The future is not bright for the U.S. military. Yesterday, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta gave America a glimpse of the half-trillion dollars in defense spending cuts requested by the Obama Administration and detailed how the U.S. military’s capabilities would be affected in practical terms. The result is a slashed and burned military that woefully lacks the forces it needs to meet America’s security challenges on a global scale. On the ground, in the sea, and in the air, American forces will shrink drastically — the Army will shrink by 72,000 …
President Obama visited the Pentagon on Thursday to outline his plan for gutting our nation’s military. Obama’s vision makes America more vulnerable to foreign threats and leaves our armed forces less able to provide for the common defense. As we’ve previously illustrated, Obama has proposed significant reductions to the Pentagon’s budget. This week’s chart shows how sharply defense spending has dropped as a percentage of the total federal budget — currently well below its historical average despite ongoing operations overseas. The chart also debunks the myth that our Founding Fathers …
The Heritage Foundation is proud to wish the United States Air Force a happy 64th birthday. Sixty-four may not sound old in the context of American history, considering that some of the founding members of the Army Air Corps are still living. Yet the history of these men and women goes back to early aviation itself. The U.S. Air Force (USAF) has much to boast. It developed aerial combat and produced the nation’s first Ace. From World War I and the plains of western Europe, it conquered the skies. In …
The U.S. Minuteman III intercontinental-range ballistic missile (ICBM) force faces an uncertain future, writes Mark Schneider in his recent post on DefenseNews.com. A set of Minuteman failures in the recent years is as concerning as the exponential loss of design and engineering expertise within the Air Force itself. As Schneider warns, no one involved in the original Minuteman design is active in the program, and no one in the Air Force project office has experience in managing the development of a new ICBM. This could cause substantial problems if a …
The chief of Russia’s air force announced this week that the PAK FA, Russia’s fifth-generation stealth fighter, will enter service in 2015. This would be close to the time when two U.S. F-35 Joint Strike Fighter variants for the U.S. Air Force (F-35A) and the Navy (F-35C) are expected to attain initial operational capability in 2016. This display means the U.S. must keep its own Joint Strike Fighter program on schedule for production. The public flight of a PAK FA’s T-50 prototype before the world, at the MAKS–2011 International Aviation …
While American defense budgets are in a rapidly escalating free-fall, Chinese defense budgets have seen annual double-digit increases. China’s rapid military modernization is focusing on anti-access and area denial (A2/AD) technologies, which are designed to deny American naval and air forces access to the skies and waters off the Chinese coast. The problem is that much of the American force is unstealthy and consequently would not be able penetrate the Chinese A2/AD zone until later on in a conflict, when the A2/AD forces were neutralized. The dilemma for American strategists …
It took a Twitter town hall to learn how the President really thinks about defense. Not only does Obama want to gut defense as part of his debt deal (a proposal that simply won’t work)—on top of that, he wants to use the Pentagon budget as his personal ATM to fund more stimulus spending. According to Obama, the Pentagon budget is “so big that you can make relatively modest changes to defense that end up giving you a lot of headroom to fund things like basic research or student loans …
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates just returned from a visit to China after the recent restoration of military ties between the two countries. While he was there, China’s military leaders unveiled a new stealth fighter jet. The Chengdu J-20 prototype of a future stealth fifth-generation multirole aircraft clearly caught the attention of U.S. defense officials. Secretary Gates told reporters that the Chinese “clearly have potential to put some of our capabilities at risk,” and while the U.S. military has known that China sought a stealth fighter, the J-20’s development outpaced …
Washington’s latest over-used phrase—“rethinking the defense budget”—has, for many policymakers, come to mean “what can we cut next?” On Tuesday, the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs convened to identify solutions to tame the growing defense budget. The thinly veiled premise behind the hearing was to identify what the Administration can cut and which cuts politicians can get behind while trying to appear not to compromise national security. Congress’s continual evaluation of government spending is vital; it can help identify efficiencies as well as …
This week, the U.S. Air Force presented its revised request for proposals for the new KC-X tanker aircraft. Industry now has 60 days to submit bids, and the contract for the new tankers should be awarded sometime this summer. A new tanker is long overdue after a much-delayed and mismanaged process. An AOL News story from earlier this week paints an alarming picture of the decrepit tanker fleet. The KC-135 Stratotanker planes the Air Force flies today were built during the Eisenhower administration, and many are more than 50 years …
