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Who is getting more COMPLACENT?

People who seriously think a kinematically compromised American medium fighter has nothing to fear from a modern Chinese heavy fighter. The same people who’ve been surprised by the pace of China’s progress at every turn to date. :rolleyes:

The F-22 was capped so it was never going anywhere beyond the numbers…

F-22 was capped because F-35 was going to be just so awesome and affordable. If Gates had known the true state of the F-35 program F-22 would likely only today be wrapping production with 300+ units produced.

F-35 has already been spectacularly successful in undermining American interests and it is barely getting started. A McCarthyist mind would suspect foreign infiltration, but I adhere more to the maxim of never attributing to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.

The US is fully committed to the LRS-B

Yes, just like it was committed to 130 B-2s and 700 Raptors and 3000 JSFs. Limited acquisition budget with F-35 gobbling most of it (amidst other demands such as KC-X) will almost certainly put uncomfortable pressure on NGB whilst stifling investment in other forward-looking platforms like F/A-XX. I know the concept of limited military funding is difficult for American mind to grasp but there it is. Smart choice would be to curtail F-35 so as to fully fund more relevant programs but China will be hoping for max F-35 production and strangled NGB instead. Fortunately China has lots of American allies in this goal: the JSF lobby is powerful indeed.

Sure, not really PMI tho. 😉

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8523/8592947034_ed071f7884_o.jpg

*drool*

Can only hope the real thing looks as good. Must say am getting tired of T-50-X paint job. :p

Boston Globe

Gregory D. Foster, a former Army officer and West Point graduate who now teaches national security studies at the National Defense University in Washington, seemed unconcerned about collateral damage when he went after the top brass, political leaders, and defense company executives.

He accused them of allowing the nearly sacrosanct principle of civilian control of the military—an early building block of American democracy—to be turned on its head. How? By virtually never questioning the key assumptions of military planning and allowing a largely unchecked, destructive and highly militarized foreign policy to pose as a “properly subordinated military industrial complex.”

“If you want to be a recognized, credible, card-carrying member of the national security community what you have to do is buy into the received truths of the establishment and continue to perpetuate that stuff,” said Foster. “This is what I call civilian subjugation to the military. We face it in this administration, we faced it in the Clinton administration…we faced it in the Bush administration.”

Anyone have a link to this presentation? Given that the article mentions the industry/acquisition side of things I don’t imagine that the F-35 program was spared.

Mind you I’d be even more surprised if he was willing to dig into the historico-cultural roots of these problems. There’s bravery and then there’s suicide. :p

On a related note…

The Iraq and Afghanistan wars will together cost $4 to $6 trillion, according a new study from Harvard University’s Kennedy School. A large share of those bills has yet to be paid: the study finds that the U.S. has spent around $2 trillion thus far on the two controversial wars, and that growing commitments to spending on military personnel and veterans will drive much of the spending in the decades to come. The study notes that the Veterans’ Affairs budget has tripled since the start of the wars.

Jaguars are going to be operated by the end of the next decade, MiG-27 will be out well before this decade ends. MiG-27 had more maintenance issues than Jaguar.

Rafale replaces MiG-23 and MiG-27 as medium aircraft whereas Jaguar as a light aircraft is succeeded by Tejas and there are a lot of MiG-21s ahead in that queue.

Given another thread is about USN UCLASS competition, I suspect the Navy is diversifying its options.

And hasn’t USN already significantly slashed it’s proposed F-35 buy down to 260 airframes?

Yep; the Navy has cut several hundred aircraft from the USMC/USN order book since 2001. One of the many ‘cuts’ which according to Scooter don’t exist. Of course in a sense this is true — they aren’t cuts because the aircraft were never ordered in this first place. Of course, by this criteria F-35 has fewer orders than Rafale. :p

Today the Supers continue to roll off the line and the Navy is quite upfront in saying “how many F-35s? We don’t know.” Only in Scooter-land does this translate to continued firm commitment to the production numbers upon which the case for JSF rested in the first place.

Msphere has all ready laid out the benefits of buying a larger Rafale order as compared to a smaller JSF order for Canada.

It is generally a bad idea to opt for quantity over quality, if only because personnel costs scale with unit numbers and are the single greatest expense for advanced nations. The enormous caveat is that one must be able to operate a given platform in numbers sufficient to constitute a credible force taking into account accidents, attrition, first-strike vulnerability, optempo, flexibility, etc. It is this caveat which by all rights should rule out F-35 for the smaller NATO nations (and Canada given that they don’t want to spend any money). In contrast, the United States would be better served with fewer numbers of larger and more capable aircraft — something which goes double given the ranges involved in the Asia-Pacific theatre.