http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZjmIDc4EOA&feature=related

Without doubt he’s been taught to give his speeches by Hitler, he’s
exact in his mannerisms to Hitler.

SO, Hitler relocated to Argentina after the press release of sucide?

I find it hard to believe, I hate snakes and scorpions, especially
anacondas.

But uh, anyone know if there’s flying saucer bases somewhere down
there?

WOW! Look at that crowd becuase of Juan Person raising wages and
equalizing the workers take on profits! CLEARLY Hitler was running
this government from behind the scenes. So what killed Hitler a
scorpion? An anaconda? A python? A rattlesnake?

I HATE THEM ALL!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rFdogL27tY

Was it SS doing this or was Hitler actually in Argentina?

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The idea: Less complexity than a chopper and good coutnerinsurgency
capability.

The plane: Similar layout to the P-39 Airacobra and the P-63
Kingcobra. Mid-engine, drive shaft geared to propeller in the front.

Engine: Small turboprop, with pivoting exhausts on each side, either
capable of being directed into IR diffusers/jammers for quiet mode or
astern for added thrust.

Wings: As much composites as possible. Fuels cells inboard. Sensor
stations along leading edges, as well as a hardpoint per side, or a
hardpoint inboard and a firm point outboard per side. One hardpoint
along the centerline, possibly stronger than the wing mounted ones.

Nose bay: As with the original, the engine in the middle frees a big
nose bay for a large cannon and sensor gear as well. Forward part of
landing gear retracts into the nose as well.

Weapons

1. Nose cannon. We have to have a nose cannon. A really big nose
cannon. I’m thnking a 30mm chaingun a la the Apache or maybe a 25mm.
Would a Bushmaster have to be cut down a bit or just stick out the
front of the propeller hub like a fencepost with a big muzzle brake on
it? Maybe a 3 barrel version of the 25mm Gatling for the F22 with rate
of fire slowed a bit? We also need lots of ammunition. Nose area would
also have room left over for some electronics, targeting systems, etc.

2. Wing weapons. HOT, TOW, and Hellfire tubes/clusters could be rigged
on Hardpoints or firmpoints. Also Stinger pairs. Hardpoints could
possibly mount Maverick missiles or Small Diamater Bombs.

3. Centerline weapons. Small diamater bombs or 500 lb. standard LGB or
JDAM. Whatever else might be fitted.

4. Nose sensors. Radar, laser designators, satellite and
communications gear.

5. Wing sensors. FLIR, cameras, laser designators, communications and
networking gear.

6. Other available stuff. Possibly machine guns mounted in wings or in
pods, or even in the top of the nose over the cannon. Caliber range
from 7.62 (Miniguns?) to 50 caliber machine guns to 20mm cannon. Photo
reconnaissance packages as well or drone hookups to follow and network
with scouting drones for quick response. While drones have a couple
missiles, if they need moe they vector in loitering planes, and this
aircraft could cover this mission.

Say: Drones —-> Loitering Cobra —> Ground Control —-> Other
units etc.

The pluses:

1. Less expensive and complex alternative to helicopters for some
missions, freeing up other manned aircraft, both fixed and rotary
wing.

2. Big cannon looks really cool.

3. Could be a nice segue plane for local Air Force pilots to get into
alongside U.S. and Allied operators.

4. Big cannon looks really cool.

5. Dedicated air to mud platform, not as expensive perhaps as a "mud
fighter" or as armed as an A-10, but capable for smaller scale close
support and attack missions that seem to pop up on a "catch as catch
can" or precision targeted basis.

6. Big cannon looks really cool.

7. Availability and durability of modern turboprops and less
complexity than many other military attack aircraft.

8. Big cannon looks really cool. (Well you knew that was coming by
now.)

It also could be pretty sweet as far as low signature if the materials
and airframe got tweaked right. Maybe even a couple versions, one more
stealthy and one less so for export?

Just a thought.

David

Two Decades Late: Military System to fight.
http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.28132/pub_detail.asp

In their new book, Ground Truth: The Future of U.S. Land Power, AEI’s
Thomas Donnelly and Frederick W. Kagan argue that if the United States
is to maintain its status as the sole superpower, American land power
must be restructured to confront unprecedented challenges. Kagan
expands on the subject in this article by discussing a military system
that was geared to fight a single enemy–the Soviet Union–with
relatively even balances between services and theaters of operations.
The 1986 military reorganization made some improvements, he says, but
the military is still poorly structured for the kind of wars we are
likely to face.

More than five years after the war on terror began, the strains it has
placed on the U.S. military are beginning to show. Some observers have
noticed increasing signs of tension between the Pentagon and our
commanders in the field. Interservice rivalries have started to kick
up again as the U.S. Marines talk about getting back to their boats;
the U.S. Navy talks about recapitalizing parts of its fleet; and the
U.S. Air Force takes up the case of the F-22, the Joint Strike
Fighter, and so on, with reference to more-or-less distant threats.

The world has changed, and the threats we face have changed, and that
means it is time for a fundamental reorganization of our national
security apparatus.

At one level, these problems seem to have a common cause: the
persistent notion that the current large-scale deployments in Iraq and
Afghanistan will be short-lived, and we need to be ready for what
comes next. In reality, that notion is not the cause of these strains
but a symptom of problems that go back much farther. Military
policymakers view the current level of deployment as an aberration.
They do this because they have to–because the military system they
are part of is not designed to support such a level in the long term.
Recognizing this fact means recognizing the unpalatable truth that the
old ways will not work in the twenty-first century. The world has
changed, and the threats we face have changed, and that means it is
time for a fundamental reorganization of our national security
apparatus.

It would not be the first time the military has undergone sweeping
change. The current U.S. national security organization was designed
during the Cold War to face the threats of that struggle. The National
Security Act of 1947 created the U.S. Air Force and what became the
Defense Department and reshaped the intelligence agencies. The
structure was tweaked occasionally but in very minor ways until the
Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, which made important changes (although
nowhere near as fundamental as those made by the National Security
Act). The U.S. military has remained virtually unchanged in its basic
structure and function since then.

In the 1980s, the enemy was the Soviet Union. Although China was a
potential foe, war with the People’s Republic seemed unlikely, and an
alliance between the USSR and the PRC even more unlikely. The
significance of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 was submerged by the
Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan that same year, as well as by
the subsequent Iran-Iraq War. The Reagan administration, like most of
its predecessors, viewed troubles in the third world primarily within
the context of Soviet expansionism rather than as an expression of
homegrown tensions.

Every aspect of our peacetime armed forces–and our national security
structure–was crafted specifically to meet the Soviet challenge, and
in the mid-1980s that challenge seemed daunting. Massive Soviet and
Warsaw Pact military forces were stationed in Central Europe. The
Soviet fleet had been steadily expanding for years in every theater,
including the Pacific. Soviet bombers and attack submarines threatened
to cut off NATO’s sea lines of communication; Soviet armies were ready
to invade the Middle East, defend against China, and threaten Japan.
And finally, there was the dramatic expansion of the Soviet nuclear
arsenal in the 1970s.

The Soviet threat was enormous, and meeting it required mobilization
of the full military resources of the NATO countries and their allies.
We had to face the possibility of overwhelming war in every dimension
of every theater at the same time. Any such war, it was expected,
would be short and decisive ("apocalyptic" might be a more appropriate
term). This assumption came from a number of factors.

In 1973, the Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War consumed in a week as many
tanks as NATO had in Europe. American military leaders watching that
conflict were stunned by the speed and lethality of modern armored
warfare. The Soviets had already concluded (for a variety of reasons)
that if a European war broke out, their best chance of success lay in
speed. They intended to get from the inter-German border to the
English Channel in thirty days. NATO was aware of their intentions.

Political considerations required defending against such a threat at
the border. Even though it is virtually impossible to stop an armored
invasion at its source, the Germans were understandably reluctant to
see their country as expendable, so they insisted that NATO be capable
of doing just that, and the United States worked hard to meet this
expectation. U.S. military doctrine and organization were geared to
fighting hard from the outset, reinforcing immediately, and winning
quickly. The assumption was that if rapid victory did not come, the
entire nation would mobilize behind the shield of the volunteer armed
forces and would overwhelm the Soviets, as it had overwhelmed the
Nazis and the imperial Japanese.

From the military’s standpoint, there was no real need to think about
how the war would end or what to do after it did. Everyone assumed
that any large-scale war would lead to a full-blown nuclear exchange,
and there did not seem to be much point in postwar planning for such a
scenario. If the war somehow stopped short of the apocalypse, then it
could pretty much only be a return to the status quo, with neither
side holding the other’s territory, so there was no need to plan for
an occupation either.

Game, Set, and Match

Everything else the U.S. military did during the Cold War was
subordinate to the requirement to be ready for the big one. Since,
happily, we never did fight the big one, it turns out that all of
those "distractions"–Korea, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic,
Nicaragua, Cuba, El Salvador, Panama, and so on–actually were the
real thing as far as fighting went. But we never configured our
military specifically to undertake them because they remained less
important, even collectively, than the need to be ready to stop the
Soviets in the "central front" (Europe), the Pacific, and the Middle
East.

Boiling all this down, the basic assumptions shaping the Cold War
military were that all services were equally important, all theaters
would be under tremendous strain, speed of response in every dimension
would be critical, and the war would be short–or, if it was long,
then it would look like World War II. As a result, we built a military
that divided defense-budget dollars roughly evenly among the services;
decentralized control of the operational theaters to their commanders,
who reported only to the secretary of defense (thereby pulling the
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff out of the chain of command);
and made the Pentagon responsible for rushing every available force to
the fighting theaters as quickly as possible and mobilizing the nation
behind them.

Basically, the purpose of the entire military establishment–
especially as redesigned in 1986–was not to fight, but to be ready to
fight. When speed of reaction and winning the first battle in every
theater are key, then the day-to-day readiness of every aspect of the
force is key. Anything that detracts from that readiness–like the
smaller wars that we actually engaged in regularly–is therefore bad.
The structure that embodied these principles was superbly designed to
meet the challenges it faced, but it is terribly designed for the
world of today.

No single enemy or collection of enemies has replaced the Soviet
Union’s vast and omnipresent military threat. After a period of
confusion in the 1990s, the U.S. military has gradually recognized
that it is going to have to spend a lot of time actually conducting
military operations–everything from high-end mechanized warfare to
peacekeeping and disaster relief. Whether we are talking about the
global war on terror or a "long war" or a "protracted conflict," the
critical issue is that the military sees that "rapid decisive
operations" are not the key to victory in the current era and that we
can "win the first battle"–the main aim of the 1980s military–but
lose the war.

The Cold War force was designed on a principle of balance–among
services and between theaters. Today’s world offers nothing like that
situation. One combatant command–Central Command (CENTCOM)–is
responsible for two ongoing major counterinsurgency operations (Iraq
and Afghanistan), one significant counterterrorism operation (the Horn
of Africa), one major nonproliferation challenge (Iran), and one major
regional collapse scenario (Pakistan). No other combatant command
faces anything like that burden.

For reasons of NATO politics more than military sense, European
Command (EUROCOM) has nominal responsibility for most of the fighting
in Afghanistan, but the burden for fighting that war on the ground
does not fall heavily on the supreme allied commander’s shoulders.
Pacific Command faces many potential threats–the Koreas, China, and
terrorists in Indonesia and the Philippines, as well as counterpiracy
operations–but its main concern is the traditional Cold War mission
of being prepared for possible conflicts, rather than fighting day to
day. Southern Command is engaged in a variety of missions, such as
directing counternarcotics efforts throughout Latin America and
dealing with Venezuela’s blowhard leader, Hugo Chávez. But again, the
strains it faces are not of the same magnitude as those CENTCOM faces.
It remains to be seen how the new Africa Command (AFRICOM) will shake
out. There is certainly enough on that continent to pose a serious
challenge to any new commander, but unless the United States becomes
much more actively involved in ongoing conflicts in Africa, AFRICOM,
too, is unlikely to be overwhelmed.

Who Is in Charge Here?

Does it really make sense to have one commander overseeing almost all
the major military activities in the most vital theater while the
others remain relatively unengaged? Possibly, depending on what role
one thinks the combatant commander should have. But the structure was
not designed for such an eventuality, and the strains are already
showing. For instance, who actually runs Iraq and Afghanistan? In
principle, the CENTCOM commander–currently acting commander
Lieutenant General Martin Dempsey, though General David Petraeus,
currently commander of Multi-National Force-Iraq, has been nominated
to replace him–should run both. In practice, he runs neither. General
David McKiernan, commander of the International Security Assistance
Force, will own allied forces in Afghanistan when he replaces General
Dan McNeill, but he reports via a German general to America’s EUROCOM
commander, General Bantz Craddock, because Afghanistan is a NATO
mission. Petraeus, on the other hand, is still nominally Dempsey’s
subordinate but in practice has been reporting directly to the
president since taking his current post. Why? Because Bush, like all
his predecessors, wants the unvarnished truth from the man who is on
the ground fighting a major war. Petraeus’s predecessor, General
George Casey, also reported directly to the president. So what is
CENTCOM’s role? It is hard to say. It is clear, though, that the
situation in CENTCOM today is nothing like what the authors of the
Goldwater-Nichols reform imagined. The nature of current conflicts is
clearly straining the command structure in ways it was never meant to
withstand.

Another unanticipated strain has emerged between the war fighters and
the force providers. In the 1980s context, this strain was minimal;
both groups spent most of their time preparing for war. In a short
war, it would not have mattered either: the military surged a very
large force to Kuwait in 1990, but no serious tensions developed
because the war was brief and the force was rapidly withdrawn. But the
large and protracted deployment of U.S. forces into combat in the
CENTCOM theater was never foreseen by the designers of the Cold War
military.

Wars wear out people and equipment fast. Both must be replaced. But
replacing them costs money and organizational effort that distracts
from preparing for future conflict. War also disrupts peacetime
training routines, to the detriment of preparedness for contingencies.
The U.S. Marines are concerned that too many of their people have not
been trained for their supposed primary mission of forced-entry
operations. The U.S. Army is worried that many of its tankers have
never qualified a tank and many of its brigade commanders have never
practiced maneuvering their brigades except in the context of
counterinsurgency. Strains on personnel also lead to much higher
levels of attrition, especially among officers and senior
noncommissioned officers. Good people are leaving, and it takes time
to make a brigade commander or a command sergeant major–a good couple
of decades in most cases.

Many of these problems could be alleviated by reducing force levels in
the active theaters, but the war fighters naturally want more forces.
Who decides how to set priorities between fighting current wars and
preparing for future ones? Right now, the answer is the secretary of
defense and the president, both civilians. Under Goldwater-Nichols,
there is no uniformed officer in the Pentagon whose job it is to win
the wars we are fighting.

By statute, the job of the Joint Chiefs is to support current
conflicts (without getting involved operationally) and to prepare for
future ones, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs is the senior
military adviser to the president. None of them, however, have the
statutory responsibility to win ongoing wars. That job is reserved for
the combatant commanders and their subordinates. In the Cold War, this
division of labor was not a problem–no one was going to be worrying
about future conflicts when the Red Army rolled across the inter-
German border. Now it creates a constant tension that requires
intervention by the two most senior civilians in the chain of command.
To make matters worse, only the force providers have a presence at the
center of power, while the war fighters are scattered around the
globe.

Hands Off My Pie

The primary purpose of the Goldwater-Nichols legslation was to improve
interservice cooperation. The famous incident during the invasion of
Grenada in which an officer in one service reportedly had to use a
calling card and a public phone to call for fire support from another
was an example of this problem. The legislation has tremendously
improved interservice cooperation in many ways, including the creation
of the combatant commanders, who have responsibility for all U.S.
forces from every service in their areas.

The approach of dividing the defense pie evenly among the services has
yielded invaluable benefits. Investments in precision air power (in
the U.S. Air Force, Navy, and Marines) have been tremendously
important to our operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, as the ability to
put large or small ordnance exactly on a designated target at very
short notice has transformed the "kinetic" (combat) part of
counterinsurgency operations. And the strains on the U.S. Air Force
and Navy to provide this support in Iraq and Afghanistan are
manageable.

But the strains on the U.S. Army and Marines created by keeping more
than 180,000 pairs of boots on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan for
years are orders of magnitude greater. The F-15s and Nimitz-class
carriers designed to defeat advanced Soviet systems are perfectly
useful against insurgents in headbands and sneakers waving AK-47s
(although the F-15s and other aircraft are getting old and wearing out
and will need to be replaced sooner rather than later). But Humvees
and trucks that were never designed for combat zones are dangerously
inadequate in the face of advanced improvised explosive devices. The
current conflicts are bearing disproportionately on the ground forces,
something for which today’s military structure was not designed.

The result has been pulling and tugging between the services in ways
that are harmful to all. Both the administration and Congress, under
both Democratic and Republican leadership, have resisted any dramatic
increase in the baseline defense budget. The U.S. Air Force and Navy
saw budgetary trade-offs at their expense in the first years of the
current conflict and largely accepted them. Now they are beginning to
push back. The current military organization thus not only pits the
services against one another–a perennial fact of life–but
effectively, and unavoidably, pits some services against the fighters
who are currently in the field.

Still another unforeseen strain on the force is the tension between
active duty and reserves (including the National Guard) in the ground
forces, especially in the U.S. Army. In the 1970s, the pressure to
build an all-volunteer military, combined with the need to reduce
defense expenditures following the Vietnam War and the simultaneous
growth of the Soviet threat, led the U.S. Army to make an important
trade-off. It placed many essential but noncombat functions in reserve
units in order to keep the maximum possible combat power in the active
force. The problem with this approach became apparent in the 1990s,
when even the small but protracted deployment of American forces in
Bosnia and then Kosovo strained critical support units in the active
army and required the mobilization of reservists. To be clear, the
deployment of something like 30,000 troops out of an army of 495,000
required reserve mobilizations. That should have awakened some people,
but in the "era of constrained defense resources" that was the 1990s,
waking up was not an option. The deployment of 180,000 soldiers in
Iraq and Afghanistan has naturally made the "strain" of the 1990s look
relaxed.

The decision to shift functions to National Guard support units
affected those units, but the large-scale deployments after 2003
affected even the Guard’s combat units. The current demand for troops
has made it necessary to employ National Guard units in extended
tours. The National Guard has a long and distinguished lineage, but it
has never been used this way before. Lyndon Johnson found it easier to
rely on conscription than to commit Guard combat brigades to Vietnam.
During Desert Storm, acrimony arose when senior U.S. Army leaders
refused to deploy Guard units to the desert on the grounds that they
were not combat-ready, and some Guard leaders felt they had been
slighted. By the end of the 1990s, Guard units were in the Balkans,
and they have kept a sustained presence there, in Afghanistan, and in
Iraq ever since.

The problem is that the Guard was not meant to be mobilized and
deployed abroad on repeated tours in extended wars. It was meant to be
the nation’s strategic reserve–the force that was committed in
extremis when a mission exceeded the capability of the active force
and before (or in place of) national mobilization. The heavy use of
Guard and reserve units in prolonged tours has led some to complain
that the nation has broken its compact with those units–that they are
being treated like active units when they never signed up to be. This
is another legacy of the Cold War. As we have seen, prolonged
conflicts were not part of that era’s doctrine.

It is worth noting, finally, that signs of strain have begun to
develop even between the U.S. Army and Marines. Since April 2007, U.S.
Army units have been deployed to Iraq for fifteen-month tours, while
U.S. Marine units deploy for only seven months. The reason is that the
Marine Corps wants to keep its troop deployments aligned with ship
rotations, and those occur semiannually. The result is that soldiers
spend more than twice as long on the ground at a stretch. Recent
comments by Marine Corps commandant James Conway that the Marines
would prefer to move out of Iraq entirely and focus on Afghanistan
generated additional controversy.

Officers versus Officers

The most subtle and heart-wrenching strains on the military are those
developing within the officer corps itself. To the outside (and even
to some on the inside) these strains appear to be the result of two
rival cliques: a George Casey/John Abizaid group that defends the
approach those commanders took in the Iraq War and a David Petraeus/
Raymond Odierno group that embraces the "surge" strategy of 2007.
There is some truth to this appearance. Senior commanders often
inspire enthusiasts and protégés among subordinates and jealousies
among equals. The controversy surrounding the January 2007 strategy
shift has added to this phenomenon, which would not be remarkable in
itself.

But there is more to it than that. Officers who command units in
combat face a unique kind of stress. They worry, as anyone would,
about the dangers they face, but they worry much more about the
dangers their subordinates face. Commanders feel tremendous
responsibility to the soldiers they lead, and they take the injuries
and deaths of those soldiers very hard indeed. No army has ever had
soldiers of such high quality, all volunteers. And of all the losses a
commander has to watch his soldiers suffer, none is more painful than
a casualty that was avoidable. Commanders understand that people are
injured and die in war, even those entrusted to them. But they
normally find intolerable the notion that their soldiers have died
because of their mistakes.

From 2004 through 2006, but especially toward the end of that period,
there was a general sense that we were not winning in Iraq. The fault,
if any, was not that of the soldiers, who fought skillfully,
professionally, and bravely. Nor was it that of their midlevel
commanders, who led their units well, followed the orders they were
given, made only the normal and expectable number of mistakes, and
learned from them relatively quickly. Even so, the experience of
losing soldiers in what seemed to be a losing cause led some to feel
guilty, as though they themselves were to blame. Others simply became
bitter that their superiors, either civilian or military, had sent
their soldiers to die on a fool’s errand. Even commanders who managed
to achieve local or regional successes generally emerged frustrated
that headquarters seemed unwilling or unable to support and capitalize
on their gains.

The tide began to turn in 2007. The start of large-scale Corps
offensives in June, together with the rise of tribal movements against
al Qaeda, wrong-footed the terrorists and allowed U.S. forces to
oversee dramatic and unexpected improvements in security. Many
commanders started to feel not only that they were succeeding, but
that they were part of an effort that was succeeding overall. Their
comrades who left before the turnaround have responded variously, but
some have clearly reacted with bitterness, at first denying the
possibility of success and then falling into quiet hostility. The
first units to experience this sense of success are just now returning
home. It remains to be seen how they will interact with their fellows.

Today, Iraq gets all the headlines, but the problems the U.S. military
faces are bigger than any single conflict. If U.S. troops left Iraq
tomorrow, the military would still be wrongly structured for any kind
of war it is likely to face. The fault lines in that structure would
still generate inappropriate and dangerous tensions; success would
still require superhuman efforts on the part of individual senior
leaders to transcend their legally defined roles and think only about
the welfare of the nation as a whole. Some would do so; most would
not. The system would continue to creak and groan and tear under the
pressure of unbalanced strains it was never designed to bear.

Iraq is a symptom of this disease, not the cause. Similar tensions
occurred over Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan, each with different
people in the key positions. This is not a problem of personality
dysfunction, and it is not a problem of ideology, although both have
played important roles in recent failures. It is a problem of
structure; of organization; and, more fundamental, of the conception
of what kinds of war we are likely to have to fight and how we will
fight them.

Of all the scary war scenarios facing the United States over the
coming decades, the one for which our military is currently
structured–simultaneous attacks on all fronts, in all dimensions, by
a unitary global enemy–is the least likely. A grinding, prolonged,
land-forces-based struggle within one regional command, or possibly
two, is the most likely. Debate over the wisdom of the Iraq war and
our current approach to it has obscured this reality for too long. Two
decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, it is time to adjust our
military for the post-Cold War world.

I Served…  2LT Ted H Matsel, Pow, W2vm, Eame.

Ted’s Authorizations and Acknowledgements

Prisoner of War Medal
Air Force Training (Accession) Ribbon
Air Medal
Army Air Force Acknowledgement
Cold War Medal
European African Middle East Medal
Honorable Service Lapel Pin
Honorable Discharge
Ocean Crossing Acknowledgement
Overseas Service Bar
WWII Victory Medal
WWII Combat Campaign, Rhineland

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Firing offense: USAF tanker contract.

http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/home.aspx?sid=140&categoryid=1…

When Defense Secretary Robert Gates summarily fired the top civilian
and military Air Force officials last week, the reason he gave was a
grave failure of leadership with respect to that service’s nuclear
missions.  The low priority assigned by the Pentagon to its nuclear
stewardship responsibilities is systemic and acute.  Consequently,
this act of accountability is both warranted and a needed wake-up call
to all the armed forces.

As it happens, there is another ground on which the dismissal of Air
Force Secretary Michael Wynne could be justified.  He was specifically
brought in to clean up Air Force procurement, but ended up presiding
over a disastrously mishandled procurement of the KC-X next-generation
aerial tanker.  The decision to award this contract worth
conservatively $35 billion to a team led by the European aerospace
conglomerate, EADS, should be considered a firing offense.

In the next few days, the Government Accountability Office is expected
to rule on a protest to that award by the losing bidder, Boeing. If
the GAO does its job, there is little doubt it will conclude the Air
Force unfairly, even cynically, manipulated the acquisition process so
as to enable EADS to compete with an aircraft that did not meet the
service’s stated requirements and that was significantly more costly
to operate.

In documents that have come to light since the contract award was
announced in February, including an Air Force briefing provided to the
losing company and a redacted version of Boeing’s protest, a number of
facts are clear:

The Boeing tanker, based on the 767 commercial aircraft, is a known
commodity.  Two were delivered to the Japanese air force earlier this
spring.  Four more are currently being built for Italy.  Its American
manufacturing line is well-established.  Its estimated costs are
grounded in data developed during more than 10 million 767 flight
hours.

By contrast, the EADS alternative known as the KC-30 is more the
proverbial bird in the bush.  None has been delivered. None has moved
aviation fuel through an operational boom.  And none has been produced
by the politically-driven, Rube Goldberg-style production line that
EADS proposes to establish on two continents – unless, that is, the
costs grow.  In which case, it turns out, the French-led conglomerate
will build all of the U.S. Air Force’s new tankers in Toulouse,
France, not Mobile, Alabama, with attendant loss of the promised
American jobs.

Speaking of workforce, there is the natty problem that unions
representing EADS employees have a record of rabid hostility towards
the United States and its policies.  The effect of entrusting one of
the most important elements of our power-projection capabilities to
foreign labor capable of production sabotage and/or work-stoppage
could be catastrophic.  That is especially true insofar as the
reliance on EADS would not be confined to the manufacturing of the
tankers.  If past practice is any guide, the company that produced the
planes would also be relied upon for maintenance over their expected
40-year service life.

Quite apart from the nationality of the source, there is the basic
question of competence.  Boeing is no newcomer to the business of
building and supporting aerial refueling tankers.  In fact it has been
at it for 79 years and delivered a total of 2,000 tanker aircraft.  It
has delivered 1,800 operational refueling booms, the complicated piece
of equipment used to move fuel safely and swiftly from the tanker to
the recipient aircraft.

By contrast, the EADS team has been trying to develop a tanker
business for just the last five years.  To date, it has not delivered
any aerial refuelers or operational booms.  To repose confidence in
such a team, to say nothing of its cost projections, entails a leap of
faith that seems irresponsible in the extreme.

Finally, there is the matter of the mission.  The Air Force, until
strong-armed by a few legislators, rightly did not want as big a plane
as the KC-30 for the simple reason that it is far better to have a
larger number of smaller, more fuel-efficient aircraft capable of
operating from many airfields.  In the competition, the KC-767 was
deemed to have 98 strengths (“discriminators”) to just 30 for the
Airbus option, with only 1 assessed weakness versus 5 for the KC-30.
If the decision to go with the inferior, but larger aircraft stands,
the taxpayer will have to eat an estimated $30 billion in additional
fuel costs and billions more in otherwise unnecessary military
construction charges.

The new leadership of the Air Force – which reportedly will include as
its Secretary Michael Donley, a well-respected veteran and national
security official during several administrations – should shortly have
an opportunity, thanks to the GAO, to revisit the Wynne tanker
selection.  If and when it does so, the service must make its decision
on the basis of:

its actual requirement, not one adapted to suit a competitor, EADS,
that could not otherwise compete;
real costs, not those artificially and arbitrarily inflated to make
Boeing’s proposal less viable and low-balled to help EADS; and
the nation’s interest in having an indigenous supplier of vital tanker
aircraft, produced by a loyal work-force capable of not only
manufacturing the planes properly and cost-effectively but of reliably
supporting them for decades to come.

http://www.waranddecision.com/ Doug Feith is donating all of his book
revenues to charitable organizations serving U.S. veterans and their
families

http://www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/home.aspx?sid=140&categoryid=1…

Mr. Feith, the former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy has
written War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War
on Terrorism.  It is the definitive account of the considerations and
deliberations that led to the liberation of Iraq and other actions
taken in the wake of and in response to the September 11 attacks.  An
objective reader will see the case for war was thoughtfully arrived at
and persuasively made, not “a fatal misstep” or “strategic blunder.”

The difference between the two ostensibly “insider” accounts could not
be more stark.  Where McClellan was not a participant in the decision-
making he finds so objectionable, Feith was.  Where McClellan fails to
document any of his pronouncements, Feith documents all of his –
including, notably, via a website devoted to making declassified
papers and other decision-related materials readily accessible to
historians and interested citizens (http://www.waranddecision.com/
documents_and_articles/).

Of course, the most profound contrast between the two books is in how
they have been received.  McClellan’s has dominated the airwaves and
print outlets for days.  Feith’s has received considerable critical
acclaim and pick-up in the alternative media – which recognizes the
book’s value in countering the “Bush lied, people died” and other
urban legends, but nowhere near the mainstream media coverage.  In
fact, the New York Times and Washington Post have refused to review
it.

It is not as though Mr. Feith has been uncritical of the Bush
administration.  War and Decision lets the chips fall where they may,
including with respect to errors made by the author himself.
Interestingly, the day before the McClellan book-selling bandwagon got
underway, Ms. Noonan’s Journal published an op.ed. article adapting
part of the Feith book under the headline “How Bush Sold the War.” It
took to task the President and his handlers – which, ironically,
included at the time Scott McClellan – for failing in the aftermath of
Saddam’s overthrow consistently to justify that act on vital national
security grounds, rather than exclusively as a contribution to
democracy-building.

There is one other noteworthy contrast in this tale of two books.  Fox
News Sunday host Chris Wallace suggested during last weekend’s show
that Scott McClellan might want to counter criticisms of his cashing
in on his memoirs by donating the proceeds of the book sales to a
charity for veterans of the war that has, evidently, caused him such
anguish.  No such encouragement was needed by Doug Feith; he made that
commitment from the get-go.

On this Peggy Noonan and I agree.  We certainly need more serious
books like Doug Feith’s War and Decision.

HOW THE AIR FORCE FELL SO FAR.

http://lexingtoninstitute.org/1274.shtml

HOW THE AIR FORCE FELL SO FAR
Loren B. Thompson, Ph.D.
Issue Brief
Jun 10, 2008

The forced resignation of the Air Force’s top civilian and uniform
leaders last week is the latest chapter in a chronicle of decline that
has been unfolding for decades.  The political influence of U.S. air
power has gradually ebbed away since the cold war ended, and the
resulting vacuum has been filled by representatives from other
services, most notably the Navy.  Air Force officers today are largely
excluded from the uppermost tier of the joint command structure, and
have grown accustomed to being out of step with the priorities of
senior political appointees running the Pentagon.  Some proponents of
air power offer conspiracy theories to explain why the Air Force has
fallen to the lowest point in its sixty-year history.  But an honest
appraisal of what happened suggests that the service’s wounds are
mostly self-inflicted.

Perhaps the greatest defect of Air Force leaders in recent times has
been their failure to adapt to the changing demands of a transformed
global security environment.  The Air Force won its independence from
the Army and became first among equals in joint military counsels by
offering a theory of strategic bombing that seemed uniquely responsive
to the geopolitical rivalries of the industrial age.  The promise of
air power at its inception was that it could hit the "vital centers"
of enemy power, and thus bring speedy victory that avoided the static
trench warfare of World War One.  A generation later, nuclear weapons
made air power even more potent — not so much as an agent of victory,
but as a tool of deterrence.  However, U.S. defeat in Vietnam signaled
that the source of danger was shifting to elusive, unconventional
aggressors, and the Air Force failed to change as fast as the threat
did.

Resistance to change is common in large, regimented institutions, but
in the Air Force it was made worse by cultural insularity.  Unlike the
Army and Navy, who have located their service academies and war
colleges close to the nation’s centers of economic and political
power, the Air Force chose to site its academic institutions in remote
locales such as Colorado Springs and Montgomery, Alabama.  In these
isolated places there was little opportunity for cosmopolitan cross-
currents to influence the education of airmen.  Air power doctrine was
passed down as dogma rather than as a living body of ideas, and that
produced senior officers who lacked the worldliness of their Navy
counterparts.

One symptom of this cultural insularity is a widespread political
obtuseness within the Air Force that leads it to misjudge what power
brokers outside the service want or will support.  For example, during
the Bush years the service has expended considerable political capital
in resisting the efforts of civilian leaders to buy more B-2 bombers,
increase spending on space systems, and accelerate the development of
unmanned surveillance aircraft.  If it had simply said "yes" in each
case and conserved its capital for the really hard fights like keeping
the F-22 fighter in production, the Air Force today would have a
bigger budget, better capabilities, and more goodwill among senior
policymakers.  By refusing to deal with the political system on its
own terms, the Air Force has handed other services with superior
political skills control of the entire joint command structure.

A final defect has been the Air Force’s inability to communicate with
outsiders in a way that makes its capabilities and needs compelling.
This is a problem for all the services, but the Navy and Marine Corps
have worked much harder to improve their outreach abilities.  Because
the Air Force has lost the capacity to speak clearly, few Americans
are aware of what it is doing in the global war on terror; fewer still
realize it may be more relevant to future conflicts than the other
services.  It is sad that Secretary Wynne and General Moseley are
ending their service to the nation on such a negative note, but it
would be downright tragic if this moment did not lead air power
advocates to rethink the way they do their jobs.

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