Can Gates really push it through?

ARTICLE: Gates defuses the Defense budget battle, By Julian E. Barnes, Los Angeles Times, April 25, 2009

An upbeat take on the unfolding budget battle to date.

But clearly a Gates battle, as Obama is almost never mentioned.

Comments

[David Emery]

Some crappy reporting in here. Gates did not -cancel FCS-. What he did do was put a stop to the ongoing MGV procurement, which is a big part of the program. In subsequent remarks he has indicated that he wants the Army to go look at the requirements and then figure out how to do combat vehicle modernization.

And he didn't "cancel F22", he just disapproved plans to buy more of them. As he has pointed out several times, we're buying the number of F22 that we've been planning to buy since '05; we're just not extending the line to buy more.

I don't see this as the 'revolution' that many others have touted. This is a shift, but it's not much different from the shift in the Carter administration (something Reagan supporters forget - Carter started the defense build-up that Reagan took advantage of) to move the Army (and the Air Force) from Vietnam to facing the Soviet threat in Germany.

Still, the #1 weapon system on my list that I think Mr Gates should add to his agenda is a replacement for the A-10 against the same set of low-slow-survivable requirements. Although the F-16 is a big success, the A-10 is the real workhorse in the last 15 years of combat! (And that's my perspective as a former Army officer now working on a certain 3-letter Army program :-)

[Gerry]

The A-10 is at the nexus of the argument that led to the separation of the Air Force from the Army in 1947. I remember an article in Aviation Week many years ago about the Army wanting more A-10's procured, but they were precluded by the rules of separation from having any fixed wing combat aircraft. The Air Force refused saying the A-10 needed so many aerodynamic fixes as to be essentially a new aircraft and they had no money for that. These articles in Wikipedia on the A-10:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-10

and its main weapon the GAU-8:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAU-8_Avenger

Are quite interesting and touch on the Air Force attitude.

The discussion pages of both articles are also quite interesting. This is a unique plane with a unique gun and very flexible capabilities. The Army and the Marine Corps need more of them around. The Air Force needs to jump out in front of this parade.