 |
|
May 24, 2013
May 22, 2013
John Thorne:
They launched the 'Arab Spring' but now yearn for the good old days of a strongman
May 20, 2013
Richard A. Serrano: Is Meir Kahane's assassin now a changed man?
Melissa Healy: Genetic copies of living people from embryos no longer science fiction
Jewz in the Newz by Nate Bloom : Jews Inducted into Rock Hall of Fame; Anton Yelchin co-stars in New "Trek" film; Kutcher (but not Kunis) visits Israel; Jewish TV Star Praises Jewish Rap Star
The Kosher Gourmet by Cathy Pollak: WARNING: This WALNUT CAKE WITH PRALINE FROSTING, perfect for afternoon coffee, is addicting
May 13, 2013
Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo: Why the giving of the document that would permanently change the world could only be done in desolation
David G. Savage: Church-state, literally? Supreme Court weighing public school graduation in a church
May 10, 2013
Rabbi Berel Wein: Be all that you should be
May 8, 2013
Peter Ford: Why China is welcoming both Israel's Netanyahu and Palestinians' Abbas
Warren Richey: Obama administration quietly backs out of appeal over new contraceptive mandate
Fred Weir: At Kerry-Putin meeting, US-Russia relations thaw --- a tad
The Kosher Gourmet by Leela Cyd Ross : Almost too pretty to eat, this colorful salad with Sicilian inspiration will tickle the taste buds and delight your visual sensibility
May 6, 2013
May 3, 2013
Kids, kittens the Same? With employee perks at struggling Internet pioneer Yahoo! it's hard to tell
Sandy Kleffman: Artificial kidney offers hope to patients tethered to a dialysis machine
April 29, 2013
Roy Gutman: Poland's new Jewish museum celebrates life, doesn't revisit Holocaust
Mark Clayton: Terrorism in America: Is US missing a chance to learn from failed plots?
Kim Murphy: Boston Bomber's 'Svengali' Revealed
Pete Spotts: Tiny satellites + cellphones = cheaper 'eyes in the sky' for NASA
April 26, 2013
Clifford D. May: Defense in the Age of Jihadist Terrorism
Sharon Palmer, R.D.: How to feel your best -- with plenty of energy, a healthy weight and optimal mental and physical function -- without driving yourself batty
April 24, 2013
|
| |
Jewish World Review
Dec. 28, 2007
/ 19 Teves 5768
Gordon England's War
By
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.
| 
|
|
|
|
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
In darkened theaters around the country this week, millions
of Americans have been getting a civics lesson. In a somewhat
romanticized and selective rendering of "Charlie Wilson's War," they are
seeing how a colorful Congressman managed to work behind closed doors to
fund a project - arming Afghans fighting Soviet invaders - with
momentous consequences, both intended and unintended.
Today, decisions that may be equally momentous are again
being made behind closed doors in official Washington. Many of these
are being driven by a single man, Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon
England, with a zeal worthy of Charlie Wilson at his prime, if little of
his panache.
The Pentagon's Number 2 has traditionally run "the
Building," managing its vast bureaucracy and effectively being the
ultimate allocator of funds among its competing programs and
responsibilities. England currently has the unenviable task of playing
such a role at a time when defense funding is substantially larger in
real terms than it has been over much of the past few decades yet -
thanks to extensive, and expensive, world-wide combat and combat-support
operations around the world - woefully inadequate to meet the military's
recapitalization requirements.
Matters have been made worse by the fact that neither this
nor previous administrations have invested the huge sums required fully
to modernize the Army and Marine Corps' armored forces, the Navy's
fleets and all three services' air arms. To varying degrees,
recapitalization programs have been pursued, but most have been delayed,
dramatically reduced in size and, in some cases, simply canceled
outright.
The result has been to leave the armed forces fighting
today's wars with yesterday's weapons. While many have been improved
and their useful lives extended with more contemporary technology, our
troops are handicapped - and exposed unnecessarily to peril - because
they are operating outdated and even obsolescing equipment.
To some extent, this travesty is being obscured by the
nature of today's wars. Counterinsurgency operations place a premium on
different weaponry and tactics than would conflicts with what are now
euphemistically called "peer" or "near-peer" competitors. In this
instance, however, it is not the generals who are guilty of being
blinded by thoughts of "fighting the last war."
In fact, most in uniform appreciate that countries like Russia and China
are demonstrating a determination to field militaries comparable to and
capable of inflicting great harm on the best of our armed forces.
Worse, they are both proliferating advanced weapon systems designed for
that purpose to others who wish us ill, from the mullahs in Iran to Kim
Jong-Il's North Korea to Hugo Chavez's Venezuela.
The best way to contend with these and other emerging threats is to
dissuade such adversaries from believing that conflict with the United
States could ever redound to their benefit. Toward that end, this
country should field wherever possible decisively superior military
equipment. A case in point is the Air Force's F-22 Raptor.
This plane is quite simply the best fighter aircraft in the world.
Thanks to a combination of "stealthy" characteristics that make it very
difficult to detect and target, the ability to operate for sustained
periods at supersonic speeds and its extraordinary agility, the Raptor
seems likely to secure for years to come something Americans have taken
for granted in every conflict since World War II: air superiority
essential to victory on the ground. In operational testing and
deployments to date, the "Fifth Generation" F-22 has demonstrated the
ability to defeat the best adversary aircraft and most sophisticated air
defenses of the kind Russia has just agreed to sell Iran.
Yet, in Gordon England's Pentagon, the Raptor is an endangered species.
Where Charlie Wilson labored in secret to secure funds to provide more
and better arms to the Afghans, the "DepSecDef" is adamantly insisting
in the closed-door budget deliberations over which he presides that
production of the world's best fighter be terminated next year.
Fortunately, many of Charlie Wilson's successors on Capitol Hill have
begun to engage on the question of whether to keep open the production
line for the F-22. A bipartisan group involving some 200 members of the
House and Senate representing nearly every political stripe wrote
England's boss, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, last month urging that
the Raptor line be kept open.
The necessity for such a course of action is all the clearer in the wake
of an ominous discovery concerning the U.S. inventory of existing
front-line air-superiority aircraft: Every one of the nation's 440
F-15Ds have been grounded in recent weeks after one of these twenty-five
year-old planes broke up in flight and the subsequent discovery of
potentially lethal cracks in at least eight more.
It seems obvious that the momentous decision of whether to terminate
the F-22 at just 180 aircraft - one that could prove fateful in
deterring a future conflict with increasingly hostile and aggressive
adversaries - should be made not by a lame-duck presidency, but a newly
mandated one. As a practical matter, this will require Gordon England to
stop waging war against the F-22, allowing more than $500 million now
earmarked for termination costs to be applied instead to long-lead
procurement of one more block of twenty Raptors and permitting the Air
Force to budget the substantially larger sums required in Fiscal Year
2010 fully to fund them.
Ultimately, the decision as to whether America will be able to deter
future conflicts, and to wage them successfully if deterrence fails,
will depend on a comprehensive recapitalization of every one of the
armed services. The Joint Chiefs of Staff are calling for a sustained
allocation of more resources - specifically, at least 4% of Gross
Domestic Product. Now is the time to determine whether the candidates
to be our next Commander-in-Chief will pledge to do so.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
JWR contributor Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. heads the Center for Security Policy. Comments by clicking here.
Archives
BUY FRANK'S LATEST
"War Footing: 10 Steps America Must Take to Prevail in the War for the Free World"
America has been at war for years, but until now, it has not been clear with whom or precisely for what. And we have not been using the full resources we need to win.
With the publication of War Footing, lead-authored by Frank Gaffney, it not only becomes clear who the enemy is and how high the stakes are, but also exactly how we can prevail.
War Footing shows that we are engaged in nothing less than a War for the Free World. This is a fight to the death with Islamofascists, Muslim extremists driven by a totalitarian political ideology that, like Nazism or Communism before it, is determined to destroy freedom and the people who love it. Sales help fund JWR.
|
© 2006, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.
|
|
Arnold Ahlert
Mitch Albom
Jay Ambrose
Michael Barone
Barrywood
Lori Borgman
Stratfor Briefing
Mona Charen
Linda Chavez
Richard Z. Chesnoff
Ann Coulter
Greg Crosby
Larry Elder
Suzanne Fields
Christine Flowers
Frank J. Gaffney
Bernie Goldberg
Jonah Goldberg
Julia Gorin
Jonathan Gurwitz
Paul Greenberg
Argus Hamilton
Victor Davis Hanson
Betsy Hart
Ron Hart
Nat Hentoff
A. Barton Hinkle
Jeff Jacoby
Paul Johnson
Jack Kelly
Ch. Krauthammer
David Limbaugh
Kathryn Lopez
Rich Lowry
Michelle Malkin
Jackie Mason
Ann McFeatters
Dale McFeatters
Dana Milbank
Jeanne Moos
Dick Morris
Jim Mullen
Deroy Murdock
Judge A. Napolitano
Bill O'Reilly
Clarence Page
Kathleen Parker
Star Parker
Dennis Prager
Wesley Pruden
Tom Purcell
Sharon Randall
Robert Robb
Cokie & Steve Roberts
Heather Robinson
Debra J. Saunders
Martin Schram
Greg Schwem
Culture Shlock
David Shribman
Roger Simon
Lenore Skenazy
Michael Smerconish
Thomas Sowell
Ben Stein
Mark Steyn
John Stossel
Cal Thomas
Dan Thomasson
Bob Tyrrell
Diana West
Dave Weinbaum
George Will
Walter Williams
Byron York
ZeitGeist
Mort Zuckerman
Robert Arial
Chuck Asay
Baloo
Lisa Benson
Chip Bok
Dry Bones
John Branch
John Cole
J. D. Crowe
Matt Davies
John Deering
Brian Duffy
Everything's Relative
Mallard Fillmore
Glenn Foden
Jake Fuller
Bob Gorrel
Walt Handelsman
Joe Heller
David Hitch
Jerry Holbert
David Horsey
Lee Judge
Steve Kelley
Jeff Koterba
Dick Locher
Chan Lowe
Jimmy Margulies
Jack Ohman
Michael Ramirez
Rob Rogers
Drew Sheneman
Kevin Siers
Jeff Stahler
Scott Stantis
Danna Summers
Gary Varvel
Kirk Walters
Dan Wasserman
Tech Q&A
Mr. Know-It-All
Ask Doctor K
Richard Lederer
Frugal Living
On Nutrition
Bookmark These
Bruce Williams
|
