Ah, the conspiracy theory. From the same people that brought you "Israelis flew remote controlled jets into the twin towers. Not a single Jew died there!".

And really? A scare speech on authoritarianism? From the same people that want Chick-Fil-A's closed down because of the owner's religious views? Tell me again about tolerance, Hatta.

And ultimately it was meaningless, as non-stealth Chinooks were right behind them and made a big racket. Stealth helicopters really don't make much tactical (or budget) sense.

Drones can only be a supplement to manned aircraft. Drones are only for situations where you have total dominance of enemy airspace with no threat of losing it. Drones are radio and satellite controlled. What happens when a peer force uses high-powered jammers and takes out your satellites? Oops. No more drones.

I served in the 80's and it was quite a bit different. A lot of the older salts... Chiefs and 1st class PO's that had served in the 70's... relayed a lot of the "hollow force" horror stories to us younger guys. Like the USAF, a lot of the Navy's air fleet were hangar queens for lack of spares and short of money for training and maintenance.

Any surface warfare officer worth his salt could tell him that there's simply no way to make any surface naval vessel truly stealthy with all of the electronic emissions blasting forth from them. Warships are inevitably huge radio transmitters, and there's no way to hide that unless you turn everything off. Even things like spectrum-hopping can't hide the fact that a lot of electrical power is being radiated. Hopefully, the brass is starting to wake up to facts like these when planning vessel design.

The F-22 was supposed to be a complete replacement for the F-15 fleet. Because of its bust-ass cost, we can buy so few of them that we have to keep some F-15's in the inventory. And doctrine calls for the F-22's to be the point of the spear against enemy air forces. It'll be the old Eagles that are hanging back to protect the big heavies, until the Raptors can clear the sky. That's the current doctrine, anyway. If the Raptor does worse than planned in actual combat, well... USAF really doesn't have a Plan B.

Uh, the Tomcat had a tighter turn radius than anything but the F-16 and F-18... and it was pretty close. The swing wings gave it miraculous maneuverability. The problem that the Tom did have in performance wasn't maneuverability or even it's large size, but rotten engines that were underpowered and finicky. The Tomcat drivers I knew used to joke that "If it says Pratt & Whitney on the engines, it'd better say Martin Baker on the seat" (for those that don't get the reference, Martin Baker makes ejection seats for military planes).

Please note that the Tomcat served longer in frontline service than any fighter in the history of the U.S. Navy. Over 30 years. Not even the Phantom served that long in fleet squadrons. The reason the Navy retired the Tomcat had nothing to do with performance and everything to do with cost. It was expensive as hell to maintain and fly. Even with the much-better GE F110 engines in the D model, the Navy simply couldn't afford to keep it anymore. Pilots that had flown both the Tomcat and the Hornet will tell you that in fleet air defense, they'll take the F-14 all day long, thank you. Ask any pilot familiar with both platforms and they'll tell you that, performance-wise, the Navy traded down. The Super Hornet won the day because of cost, cost to buy and cost to fly. It has much fewer maintenance requirements. Economics is the sole reason the Tomcat is no longer with the fleet.

Which is why the whole strategy of stealth-based long range missile interception is a loser. Long range missiles are notoriously unreliable. Even the latest versions of the AMRAAM have under a 40 percent kill probability at long range. Our best missile, by far, is the short range all-aspect versions of the AIM-9, which has a sub-20 mile range. A fighter should be a dogfighter first. When critics raised the point that the F-35 would be less manueverable than the F-16, Lockheed's response was "Oh, dogfighting is obsolete anyway". What's truly infuriating is that we've been down this road before, when the Brits released their 1958 Defense White Paper stating that missiles made dogfighting a thing of the past, and as a result. western fighters of the late 50's and early sixties didn't have guns, and we stopped training in dogfighting. Then we get to Vietnam, and 15 year old subsonic, no-missile MiG-17's are shooting down multi-million dollar F-4's because the Sidewinders were chasing the sun, and the Sparrows just plain missed (the early AIM-7 couldn't hit a barn door. It was that bad). And since the pilots no longer had dogfighting skills, they were being eaten alive. The whole reason for the teen series of fighters and the Navy's Top Gun and USAF's Red Flag schools were these hard-earned lessons in Vietnam. And now contractors feed us the same crap, and we eat it with a higher price tag. Note that the Navy and USMC versions of the F-35 won't have an internal gun. Lessons? What lessons?

So I'm heartened by the Admiral's good sense here. USAF put all their eggs in the stealth basket, and wanted the Navy to follow along. That's gotten them $200 million dollar fighters that cost $40 grand an hour to fly. USAF now has fewer than 400 fighters that are less than 10 years old, and it's only going to get worse. And the drawbacks of such megabuck planes outweigh the benefits. Good for the Navy. Cancel the F-35, and keep the evolutionary-not-revolutionary weapons development policy. Those Super Hornets the Air Force says aren't good enough? The Navy will have twice as many of them as USAF has of their Raptors. $50 million a pop is a hell of a lot more affordable than $200 million a copy.

This is stupid beyond words. We HAVE diplomacy, and always try diplomacy first, Democrat or Republican in office. Further, this kind of thinking completely ignores the fact that the US has intractable enemies that won't be swayed from their national interests by any amount of diplomacy. Russia is always going to see the US as an adversary. China is always going to see the US as an adversary. Various Middle Eastern and Asian countries are the same. No amount of diplomacy is going to stop Russia and China from blocking UN support for freedom movements in countries with rulers they support. No amount of diplomacy is going to stop Putin's Russia from trying to reassert supremacy over their former satellites in East Europe. No amount of diplomacy is going to stop China from trying to claim all of the islands, oil fields, and shipping lanes in the South China Sea.

Get your head out of the sand. Everyone here... myself included... agrees that we need a smaller military. But "diplomacy not bombs" is hippy-ish stupidity. Try diplomacy first. If that doesn't work, then you'd damn well better have the bombs.

On Slashdot, it's the top five reasons to peddle cheap cynicism. Even when something good happens... Hey, other countries want to move jobs here! ... some people bitch and moan, and are generally just looking for any excuse to complain about the United States.

I've been saying for years that we should simply build an updated Saturn rocket. The primary argument that people threw at me on this was cost: that it would simply cost too much to replace the outdated components in the design. I said that was mush then, and I'll say it now. We (meaning modern countries) continually build updated versions of older designs all the time. It's not that big an obstacle, or that costly either. Not only do we continually update old hardware for current and future use... the B-52 will famously roll along in service for another 25 years, with Boeing sticking new electronics in it... the Russians went one better and simply put their old Tu-95 Bear bombers back into production in the 90's... an aircraft that first flew in 1953. Several Russian rockets are nothing but dressed up old designs, and they work fairly well.

So don't throw the "too costly/too complex" argument at me. Would an updated Saturn would really cost more than the Ares rockets planned for the Constellation program? I really doubt that. We're way too prone to reinvent the wheel on things like these, with an erroneous belief that "new" always equals "better".

Uh, there's definitely a big science angle to disease outbreaks. So they problem is...?

Wish? More like planned that way. The Pentagon knows how to play the game: lowball your estimate for a weapon system you're selling as critical to national security, get the process flowing to as many Congressional districts as possible (one factor that raises costs, in fact) in order to gather maximum support, and then when production actually starts, you know that Congress won't have the courage to cancel the program.

I'm very hawkish, but over the years, I've also become very, very cynical about how we buy weapons. This is one of the reasons that, despite my support for free trade in civilian goods, I think perhaps we should go back to a mostly-nationalized weapons building regime. The Navy owns a lot of shipyards, the Air Force a lot of aircraft plants, and the army some armories (and in the past, even armor factories). But they no longer design and build ships, planes, and guns on their own. It's totally contractor driven now, and anyone that studies the issue objectively has to admit that weapons procurement (domestically) is in no way any kind of free market... it just has the appearance of one. The whole process is very corrupt (by design). Maybe we'd be better off going back to designing and building our own ships and aircraft (the Navy especially was into doing this... they even had their own aircraft factory, and they found that it kept costs down in the 20's and 30's as it kept 3rd party contractors honest).

This is coming from a right winger, folks. Entitlements are our biggest budget problem, and a corrupting influence on it's own, but we can not continue to ignore the fiasco that is our arms procurement process and military budget either. No nation in the world can afford $15 billion dollar aircraft carriers and $200+ million dollar fighter planes in any useful quantity. And not only are we engaging in corruption, we're borrowing 40 cents on the dollar to do it.

Pretty much everything the Pentagon does is over budget, behind schedule, and budget-wise, generally a spawn of wishful thinking. The "cheap" Littoral Combat Ships were sold to Congress as sub-$250 million craft. They're currently just under $700 million apiece. The "cheap" F-35 was promised to be no more than $60 million a copy or so. They're now just under $200 million a copy, flyaway (more expensive than the F-22 they were supposed to compliment). The new Ford class carriers... an evolutionary development of the current Nimitz class.... will now cost 2 1/2 times as much as the last Nimitz that was launched just a few years back.

Why should DOD software be any different than DOD hardware when it comes to wishful thinking from the brass?

Does this scenario remind anyone else of the old War Games movie, where WOPPER would put fake Backfire bombers on NORAD's screens?