TBoneF15

Mosely did and he was fired for it (among other things). COMACC just did and he is retiring. Congress is using his letter as their basis for fighting the F-22 cancellation AND the drawdown of 250 4th gens. If he wasn't retiring, you can bet he'd be out soon anyway for not maintaining the party line. Anyone in authority who has any real understanding of air superiority IS saying it. The problem is that SECDEF does not believe it. Anyone who doesn't agree with him is marginalized (at best), so lots of dudes are just jumping on the train to avoid getting run over. The DoD is continuing down the path of fighting the last war (of course I understand that this one is not even close to over and we must focus on it) in the sense that everyone believes the next conflict will look just like this one. Look at WW Storm...it became all about stealth and precision strike...that could solve anything and became the model. Then Bosnia made folks believe that air power could do it all alone and the concept of a ground war was now outdated completely. The Army suffered those consequenses in the subsequent budget wars and cutbacks. After all, if we could achieve our political objectives with little risk of our own boys (no/few boots on the ground), then that must be the answer to every conflict since every subsequent conflict would naturally be of the exact same nature. Then the taliban showed up and had no Air Force or IADS, no nation or government to dethrone. Hmmm...how do we handle that when there are no centers of gravity to attack and the bad guys won't wave a white flag when we've blown all of their shiz up? Ruh, roh. Then Iraq II happened and the bad guys figured us out. We have no imagination and fail to anticipate possibilities, instead focusing only on what we've been through recently. Thus, we scramble to adapt our thinking to insurgent conflict now. We are always the one-trick pony.

I get it. The world has changed. The nature of conflict has changed...this time...and we need to adapt. The problem is that we don't see that there are realistic potential nation-state conficts out there, but are there any? I don't know, but if there aren't, why are we still spending billions on submarines and such? The taliban doesn't have a navy after all. We have never predicted accurately the nature of any of our wars in advance (except maybe Storm), so who knows what the next one will look like. We don't exactly get 10 years of notice before the balloon goes up. But every country with a checkbook is investing right now in advanced fighters, EA pods, missiles, and IADS and they aren't doing it to defeat our swarms of predators or MRAPs.


Totally, completely true. And that, my friend, is the problem.