and don't expect to get everything I want.

Now Kao, if you can promise me a Unicorn and Castle on a purple cloud, I'll vote for you in the next election.

Aircraft, and by extension aircraft carriers are our most effective military assets. While UAV's may someday supplant manned aircraft as our primary strike capability, the aircraft carrier will still play an integral roll by allowing us a military presence anywhere in the world, regardless of terrain, political affiliation, or infrastructure (fuel, basing, runways, etc). Their existance acts as a deterrent to potentially agressive naval powers (China, Russia, India to an extent) and a very potant negotiation tool with countries that are not willing to back down from certain nuclear ambitions. Decreasing our naval superiority would lead to a worldwide naval arms race as every agressor nation on the planet tried to supplant us as king of the seas.

The Ford class carriers in their own right are a huge improvement over the nimitz class. Greater capabilities, requireing fewer people, and costing billions of dollars less to operate over their service life. I think not only should we build them, I beleive we should significantly accelerate the first 5 to retire the older Nimitz carriers early for the cost savings alone.

The F-22 is a great use of money because all of our current frontline strike aircraft are nearly 15 years old. Most of them would require extensive structural retrofit within the next 8 years to maintain airworthyness, and the F-15 is a nice aircraft, but it is obsolete on several fronts. Maintenance costs continue to rise, and will exceed production costs of the F-22 as the price per aircraft of the F-22 continues to fall. Stopping F-22 production not only hamstrings our airforce, it will cost us money in the long run. The russians are already plaaning to export the Mig-35 in significant numbers, which exceeds the F-15's capabilities on most fronts.

The F-35 is an average fighter aircraft. It is suitable for support roles, it is not a frontline strike aircraft. It lacks the horsepower of the F-22, the advantages of two engine thrust vectoring for manouverability, and speed that the F-22 can bring to the table.

Upgrading and maintaining our military hardware, especially when there is a proven ability to decrease the number of needed aircraft due to increased capability of the aircraft and demonstratable savings on maintenance time and cost makes sense. Killing the program and incurring the early cancellation fees for no return make no sense, especially since it will cost thousands of jobs in california and the midwest to do so.

How can you not see the benifit is my question?

Thats ok, we won't be able to afford busses soon, so they'll ahve to walk like the rest of us.

You don't think china could pull it off in a few years? Really?

I'll toss out the obligatory observation that spending money on "anything" as long as it creates jobs is apparently ok, unless those jobs involve something as unimportant as national defense. And as Kao very nicely summarizes, the cost to *not* put these newer systems into the field will outstrip the costs we save over probably the next decade and will increase the longer we wait.

I could buy the whole F-22 vs F-35 argument, except I don't see a corresponding increase in F-35 orders, so it's not really about choice. It's just about eliminating as much military spending as possible.

Can we just acknowledge that there are a whole lot of prominent and powerful Liberals who just plain don't like anything having to do with the military and that this is what drives these sorts of cuts?

I'll toss out the obligatory observation that spending money on "anything" as long as it creates jobs is apparently ok, unless those jobs involve something as unimportant as national defense.

That's a fair point. Let me write this down, "Gbaji mistakenly makes valid point, 9 pm, 2009-Feb-27." I should be updating that again in early 2011 if history is any guide.

Sure, but they don't need full control, all they need to do is get it to accept a command for a fraction of a second and destabilize in flight. Getting our command syntax would not exactly be that difficult. I'm certain they already have it given various missing Predators that have never been recovered, and if you had an asset close enough to try anything, blasting a 24 byte "immidiate full 35 degree down elevator" command simultaniously over a huge spectrum and hopeing to get lucky for that split second isn't an unreasonable approach. I suppose they might have some sort of security authentication on each command to the UAV, and definitly on weapons free authorization, but they can't put basic flight control through too many checks or else the manouverability of the UAV would suffer.

I suppose at that point it would just be easier to shoot it down with a missile, but if you had a large group incoming it might work.

You forgot "EST". It's only 6 by my watch... ;)

As the resident pilot on this board, allow me to explain why UAVs are not the end-all or final answer to the issue of air superiority.

While UAVs certainly have capabilities that far exceed a machine driven by a human, there is one critical area where a UAV cannot perform adequately, nor even in a support role: Immediate and fluid combat operations. Why? Because a UAV is severely limited by the operator flying the craft in a box many miles away and is completely hampered by the lack of instinctive, cognitive, intuitive, associative, and laterally-based judgements that hinge on the on-location flight experience that data collection via sensors just cannot duplicate nor transmit.

Much of flying is instinctual, an artform. No, I am not kidding. Studies have shown flying skills use brain function in the same locations where creation occurs in artists.

Totem