Above All

While there's some excellent criticism out there about the new defense budget, there's also some profoundly troubling commentary by people who should just know better. The following is an argument that Thomas Donnelly and Gary Schmitt made yesterday in the WSJ against the Gates/Obama changes in the defense budget:

 The termination of the F-22 Raptor program at just 187 aircraft inevitably will call U.S. air supremacy -- the salient feature, since World War II, of the American way of war -- into question.

The need for these sophisticated, stealthy, radar-evading planes is already apparent. During Russia's invasion of Georgia, U.S. commanders wanted to fly unmanned surveillance aircraft over the region, and requested that F-22s sanitize the skies so that the slow-moving drones would be protected from Russian fighters or air defenses. When the F-22s were not made available, likely for fear of provoking Moscow, the reconnaissance flights were cancelled.

Yes, that's right. Only in the strange world of F-22 acquisitions does it make sense to buy a $130 million dollar airplane to protect $5 million dollar low-observability unmanned drones, by suppressing the air defenses of a nation you're not even at war with. Because if we buy more F-22s, the political and strategic factors preventing using them will JUST GO AWAY.

Right.

(I'm slightly exaggerating the ridiculousness of the editorial. It has some useful points, including noting that the Gates budget says virtually nothing about submarine acquisitions.)