USAF BRASS: WE LOST, NOW PAY UP

It’s hap­pen­ing. Already, the U.S. Air Force brass is try­ing to spin their pilots’ defeats against Indian fight­ers into cash for two new con­tro­ver­sial, budget-​​busting jets.
As dis­cussed yes­ter­day, Indian fly­boys in creaky Russian and French planes trumped their American adver­saries 90 per­cent of the time dur­ing a recent exer­cise.
“We may not be as far ahead of the rest of the world as we thought we were,” Gen. Hal M. Hornburg, the chief of Air Combat Command, told reporters.
He then made a pitch (scroll down) for the trou­bled F/​A-​​22 and F-​​35 Joint Strike Fighters. Pentagon-​​watchers have called both planes money-​​hogs that the mil­i­tary can’t afford dur­ing wartime.
“The jets are designed as stealth ‘air-​​superiority’ fight­ers planes whose main mis­sion is to shoot down enemy planes… [But no] air force in the world, except per­haps those of Israel and France, could shoot down more than a few American non-​​stealth fighter planes in even a large, pro­tracted dog­fight (and most of those shoot-​​downs would be by dumb luck),” Slate’s Fred Kaplan said last fall.
Now, the Air Force has new ammu­ni­tion to fire back at its fighter crit­ics.
“We’ve taken air supe­ri­or­ity for granted,” Gen. Hornburg said.
THERE’S MORE: How could refur­bished Russian MiG-​​21 jets even be a threat to American fight­ers? “When you stuff them full of Israeli elec­tron­ics, multi-​​function [air-​​to-​​air] radar, and a helmet-​​mounted sight for cue­ing its Python-​​3 mis­siles,” said a Defense Tech pal in the USAF, point­ing us to these two sites.
He adds, “Now does that jus­tify an F-​​22? Not on its own, but old Russian clunk­ers can be made over pretty nicely.“
AND MORE: Air power’s dirty lit­tle secret is that the air­frame pretty much doesn’t mat­ter these days,” says Defense Tech reader JA. What it does is “pro­vide mount­ing points for weapons, sen­sors and engine(s). The MiG-21’s air­frame is quite suf­fi­cient for act­ing as a place­holder for state of the art toys. To my way of think­ing the USAF’s Fighter Mafia has never made the case for the need for either the (A)/F-22 or A/(F)-35. Rumsfeld’s fail­ing has been in not bring­ing these overe­d­u­cated idiots to heel.”

June 25th, 2004 | Planes, Copters, Blimps | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.