On Wed, 04 Jun 2008 19:03:02 -0700, John Boyle
wrote:
To ALL: You people are nuts to think another war, at this Time and with
the condition of out military without the draft, makes any sense! We do
NOT have the manpower to handle the alleged war, and without manpower
you can NOT do what is necessary! I am a Retired Army Sergeant with 21
yrs of service and One year in Vietnam, with a Bronze star to boot!
Close, but draft, lack of, has little to do with it. The fact of the
matter is that our industrial base is about gone. Because of some really
bad decisions made by folks like Stewart Symington, that we don't need a
wartime production capability anymore, because we've got the bomb, we've
been on the same merge & RIF binge that the Brits have been on since
Christ was a Corporal.
What that means is that we're just like any other third world country. We
go to war with what we've got and when we run out, we're done. And that
makes buying airplanes that cost a hundred thirty million each for a
whopping total of around one hundred forty five or so airplanes, insane on
the face of it. One hundred thirty million is what you pay for a frigate
or a low end destroyer, not an asset which by the nature of it's
employment is essentially fungible. We're buying ourselves into a
situation where we have weapons that are too precious to actually risk
because they're impossible to replace in a timely manner, in wartime. Keep
in mind, that the production run for the F-4 Phantom was 2087 aircraft.
What it boils down to is that all the Chinese have to do in order to win
is what we did in WW-II-- outproduce everybody and just keep shoveling men
and gear in until we run out of stuff to send. All Beijing has to do in
order to win is to not lose.
And we're not gonna solve the problem with boutique weapons that have
twenty plus year long product development cycles either.
In the meantime, I got a look at what the Chinese are doing about their
fifth generation fighter project. Looks like a pirate copy of the Northrop
YF-23. You can bet though that the Chinese'll design theirs with a stable
aerobody rather than relying on EMP vulnerable electronic stability
systems, and you can bet that the electronics will be something more
advanced than the Intel 286 chip based systems on the F-22, which is what
you get when you get design & development programs that take twenty years
or longer.
Bottom line is this. First off, we need to reestablish our industrial
base and reorient military procurement thinking towards weapons we can
manufacture during a long slogging match with the Chinese and the Shanghai
Cooperative Organization.
Secondly, we need to go to the type of open market in combat aircraft
design that existed before the beginning of the Cold War when guys like
Symington created a mixed economy in weapons production. We need guys who
design and build airplanes, and then test them and then market them by
themselves without Air Force interference. Why? Because that way you have
a technological defense in depth like you had in WW-II where when Donovan
Berlin, (P-40) hit his slump, guys like Lee Atwood, Kelly Johnson and Ed
Heinemann could pick up the slack. Those guys all designed, built, tested
and flight qualified multiple aircraft. Your typical aeronautical engineer
gets to maybe work one project in his entire career. If you're gonna learn
to design combat aircraft, you do it by designing combat aircraft.
Laugh all you want to, but look at it this way. During the 1973 Yom
Kippur War, the Israelis lost 150 aicraft in three days to the Egyptian
air defense system. We were there to replace their airforce and their
armored forces, twice, and by the end of the war, much of their Air Force
consisted of US Air Force pilots on leave to fly the Phantoms that the
Israelis no longer had pilots to fly.
Now, maybe somebody can tell me who the Arsenal of Democracy is gonna be
to do for us, what we did for the Brits in one war and the Israelis in
another?
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