Hopsalot provides a good example of the kind of counter-productive criticism of APA that I was referring to earlier. Nobody disputes the facts in question re: APA, F-111s, and vested interests, or any of the other ‘facts’ regarding APA that are often brought up, e.g. that they once said some nice things about Super Hornet. The difficulty is that APA’s critics seem to think that these facts constitute arguments of themselves — reasons to dismiss all that APA has to say on the subject of e.g. the F-35. And this just doesn’t follow.
There are several objectionable features of this line of reasoning. Beyond the fact that it is obviously ad hominem, one can’t help but notice that APA is implicitly being denied a right that each of us would surely reserve for ourselves — the right to have been in error, and to extend and revise our positions in light of new information and new developments. Sure, APA once advocated a rather bizarre course for the RAF re: F-16s and Typhoons: so what? Who among us would survive similar scrutiny?
More problematic I think is this apparent notion that ‘discovering’ that APA has (or had) a particular agenda somehow invalidates the arguments that they make. This is simply nonsense; each of us has a particular agenda, a series of pre-existing beliefs through which new information is interpreted and which are necessarily involved in the statements that we make. It is not agendas that are the problem, but hidden agendas — and APA’s is hardly hidden, and not even particularly relevant at the current stage of the game.
The Super Hornet provides a good example. Seen from a certain perspective the aircraft is a disaster, a retrograde development that is uncompetitive with all of its contemporaries. From another perspective it’s a superb aircraft, an excellent solution to the particular set of circumstances that obtained and one of the most successful programs of the modern era. What’s important when someone says that the Super Hornet is a wonderful aircraft or a terrible aircraft is knowing what they mean by this and why. In this example, the context usually makes it clear.
On a related note, it often seems to me that when there is a debate here on a particular topic, what is at issue is often not the technical characteristics of the platform in question, but rather these broader issues of context, vision, and ‘agenda’. For example, in the thread about Gripen vs. F-35 for Denmark, inflammatory statements aside (e.g. “Gripen couldn’t penetrate its way out of a paper bag”) there is comparatively little disagreement as to the merits and demerits of the respective platforms; rather what is at issue is precisely those broader issues of national vision which shape the weight — or lack thereof — that one gives to particular technical or quantitative factors. Some people might see my bringing up issues of NATO policy as off-topic or unnecessarily controversial, but in fact I think they strike at the very heart of the debate, and that without this broader context one is forever chasing ghosts.
So, I wound up rambling on a bit here, but to summarise my position: I think that APA is a valuable contributor to public discussion on these matters which are of interest to all of us, and I think this is true regardless of whether one agrees with the specific arguments they have made or not — and indeed in many cases I do not. I further think that those who apparently cannot let go of certain facts, e.g. that APA stood to gain from the souped-up F-111 project, and prefer this line of argument to actually engaging with the substantive issues raised, do not help their own cause, and that this is particularly true when that criticism is expressed in hyperbolic terms, e.g. as in hopsalot’s post.
But then I’m just an Arts major so what do I know. :p
The proliferation of fighters with look down, shoot down capability pretty much blunted the effectiveness of the F-111/Tornado/Su-24 genre. The advent of missiles like the JASSM pretty much made them redundant.
In the Australian context the significance of the F-111 was in its range, not its specific modus operandi. It represented a class of aircraft that is no longer extant in the world today.
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