They aren’t even trying anymore:
Obama and Gates Gut the Military: The secretary’s new budget will leave us weaker to pay for the president’s domestic programs.
By THOMAS DONNELLY and GARY SCHMITT
On Monday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced a significant reordering of U.S. defense programs. His recommendations should not go unchallenged.
In the 1990s, defense cuts helped pay for increased domestic spending, and that is true today. Though Mr. Gates said that his decisions were “almost exclusively influenced by factors other than simply finding a way to balance the books,” the broad list of program reductions and terminations suggest otherwise. In fact, he tacitly acknowledged as much by saying the budget plan represented “one of those rare chances to match virtue to necessity” — the “necessity” of course being the administration’s decision to reorder the government’s spending priorities.
2009 Pentagon budget: $513 billion
2010 proposed Pentagon budget: $534 billion
Seriously, I can’t be the only person to notice that this “gutting” of the military includes spending 21 billion more than this year. I remember back in the day when Republicans and conservatives would get upset when Democrats framed increases in spending as cuts. Guess I am just getting old.
BTW- didn’t the GOP alternative “budget” call for a spending freeze? Lemme guess, military spending was exempt from the freeze.
norbizness
As long as everyone is going to lie anyway, how about taking a stab at gutting that bloated thing where we’re spending more than the rest of the world combined?
blahblahblah
With so many blogs dedicated to tracking misrepresentations and untruths published in the mainstream press, one question I have is where does one obtain reasoned and honest reporting?
SpotWeld
He’s essentially following on with the cuts Bush made for a smaller "more agile" militart (see Crusader and Commanche programs), and the GOP is going to complain!
Who do we have to get to recite thier own name backwards to make this wierd and crazy trip end?
SGEW
One does not.
Cris
From Donnelly and Schmitt:
"Emerging environments." SDI has been emerging for two decades, and the fucker just won’t bloom. It should have been snipped when Reagan proposed it; cutting off its leggy suckers is long overdue.
Go trim your nose hair.
r€nato
SSDD.
The Republican party couldn’t get a dog catcher elected if they didn’t peddle FUD.
back in 2000, Bush/Cheney conjured up this bullshit argument that Clinton had so overstretched our military that two of the Army’s 12 divisions would have to report, "not ready for duty, sir!"
We all know how that one turned out; in any case the argument was bullshit and the military even said so at the time.
Pretty much anything the GOP has to say about our military – when the Republicans are out of power – should be considered concern trolling until proven otherwise.
Dennis-SGMM
"War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength."
r€nato
yeah, that reminds me of how the frightards hammered Clinton for ‘gutting’ our military in the 1990s… counting on people to forget that Clinton was simply continuing the reasonable response of his Republican predecessor to the end of the Cold War.
I fucking hate Republicans and their water carriers.
zzyzx
They were very upfront in the budget that military spending would be increased.
r€nato
exactly.
Just like how the Great Depression didn’t really end until WW2, because military spending is so not like government spending.
Cris
That’s the beautiful thing about IOKIYAR. Not only did Bush get to enact policies that would have been intolerable under a Democratic administration, but his Democratic successor can neither reject nor continue those policies. It’s a hidden Catch-22 that nobody could have predicted.
SpotWeld
And this brings us back to one of the biggest whingings of NRA’ers. That the cutbacks during the Clinton era reuduced the amound of surplus on the market, therefore raising the prices of ammunition, ammo boxes, and uniform components.
That’s right, the people who squall like infants at the thought of "goverment handouts" complain until they are blue in the face about the reduction of "goverment surplus" goods for them to buy.
Buck
I get mine here.
NutellaonToast
I think the simple fact that you NEVER see main stream writers mentioning the "more than the rest of the world" bit and yet constantly hear them speak of the military being "gutted" is the single biggest piece of evidence that this is all being run by the corporations. I mean, I try and tell myself that it’s just a crazy conspiracy theory-the black helicopters of the left-but… how can that not be mentioned a million times a day?
Sometimes i wonder if maybe the fact that people don’t vote is because politicians are way to afraid to say stuff like that. How can the majority of Americans not see the fact that our military is bigger than the rest of the worlds is a bad fact. A bad bad fact.
ZOMG! DEFICITS!
Rick Taylor
Off topic, but John Stewart on the craziness of Wingnuts is nearly perfect.
Apsaras
Noooo, not my precious F-22!
How will Bill Pullman save us from the aliens now?
JenJen
@John Cole, top:
Not sure about the Awesome GOP Alterna-Budget, but during the campaign, and especially in the debates, John McCain, said that, if elected, he planned to freeze all government spending except for military spending and aid to veterans.
Barry Soetoro
The Russians wouldn’t think our F-22s flying around in the region is an act of aggression? New fighters with all sorts of new technology, flying near or over Georgia? How exactly does an F-22 "sanitize" the skies without pissing off those being "sanitized"?
This "editorial" by Donnelly and Schmitt reads like a brochure for certain defense industry interests. They’re not cogent arguments (calling a cut "discouraging" doesn’t explain said program’s importance to US national defense). I’m not surprised, though, since these guys are from AEI.
Warren Terra
I’m a huge fan of the Obama/Gates shift in priorities from toys to troops, although as a lefty I’d actually like to see some contemplation of genuine cuts.
All that said, I keep on seeing this comparison of the Obama/Gates proposed budget of $534 billion to the 2009 budget of $513 billion as if it were apples-to-apples, and it’s just not.
Obama, you may recall, is opposed to playing games with the budget, and so he’s insisted that predictable expenses in Iraq and Afghanistan should be funded from the defense budget, not from supplementary bills. Bush, whose honesty was rather less impressive, always tried to keep the war spending (and G-d knows what else rolled up with it) out of not only the annual defense budget number but even the annual deficit number.
If Obama and Gates can get people to play along with their $534/$513 comparison, that will largely be Bush’s fault for his game playing with the 2009 numbers – but it doesn’t make the comparison right.
The Other Steve
First time I’ve ever heard an increase in spending referred to as gutting.
r€nato
It’s about goddamned time we restored some sanity to military spending. If this administration can’t do it, it’s not going to happen for another generation.
i don’t know how Obama thinks he’s going to get it done – military spending is the epitome of congressional pork barrel politics – but I hope he follows through on his promise.
If Republicans were really concerned about an effective national defense, they would recognize that a lot of the Pentagon’ budget is pissed away on horrendously overbudget hardware programs and pie-in-the-sky garbage make-work programs like missile defense, and they would work with Obama to make sure that national defense needs supercede parochial ‘I want military contracting jobs in my district’ politics.
But, as always, the troops are just political props to be cynically used by the GOP. Military spending is a sacred fucking cow which can never be criticized nor looked at closely.
Military spending has become white-collar welfare and it needs to be re-oriented. We need to spend less because we simply cannot afford double-digit annual increases in it, and we need to spend it more effectively than we currently are.
r€nato
perhaps so (how young are you? lol) but surely you have heard of ‘losing a war badly’ referred to as, ‘we’re winning!’
Ricky Bobby
The GOP mantra:
"Details? We don’t need know stinking DETAILS!"
Carry on PARTY OF NO.
BTW, the tarring and feathering of Gates as librul flunky sabateur in 5… 4… 3… 2…
Punchy
You clearly dont understand Republican Math(TM). See, a spending freeze across the board of course means an increase in military spending. Only a unitard like yerself would fail to understand such easy arithmetic.
Miriam
@Warren Terra
I’m confused. Are you saying that it isn’t an actual increase in the Defense Budget, but a function of an accounting change? Do you have anything to back that up?
Michael
I’ve never seen anything wrong in having some old time "dumb" systems available for use around lower-tech third world garden spots.
Seems to me that the guns of the USS New Jersey and USS Missouri would work well in support of hostage extraction in Somalia. Old cruisers and destroyers could do a fine job of pirate patrol as well.
Likewise, I can think of some very positive uses for F-4 Phantoms and A-37 Skyraiders with regard to interdiction flights.
Leelee for Obama
@Dennis-SGMM: And, "we have always been at war with__________(fill in the blank)." Also.
When do we stand up and say, "enough, just enough?" There needs to be a bit, just a bit, of sanity injected into the MIC. They will still have more money than God to spend; just a wee bit less.
After watching Frontline last night, I may never stop being pissed off. How the hell many people could have health care, or college or decent housing with the kind of money Bandar Bush calls chump change?
NutellaonToast
Not to mention that the F-22 will almost certainly be obsolete quickly enough. There’s a lot of electromagnetic spectrum up there. You gotta reflect some of it!
It’s amazing how much military technology is like that. We build tanks, so they develop antitank weapons. We develop better armor, so they make HEAT. We develop responsive armor, so they make double charge rounds (or whatever they’re called)! Seriously, read about explosive responsive armor. It’s hilarious. Imagine how much money it cost to develop and make that. Now imagine that it took like, what, a month for a clever guy to find a way around it? Maybe?
Tom Ames
I suspect that Warren Terra (above) has it exactly right. IIRC the budget for the Iraq/Afghan adventures were not included in the Bush administration’s Pentagon budget. Obama (rightly) ended that charade.
But it would seem to me that the correct comparison is:
$513B + all of the "emergency appropriations" vs. $534B.
That probably a pretty hefty defense budget cut after all. And good for Gates for pushing it.
Dennis-SGMM
Even as we speak, the planet Mars has noted Obama’s weakness and is preparing an invasion fleet. You’ll all be singing a different tune when we have to bend our knees before our new Martian overlords.
Mnemosyne
So these guys think it was a great idea to fire on Russian planes and air defenses while we’re over their territory?
They must miss the Cold War more than I thought if they’re that focused on starting a war with Russia.
Zifnab
This doesn’t not have enough to do with pirates!
Dennis-SGMM
r€nato
@Punchy:
Republican politicians regularly and habitually refer to an opponent’s votes against tax cuts, as a vote to ‘raise your taxes’.
Not a big leap from that to, ‘ZOMG! Obama is gutting military spending by not increasing it as much as we would have!’
Mnemosyne
@Tom Ames:
If so, I really really really want the Republicans to pursue this line of complaint. If their explanation for it being a "cut" is that we were paying for Iraq and Afghanistan off the books so the defense budget numbers have been completely bogus for the last 6 years, I don’t think that’s going to go over very well with the citizenry. Smells a little too much like AIG’s "creative" accounting.
kay
@Tom Ames:
That probably a pretty hefty defense budget cut after all. And good for Gates for pushing it.
I knew there was going to be coordinated push-back. The defense lobby dwarfs all others, in my opinion, in terms of broad institutional support and influence.
It’s the REAL third rail in American politics, but it isn’t voters who object to slowing the flow from the defense money spigot, it’s a much more select and influential group.
I think Gates is the only one who can do it, if indeed he succeeds. I doubt he does succeed, and that’s a shame.
The Moar You Know
I don’t see reductions in defense spending here. What I’m seeing is a focus on programs that work, and the cutting of programs that don’t or can’t help America’s security needs.
The F-22 Raptor is a fucking joke. The planes are running about $160 million each and they still can’t get them to work properly.
So is the F-35. Although much cheaper, they still cost five times what a brand new F-16 costs and have less range, less manuverability, and are in every way inferior to the F-16.
Think about that. We’re going to build almost 3,000 aircraft that are demonstrably inferior to what we’ve got now.
Gates is right on with his budget.
Dennis-SGMM
@Zifnab:
Arrr!
Barry Soetoro
@NutellaonToast:
The average time to overcome tank armor with new anti-tank weapons is about 5 years. To counter this, tanks receive periodic updated packages to their armor. Reactive armor development and usage seems crazy but its use is not uncommon. Take a look at the latest M1A2 Abrams SEP, with its Abrams Reactive Armor and slat armor on the rear of the hull.
The Moar You Know
Don’t know where this came from:
but it is a full-bore lie. The F-22 is not combat ready and won’t be for several more years.
The Grand Panjandrum
@Dennis-SGMM:
At least when the little fuckers say "Take us to your leader" we won’t be taking them to someone who sounds like he speaks Martian. I guess a Martian just can’t get a break these days.
Zifnab
Hey, anyone remember back in 2005 when the Rumfeld Pentagon went through a large round of domestic military base closures focused primarily in (blue state) New England?
http://www.defensetech.net/downloads/PDF_downloads_news/051305_hammer_new_england.pdf
I remember how loud the Red State Republicans howled about Bush destroying our national security. Oh… wait… no I don’t.
Barry Soetoro
@The Moar You Know:
But the F-22 is young and sexy, and that is all that matters. We don’t need no old and ugly planes designed/built during the 70s and 80s like F-15s, F-16s and F-18s–not to mention their paper bag-worthy cousin the A-10.
Dennis-SGMM
And of course the fun-loving Russkies would never decide to sanitize Georgia or the Czech Republic or the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S. as a response. Nor would they arm the Iranians with the latest weapons also.
kay
Just do a quick review. Of all the government corruption scandals over the last 30 years, both parties, how many of them had to do with defense contracting?
The government spends a lot of money in a lot of ways. Why is this one area so prone to corruption?
We haven’t had an honest debate on this in my lifetime. Nearly every other government expense has been slated for cuts or reform at one time or another, but for some mysterious reason, we never get to defense, without insane, coordinated push-back from nearly all corners. Why is that?
Good luck, Secretary Gates. You’ll need it.
Cris
You may be right. I would really like to know if you’re right. Unfortunately, a few minutes of idle Googling while working has not turned up any articles that mention the details of the comparison.
r€nato
@Dennis-SGMM:
my (asshole) father, who spent nearly his entire career in defense electronics (yet he loathed ‘big government spending’, hahahaha but that’s another story), once told me how the B-2 stealth bomber was really not all that stealthy. It leaves a ‘hole in the sky’ which is easily detected if you are an enemy who knows what to look for. see here for a brief but accurate description of the problem.
Cris
By the way, anybody who uses the phrase "sanitize the skies" without irony is a tool.
Warren Terra
Miriam, Tom Ames has it right. I’m not sure how much was passed in Iraq + Afghanistan supplemental military spending for 2009 (at least $65 billion), but my understanding is that the Obama/Gates budget would include such spending in the defense budget, so their $534 billion should be compared to at least ($513 billion + $65 billion).
As I said, this doesn’t faze me in the slightest (I’d like to see more), and critics of Obama/Gates are pushing weapons systems that don’t work, aren’t cost-effective, or can’t be justified, so they’re not really very credible. Still, if my numbers are right then the Obama/Gates is at least an 8% cut from the previous year.
P.S. I looked at a Wikipedia article as well, which makes the astounding claim of $1 billion military spending for 2009, but they roll in all kinds of other things no-one would consider parto f the Pentagon budget (Veterans affairs, interest payments on the military’s part of the national debt) and I think they may be double-counting Iraq and Afghanistan, so I couldn’t immediately ifgure out how to include them in any comparison.
The Moar You Know
@Barry Soetoro: I wish that wasn’t true, but it is.
I will also admit that I find the A-10 the sexiest aircraft around. 19,000 lbs of thrust from the engines moving it forward. 9,000 lbs of recoil from the gun trying to move it backwards. That is the definition of awesome right there.
AhabTRuler
Yeah, if you are trying to extract the hostages through a straw. What the hell do you need a 16-in gun for, other than to swing yer dick around?
Darius
Ding ding ding. Specifically, they called for a freeze on "non-defense discretionary spending" – which makes up a whopping 17% of our federal budget. (In comparison, defense spending makes up 20% of the federal budget all by itself.)
And Republicans wonder why nobody takes them seriously anymore.
GSD
Ah yes, I remember that Bill Clinton had so gutted the military that the GOP and the political right were eager to take that decimated, gutted and destroyed military and promptly put them into action in two theaters of military battle in Afghanistan and Iraq with nary a moment to rebuild the totally destroyed institution that was the military.
Fucking unreal.
-GSD
NonyNony
@The Moar You Know:
Gates just put all of the Congresscritters on the defensive. He put together a package that is good for the military in the long run, and good for taxpayers at the macro level but bad for individual states and congressional districts.
I’ll be very interested to see how this worms its way through the Congressional budget process. I get the feeling that Gates is shooting for the sun and hoping to get the moon – asking for more cuts than he thinks he can get in the hopes of getting the worst stuff cut. The really interesting thing to watch will be the individual Congressional leaders trying to justify keeping purchases that the Pentagon is now saying are useless. I’m curious how many of them will be willing to stick their necks out to defend useless wastes of tax dollars just because it hits their home state/district.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
@Dennis-SGMM:
I, for one, welcome our new Martian overlords.
Michael
Accurate groundpounding to 15 miles in, for starters. How are the pirates going to muster up their defenses if 16 inch guns and a cheap drone can provide pinpoint accuracy on depots, walls and observation points?
gnomedad
@Rick Taylor:
"I think you might be confusing ‘tyrrany’ with ‘losing’." lolz!
Brian J
You can frame the issue as either a cut or as an increase in spending and have some justification for your claim. What’s not debatable is that money is being pulled from different programs, leading to a number that is larger than we saw last year but not as large as it might have been.
Some seem to feel as if the administration is doing little more than arbitrarily closing down spending avenues to please some extreme constituency. That’s a laughable claim, of course, but I won’t be surprised to see them making it. The correct response is to simply ask them to defend their claims that the programs that are being cut are worthwhile, primarily for their value to the armed forces and not for jobs in their district. Something tells me the administration will be pushing that exact line of defense against any critics.
Walker
What is fascinating is just how out of touch these cold war relics are. All of this stuff they are clinging to are designed for major actors like Russia or China, not the people we are actually fighting.
And if these idiots want to worry about war with China fine. They should just be aware that the only "space" that war will be fought in is cyberspace.
TenguPhule
And after 8 years of Bush/Cheney, we’re LUCKY if two divisions can report as fully ready for duty.
kay
@NonyNony:
"But Gates said he’s worried that “a deterioration of discipline” has crept into the process, where even low-level officers are offering advice to Congress about what to keep.
Gates said it’s OK for the chiefs of staff to provide their professional advice to members of Congress, but not all Pentagon employees may do so."
I think individual members of Congress were probably relying on "advice" given to them by low-level officers, to justify a vote saving a pet project. I imagine it wouldn’t be hard to find one Pentagon employee who supports nearly any project.
Maybe if Gate’s limits Pentagon access to Congress, it will help. Let’s face it: they’re lobbying, and they’re giving Congress an "expert" to rely on.
TenguPhule
Accuracy of course is relative.
Much like smart munitions.
It’s only as good as the person pulling the trigger.
And that doesn’t factor the gremlins.
gwangung
Sorry, I’ll disagree here.
Their main thing is that the art of defense is to account for contingencies. And there (albeit remote) possibilities of armed conflict with Russia and China. It’s part of the job of defense to prepare for those contingencies.
What’s NOT part of their job is to do it with systems that work badly or not work at all. That’s the line of attack that will work, every time.
TenguPhule
Think of it as another piece of the stimulus package.
Can we afford to lose all those related jobs involved right now?
Of course in this case the jobs seem to be moving out of the big wasteful contractors and redirected towards stuff that actually matters to troops in the field.
TenguPhule
Yep.
Instead of fewer more expensive stuff, they should have stuck with the ability to deploy large numbers of middle class stuff that costs half as much.
If we ever pick a fight with China, we’ll run out of ammo long before they run out of planes, ships and warm bodies.
Warren Terra
Someone clearly hasn’t been paying attention for at least the last seven years. The problem isn’t hitting the target, it’s finding the target. If we had a drone overhead watching and telling us for certain that a specific slum dwelling or car contained the pirates or the terrorists or the martians, and were willing to blow that slum dwelling or car up, the drone’s own missile would do the job, or we could use a guided bomb from the air force or the navy. The problem is finding the targets, not hitting them, and especially not hitting them with salvos of 16-inch shells.
Our problems in Afghanistan and the Northwest Frontier Province would not be fixed if we put wheels on the Missouri and rolled it into the area (though if it meant jobs in the right districts I’m sure some congressfolk would demand it be done for our national security).
Tsulagi
So a 4% increase in defense spending is “gutting” and surely unpatriotic. Yet a 3% rise in the top tax bracket that could help pay for that without additional debt is clearly a massive increase and the certain cornerstone of an Obama/Dem commiesoc-ialistfascism agenda.
Today’s wingnuts need to leave a Rosetta Stone so future archeologists can decipher their shit.
Dennis-SGMM
Here’s your smart, computerized 21st century, weapons system in a nutshell: the U.S.S. George H.W. Bush, CVN 77, uses a Windows-based OS on its integrated communications and integrated warfare systems, among others.
Kinda’ gives a new meaning to "the Blue Screen of Death."
Lost Rocks While BSG Sucks
People, check who wrote this: "By THOMAS DONNELLY and GARY SCHMITT"
Now go to the end of the article and you’ll find this:
See: "American Enterprise Institute". This was written by two employees from a right-wing
think tankinsane asylum. And published in the WSJ.Wile E. Quixote
@NutellaonToast
Sorry, but infantry anti-tank weapons are overrated. The best anti-tank weapon out there is another tank, second best, an aircraft. Once you start looking at the amount of HE and propellant necessary to punch through modern armor you very quickly go beyond anything that is reasonably man-portable, which means you have to build a vehicle to carry it, which is a bigger target, and you have to provide protection for the crew, because otherwise they’re getting shredded by bullets or shrapnel. Oh, and you either have to build a weapon that is fire and forget, which is difficult to do, or you have something that is wire guided, which, if you kill the operator or cause the wire to break by maneuvering so that the missile has to keep up with the target becomes a very expensive firework. It’s hardly that it takes a month for a clever guy to find a way around this stuff, it takes years and a lot of hard work. Anyone who thinks you can do it in a month is probably out simulating the behavior of Bradley fighting vehicles in their catbox with their 1/32nd Matchbox toys.
TenguPhule
Why would you condemn future generations to the same mistakes?
Better that wingnuts die out alone and forgotten.
gex
@The Other Steve: I’d love to have my salary gutted to the tune of X + $21K. I’m willing to take that kind of hit for my country.
guest omen
how much of the increase goes to the va? or is that put on a separate bill?
Fencedude
@Warren Terra:
If nothing else, I think that would be awesome.
Nellcote
So Cheney’s recent fear mongering were just a pre-emptive strike on military budget cuts/defense of the military industrial complex?
Wile E. Quixote
@kay
It’s worthwhile to re-read Eisenhower’s farewell address, where he warned about the influence of the "military-industrial complex".
and remember that he wanted to use the term "military-industrial-congressional" complex. I think that we need to start using this formulation because Congress is a huge part of the problem. Of course I say this as a resident of Seattle, the town that Boeing built, which for years was represented by Henry "Scoop" Jackson who was referred to on Capitol Hill as "the Senator from Boeing".
eemom
Milbank in the WaPo had a good piece on this yesterday:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/06/AR2009040603421.html?sub=AR
If you can access the print edition, check out the pic of Gates at the conference with the Marine General named "Hoss." That grin on his face is priceless.
And I am generally not one to muddle in things military, but from everything I’ve read and heard about this, I am really impressed by Gates.
gex
@r€nato:
Hey, I have one of those too! If ever anyone wonders why the post boomer generation is more liberal, just point to these guys. My dad has the added GOP cred of being a *Chinese* man who complains about foreigners.
guest omen
isn’t it strange that nkorea launches a missile right before missile defense funding was headed to go on the chopping block?
Wile E. Quixote
@Lost Rocks While BSG Sucks
I think that this sort of thing is one of the most corrupt things that the MSM does, allowing various partisan "think tanks", mostly staffed by right-wingers, unfettered access to their editorial pages. If I had the money I’d love to set up a website and hire some writers who would do nothing more than investigate and reveal this sort of thing and in general call bullshit on these bastards and the whores in the MSM who enable them.
Sunshine is the best disinfectant, but I want to go much further than that, I want to focus the harsh and unforgiving light of the truth on these bastards and incinerate them like ants under a magnifying glass.
guest omen
my (asshole) father, who spent nearly his entire career in defense electronics (yet he loathed ‘big government spending’
that’s like farmers who earn 6 figure incomes with the help of taxpayer subsidies bitching about single mothers on welfare getting an extra 100 bucks a month.
Woody
So the "authors" are not part of the WSJ ‘staff’?
So it’s an op-ed piece?
On the WSJ’s batshit-crasy, fucktard-wackloon op-ed page…
Why are we wasting time on this?
HyperIon
@Wile E. Quixote:
Many modern weapons systems are overrated. How else do you get people to agree to spend so much?
Step 1: Fear-monger the threat of X.
Step 2: Our weapon system will save you from threat X. Really. Just give us a shit ton of money. Oh, and we’ll employ lots of people, too.
Aside from hardware purchases, I like that Gates is also proposing that many projects NOT be outsourced, that they be performed by military personnel.
TenguPhule
Years ago I called my local paper to complain about this.
Their response?
"It’s to balance the liberal media on our other pages."
I shit you not.
Ash Can
I wonder how much payola Donnelly and Schmitt get from defense companies for writing and publishing their shit. It would be irresponsible not to speculate.
@Lost Rocks While BSG Sucks: For all the great straight reporting the WSJ does, its op-ed section is consistently and thoroughly out to lunch. Go figure.
TenguPhule
Mines.
Or the poor man’s version, IEDs.
Woody
Why, yes, yes it is exactly like that…
Gates "killed" the F-22, parts of which are manufactured, designed, polished, installed, or wqarehoused and/or transported by companies in 48 states.
Wanna bet the F-22 doesn’t stay dead???
Zifnab
@guest omen:
Isn’t it strange that anyone honestly thinks N.Korea is going to be able to successfully launch an ICBM with a rat’s chance in hell of hitting it’s target?
You’ve got FAUX Noise screaming like a freak’n banshee that a satellite launch spells the end of the free world. This is fifty year old technology and the NKs are just now picking it up. Why are we afraid again?
NonWonderDog
@Dennis-SGMM:
The point of stealth really isn’t to make planes invisible to tracking radar. The point is to make the plane unlockable to enemy missiles until it’s in range and can destroy the target. (And an F-22’s radar cross-section is supposed to be much less than 1/100x a Cessna 172’s. It’s supposedly 1/10000x the size.)
An F-22 against an F-16 (or hell, 4 F-16s) in a head-on engagement at long range will win at least 90% of the time, because the F-22 will be able to lock on and fire at something like 3-4x the range. The only chance for the F-16s in a first pass, assuming they know the F-22 is in the area and they’re getting sporadic radar returns, is to fire without a lock, run away, and hope their missiles pick up the F-22s on their own (exceedingly likely).
It’s still totally unnecessary, of course, and there’s no pressing geopolitical reason to pay so much money for that capability. (And it doesn’t yet, ya know, work.) But it’s pointedly not an already-obsolete technology.
The Grand Panjandrum
OK so I didn’t read the piece before commenting earlier. But man did you miss THE quote. Nathan Bedford Forrest? No fucking shit! Nathan Bedford Forrest! They just couldn’t help themselves could they?
Nathan Bedford Forrest:
TenguPhule
Military budgets are like a box of chocolates?
Comrade Dread
Democrats used to play that game all the time. A decrease in the rate of a spending increase on, say, Education was described as massive cuts to Education spending by the time it got distributed to the media.
It used to rightly piss Republicans off to no end.
I guess it’s one more thing to ad to the ever increasing list of things which are okay if you’re a Republican.
Doug
@Warren Terra:
2009 budget: $513b ($655b incl. Iraq/Afghanistan)
2010 budget: $534b ($664b incl. Iraq/Afghanistan)
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/04/06/gates.budget.cuts/index.html
guest omen
@Zifnab:
there is a history of certain players intervening and playing both sides of an issue. from peace summits to arms dealing. wouldn’t surprise me to find out nk was bribed.
Zifnab
@The Grand Panjandrum:
As an aside, how did General Forrest do, anyway? What ever happened to the Confederate States of America?
Calouste
@The Moar You Know:
The A-10 has some MacGyverish cool about it. You basically weld a Gatling gun to a bathtub, put some wings on it and you get something that can still come back to base even if it has been half shot to bits.
Woody
They’ve got pitchers in NKorea who could throw a fastball to japan…[/snark
Seriously, all the NKoreans have to do to bomb japan is to keep a bomb in the air long enough for the earth to rotate under it…a couple of minutes, half an hour?
Pyongyang to Hiroshima = 490 miles
Robert Sneddon
Re: Battleships in the modern world. Sadly there just isn’t any sort of reason to have them around any more. Their raison d’etre was to pound on other Big Iron ships on the other side(s), absent that take their smaller capital ships under fire and engage troop and supply convoys. Going in close to a hostile shore to deliver main-gun fire on-shore was always a risky business; less room to manoeuvre (remember Nelson’s Toast: "A willing foe, and searoom!") and the real risk of minefields and littoral subs sending an expensive asset and 2000 men to their final resting place on the (admittedly) shallow bottom. It’s one reason the B-17 Flying Fortress was developed, to attack shore installations in a similar manner to a battleship.
Anything a 16"/50 rifle can do a ground-attack aircraft today can do much better and more accurately, and its choice of targets is not limited to a narrow strip of coastline — see Afghanistan and Iraq as prime examples.
Zifnab
@guest omen: N.Korea gets thrown up in the news every time Little Kim makes a particularly wet fart. I’ll happily concede that N.Korea suddenly got newsworthy again because we’re talking about budget cuts. I don’t know if it’s quite so "The World Is Not Enough" as guys sneaking out and "making" news by handing NK all the parts to make a full blown rocket.
A launch like this has been in the hopper for a long time. And if it hadn’t been Korean rockets, it would be Iranian centrifuges or Somalian pirates or Chinese air craft carriers or Russian spy drones or who knows what? The well is deep. There’s plenty to draw on.
Woody
Re: The butcher Forrest: via wiki–
wasabi gasp
Walk in with that kind of chump change, don’t expect to drive away in anything with that new death star smell.
Puggins
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/66xx/doc6630/SuppApprops.pdf
TenguPhule
The Rule of Cool.
Because there is something simply mesmerizing about that big ship throwing a hell of a lot of firepower at a target.
Zifnab
@Woody:
And avoid hitting China on the left and the Pacific Ocean on the right.
I mean, ICBMs… pish posh. It’s not like we’re talking about rocket science.
NonWonderDog
@NonWonderDog:
Ach. Unlikely. Exceedingly unlikely that an AMRAAM will ever hit anything at all when fired "mad dog," much less find and hit an F-22.
NonyNony
@Zifnab:
To be fair, Kim Jong Il is kind of nuts. If there’s a single world leader on the planet I’d expect to NOT be afraid of MAD, it’s KJI. I’m not worried about the Iranian Supreme Leader, or the Prime Minister of China, or of India, and I wasn’t really afraid of Mussharef (though I am worried about crazies getting the button in Pakistan if it devolves into failed state territory). But KJI worries me – that whole country’s leadership just seems not quite rational and not too worried about what happens to their country as a result of their actions. So yeah, NK suddenly being able to hit Japan with a nuke when they couldn’t yesterday does worry me a bit.
Michael
Try reading Media Matters.
Warren Terra
@ Doug #92
Thanks for the numbers.
Michael
That’s a titanium bathtub.
Awesome, wicked cool.
Brachiator
Bonehead progressives would spend infinite amounts of money on domestic programs, while bonehead conservatives would spend infinite amounts of money on defense.
And as others have noted, the GOP has mastered the art of deception on defense issues. They whined about Clinton having "gutted" the military even though the Iraq war was started with the military that Clinton had left in place. And the last time I checked, US military spending and capability exceeds that of any other nation many times over.
The Cat Who Would Be Tunch
@Tsulagi:
Here, let me help you with that.
Marginal tax rate for top bracket:
39% = socialism
Treatment of detainees:
Americans use water boarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, etc. = "Enhanced interrogation" or "hazing".
Rest of the world uses same techniques = Torture.
Policy Debates
Democrats criticizing Republican president = Treason.
Republicans criticizing Democratic president = Loyal opposition, patriotic duty.
Service to Country
Republican candidate that got out of enlistment = Warrior, ball scratching tough guy hero.
Democratic candidate that served in war = French-looking, Appeasement-loving, Chamberlain-esque liberal wuss.
Time Needed to Judge Policy Decisions
For Republicans = Several decades, maybe even a century.
For Democrats = Two weeks.
Just looking at that list makes one dizzy because of the sheer amount of cognitive dissonance that one experiences. Although I must say that it was a fun exercise putting it together. Anybody want to continue building the "Wingnuttia Stone" with me for future generations?
Corner Stone
@Michael
They’re *pirates*! What defenses, depots, walls or observation points? Unless a 16in gun can hit a speeding boat no bigger than a good size tugboat, not sure what else they can do.
Corner Stone
/Lebanon
Corner Stone
It may be just the war pr0n inner hooligan in me but I have to totally agree. FSM help me but there’s nothing cooler than watching tape of those guns rain it down.
Dennis-SGMM
New Concerns Over Chinese ‘Carrier-Killer’
A supercarrier costs $5bn. The missile costs? Supposedly, we’ve built our last supercarrier.
AnneLaurie
To a significant minority of American voters, having the Biggest! Military! in the Muthafvckin! WORLD! is another form of tiny-penis overcompensation — a feature, not a bug. The difficult thing, for the rest of us sane people, is figuring out how to convince them that a steady supply of cheap effective boner pills is better than one of those risky ridiculous ‘extension’ operations that’s liable to leave the patient incapable of achieving an erection & possibly incontinent as well.
For Dennis-SGM:
The War Nerd
inthewoods
These guys just remind me of Team B:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_B
gex
@The Cat Who Would Be Tunch: I think that all we really need to do is spell out what the IOKIYAR acronym stands for. It is the only translation guide you need and it never fails to explain the apparent contradictions.
Llelldorin
Besides, the old Mark 7 guns in the battleship main battery were cannon, in the true sense. Sailors loaded bags of gunpowder behind the shell, then sealed the chamber. Given that most of us associate piracy with the nineteenth century, something deep within us wants to fire cannon at them, even though that makes absolutely no sense at all.
TenguPhule
At that speed, modern anti-missile systems have a snowball’s chance in hell of hitting it short of the target.
TenguPhule
I don’t hate the unborn that much.
bago
@TenguPhule: Remember that a Phalanx cannon pretty much can throw up a wall of steel anywhere. There is a slight chance it can slip through the firing rate gate, but that is minimal. At that speed the interceptor projectiles are a minimal kinetic threat other than the energy being spent by the the penetrator. That whole equal and opposite reaction bit.
Dennis-SGMM
@bago:
Although it has a high rate of fire the Phalanx system does not have a high sustained rate of fire. The barrels simply burn out after X number of rounds. Moreover, the Phalanx was designed to counter sea skimming missiles which travel considerably more slowly than the mach 10 quoted for the Dong Feng 21. At that speed, the gun simply can’t traverse fast enough to acquire the target. If by luck the the gun is pointed in the right direction it can’t initiate fire quickly enough to do much more than put rounds where the missile was.
asiangrrlMN
Oh, good grief. The right, The WSJ, the Republicans, and all the LOSERS (thanks, Jon Stewart) need to simmah down nah!
I was thinking of starting a political blog, but really, do I want to immerse myself in this kind of inanity every day more than I already do? Sheesh.
As for the teabaggers whining about taxes, I say, this is what losing tastes like. I didn’t want my president to start a fictitious war, but he did, and I paid my damn taxes, anyway, because that’s democracy (thanks again, Jon Stewart). Wusses.
Foxwood
The direction our country is headed, we’re in trouble. Putin has a better plan than Obama.
AhabTRuler
@bago: @TenguPhule: It is my understanding that the phalanx would not be able to elevate enough to attack a missile traveling on a ballistic trajectory, to say nothing of the closing speed and associated aiming error.
r€nato
@GSD:
AHA! Yet another thing that’s Clinton’s fault.
r€nato
@TenguPhule:
Interestingly, when Google was considering how to go about acquiring the massive amount of servers needed for their data centers, they realized it was much smarter and much MUCH more affordable to obtain inexpensive servers using readily-available inexpensive components rather than much more expensive, almost-completely-100%-reliable servers from, say, IBM.
With the former approach, you know you’re going to have a certain failure rate in hardware. But, that’s OK; there’s lots and lots of redundancy built into the infrastructure of the internet. So if a server goes down, no problem; let the rest of the servers handle the load and just swap out the faulty component.
Although it’s not a 100%-valid analogy for military hardware planning, it’s certainly something the Pentagon should be thinking about as Gates considers how to re-orient defense spending.
bago
@AhabTRuler: Ballistic projectiles are WAY easy to aim for. When you give up any pretense of atmospheric maneuvering, you are one quadratic equation away from being intercepted.