A friend of mine sent me an article from today’s Wall Street Journal asking “Will Obama Gut Defense?” This article had many flaws, it is telling that military spending is equated with having a better military, without thought to what that money is being spent on.
What Sen. Obama has said is that we need to invest in our service members. That we need to do more to protect them while they are in the field and ensure they get the care, both physical and mental, that they need when they return. This will ensure that more Solders, Sailors, Marines and Airmen can return to duty and be redeployed. It will also ensure that more Americans will be willing to join our armed forces.
Sen. Obama has not commented on the F-22, F-35, Future Combat Systems or National Missile Defense specifically, he has indeed been light on specifics which leaves open the opportunity to make the assumptions that the author does in this article. Even so, lets assume that the author is correct, and that these programs would be cut under an Obama administration.
First, lets focus on the Air Force. Nobody is denying the age of the Air Force’s current fleet of aircraft. The Air Force desperately needs to replace many of its air frames of all types. The question isn’t whether or not to replace these aircraft with fifth generation or nothing at all. The question needs to be: do we replace a handful of aircraft with fifth generation fighters or do we replace a majority of our aircraft with a new production line of our existing fourth generation fighters.
Looking at the F/A-18 E/F, the Marine Corps has the right idea. Upgrade our existing air frame designs with new avionics so we have a fleet of generation 4.5 aircraft. This could easily be done if the Air Force bought a new block of F-15s and F-16 at a substantially reduced cost from buying F-22s and F-35s.
This same logic holds true for all of the Air Force’s planes. There isn’t a huge need that isn’t being fulfilled by current tankers. The Air Force should buy new air frames of the current models, instead of developing something new.
Moving on to the Army, FCS does not fill any need that the Army currently has. In fact, it will likely do more harm than good, keeping the Army in a Second Generation model instead of moving towards the Third Generation of warfare. This is because the generals and commanders will be able to have more real-time information and be able to give orders while troops are engaged in battle. What the Army needs to do is rely upon the collective knowledge and insight of the troops who are doing the fighting to ensure the best decisions are made while in combat. Quite simply, instead of pushing the decision making to the lowest grunt in the field, that decision making will be concentrated at the top. This leads to slower decision making and an inability to adapt to new information quickly.
There are many other problems with FCS as well. The biggest other problem is the weight of the system. By adding all of this computer equipment, and the batteries to run it, we are weighing our Solders down with over a hundred pounds of gear. This limits their mobility and ensures they can’t be agile when responding to threats.
The Future Combat Systems also helps ensure that our Solders are more cut off and removed from the populations they have to interact with. In the types of engagements we find ourselves today, and that we will likely find ourselves in the future, this is a huge issue. Our troops need to be free to interact and build relationships with the populations they work in. It is the only way to win hearts and minds and to build legitimacy. Without doing that, we don’t have a viable exit strategy.
What all of this says, is that more spending does not directly equate to a better military. Our military needs to do more than blow things up, it cannot just be a gun that we point at what we want destroyed. Our military needs to be more nuanced, it needs to to be able to build bridges within the countries we are engaged, both literally and figuratively. Our military needs more smart people who are dedicated to improving the world in which we live.
Original post by dram
