At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the defense budget, here’s the showdown you’ve been waiting for: Defense Secretary Bob Gates, who cut er, “completed” the Air Force’s F-22 fighter jet order at 187 planes, versus Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), a staunch advocate for the F-22, which More…
Defense Secretary Bob Gates walked into the Air Force’s War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama today and explained why he cut the F-22 fighter jet:
I keep rubbing my eyes and jabbing at my forearm with the point of a safety pin, and yet I keep seeing the secretary and the chief of staff of the Air Force saying a mournful public goodbye to the F-22:
Make no mistake: Air dominance remains an essential
Tom Donnelly and Gary Schmitt of the American Enterprise Institute, members in good standing of the neoconservative cabal to eat your babies and conquer the world and then eat more babies, have an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal arguing against Defense Secretary Bob Gates’ program cuts. While they More…
Pentagon chief Bob Gates and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. James Cartwright, held a conference call to talk about their defense budget reforms. I asked whether and how they had secured consensus from the service chiefs for reductions or cancellations of programs that some of More…
Defense reporters these days have a number of anecdotes that they believe reveals Pentagon chief Bob Gates’ true colors. Some like his April 2007 press conference, where he anguished in public about ordering 15-month tours for soldiers in Iraq; between the lines it was clear he really, really didn’t More…
After my wrap-up piece on the defense budget was published, Lockheed Martin’s spokesman for the F-22 Raptor program, Rob Fuller, got back to me with a statement about how the F-22′s manufacturer views Defense Secretary Bob Gates’ decision to halt the program at 187 planes:
“Today, Secretary Gates announced
The presser is still going on, but here’s Defense Secretary Bob Gates’ statement about what defense programs he’s cutting, halting and continuing. Big news: theater-based missile defense will continue, but there won’t be an increase in ground-based missile defense capabilities; the F-22 program is done after the current 187 More…
Remember the PreserveRaptorJobs Website? The one portraying the F-22 Raptor fighter jet as an economic engine; and one that seeks to mobilize people to write in for protection of the aircraft?
I’ve been emailing with the F-22 spokesman for Lockheed Martin, the jet’s manufacturer – a nice fellow More…
Colin Clark at DOD Buzz is hearing that the latest version of the White House-Pentagon back-and-forth over major defense platforms caps the F-22 fighter jet at 40 additional planes:
Word is that PR 9, the latest version of the budget from the White House, would keep the F-22 production
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