Kirk Lippold
When former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that you go to war with the army you have, not with the army you wish you had, the U.S was already at war. All the leaders of the military could do was react to their short-sighted budget failures and scramble to upgrade those vehicles as quickly as possible, even as they came under relentless attacks in Iraq.
Fortunately, the United States is not in a declared state of war. Now is the time for decisive leadership and investments in the military we want to have, and then build it to protect us in the future. We should act now, before we are in the middle of a fight, not react later at the expense of American lives.
This point seems obvious, but it apparently escapes Philip Breedlove, a retired Air Force general. Breedlove writes that the “global threat environment demands we build as many F-35s as we can, as fast as we can.” Why would he think that? He says it is because, “the F-35 is simply the only allied stealth fighter in production that meets the demands of modern warfare.”
While speciously factual, it belies a greater underlying problem that fails to get to a long-term and sustainable solution. Having watched numerous budget contortions by the Air Force in the past, his statement alone is driven more by service loyalty to the Air Force than developing a combat-capable fighter to safeguard our nation. Even if it was true that the F-35 is all we have today (it isn’t, but that point isn’t worth arguing about), it simply isn’t good enough. The Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps all struggle to deploy F-35s, even as they keep coming off the assembly line over budget and failing to meet their design mission requirements. It remains a struggling acquisition program.
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