The senate voted to end production of the F22 Raptor. Reasons? The cost and the mission. Pres Obama and Def Sec Gates thinks the Raptor does not help fight the wars we are in today, such as Iraq or Afghanistan. The Raptor was designed for the cold war - war. Also, the expense cannot be justified given the deficit. My work on policy termination suggests that "cost" is usually not the reason why a program is terminated: usually, termination costs more than continuing the policy. However, a change in ideology is often a reason for termination. In this case, the Raptor does not give our troops an edge in the wars we are fighting - we are fighting a war on terror and insurgency, and what we need is the tools for counter-insurgency, how to eliminate the reasons and the support for terrorists and insurgents.
I have decided to look into the F22 termination as well as other terminated military equipment. Why was the F22 terminated but not the Osprey? Both were costly. Does the Osprey help fight our current wars better than the F22? Perhaps. I am going to look into this further, maybe write a conference paper on it. I havent done anything with policy termination since my book came out in 1997, other than one paper on terminating military bases (which was rejected by two journals at which point i threw it away, literally).
5 comments:
If those raptors are so useless, sell them to china. It will reduce the trade imbalance in no time
outstanding insight. I agree. But I think the raptors contain technology that we dont want china to have. (Im sure you know that). but yeah, funny and insightful comment :)
Who cares about air superiority? the biggest concern right now is to reduce deficit, and reduce it must at all cost.
I've been waiting for your conference paper. So long...
BTW, it's good to read your blog
At what point does global military domination become a problem. We don't remove troops from any place once they are there. Look what happened to the Soviet Union from their attemps in Afghanistan. A billion dollars in war seems quite trivial in regards to military spending vs the same amount dedicated to the obvious domestic benefits. Was the amount spent to get Obama really worth it when everyone in America could have had free health care and free education. Was one man worth that?
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