Dollar Store Specops

yes funding is awful low these days. The navy is feeling it too. We're cutting thousands of personnel to save money. And you might have noticed more and more rent-a-cops guarding our bases over the past few years.

It's impossible. 8 planes. How many grounded for required maintenance? They can't cover iraq + afghanistan at the same time. So you've (let's be simple here) 4 planes in each scenary.

1 grounded, other on stand-by, one flying a +10 hours patrol, the other resting?

(numbers pulled straight from where you're thinking I pulled them)

Those planes save a LOT of lives, Congress should pull an emergency budget to build lots and lots of them.

I belive the real numbers are 8 AC-130H and 13 AC-130U, but either way it is a disgrace. By the time you start pulling the ones down for phase, depot or modification maintenance. Plus the ones you need for flight, weapons and maintenance training, I would be surprised to find any more than 14-15 deployable.

I’m a retired SNCO who spent his career on flight line maintaining various models of the F-15. I can tell you from personal experience there was and still are a great number of modification programs to the Strike Eagle that either got canceled or pushed to the right because of funding cuts.
Quiet a few of these cuts can be thrust directly in the direction of the F-22 Raptor.
While the Raptor appears to be a great A/C whole parts of the active force were sacrificed to pay for this next silver bullet. With it’s astronomical cost we will by the time the last deliveries are made we will have effectively disarmed ourselves because of the retirements in the F-15 and F-16 community. For now all we hear is the cheerleading on how great the F-22 is. I wonder how many other glitches lie under the skin? Whatever the problem was when they tried to deploy to Kadena a few months back was a disgrace, this occurred after supposedly the most thorough testing ever conducted on a new aircraft was completed.

The entire BS about its avionics is meaningless; I wonder how much parts obsolescence has already occurred since it spent over a decade in development. In addition I can never envision any ROE that will never allow true BVR engagement, BVR engagement has been the white lie told over the last 50 years. We may have to deal with the Chinese one of these days, then 183 Raptors will help, but right now with the type of warfare we actually are facing the Raptor is the answer to a question asked back during the cold war when we were staring at the Russians across the Fulda gap. I may be wrong but I do believe my brothers who are Grunts would much rather have a Strike Eagle loaded to the gills with SDB’s or a AC-130U overhead covering their six.

While more money is always nice, it also has to do with the manner in which you spend it.

Let's face it. Spectre gunships are not sexy... not fighters. And that's what generals like to spend their money on.

Until the Air Force gets IT'S priorities in order, you will still have some of the more effective platforms and units getting the short end of the stick.

What are those other planes the Air Force has that get used a lot these days? The ones from Battlecreek I saw last week?

Hmmmm, what are they, can't remember...

Oh yeah, that's right: the A-10. Also, not a fighter...

Strip the ground support missionfrom the Air Force and rebuild the Army Air Corps.

First of all, C-130, If I remember correctly the "First Rule of Engineering, it goes something like this. "If it works, don't fix it!" Those old girls could really lay out a nasty shot pattern. You always wanted to be on the "right end" of that weapon system. Now you talk of funding the military, there are two ways to defund the military. The Congress appropriates the money, but the Administration actually cuts the check. You talk about the funding of the military, I always thought that was using "common sense". I always thought there was a law against it, in either the US Code or the UCMJ. My Father was extremely intelligent, but he had very dry sense of humor. He said, "Many years ago, the Federal Government got together and decided they wanted to build a building that was perfectly square. The result of this process is what we now call, "The Pentagon". HAVE A GREAT WEEK- GRUMPY

...Has anybody noticed the insane amount that the U.S. spends on their military? They spend 4% of their money on it. Which is a lot. Go canada.