Major overhaul in Pentagon spending

[Mr Bean]

Darfur!

If the option was sending the infantry in Styker's, Bradley's or MRAP's which would be your APC of choice for an urban environment?

MRAP's are great for one thing
Patrolling streets where you expect to get hit by an IED regularly. Can the latest versions even take 40mm launchers or 25mm cannon?

[Redleader34]

how is second strike ability obslete? Even if CHINA and RUSSIA spawn thousands of attack subs and advanced trans oceanic microphones, how will that make the abilty to destroy a nation after the first nukes are launched obslete?

Shep is arguing that widespread proliferation of missile defense systems will render both ICBM and SLBM obsolete.

There are too many useless military programs that should be cut and the nation spends an insane ammount compared to every other nation on this planet. We need to fix our internal situation before America goes World Police.

Which ones?

the massive clusterfuck that is the CSAR-X project for one,

[Thanas]

And when the need for intervention in another hole like Somalia or Iraq arises, you will do what exactly? The army needs to be prepared for those kind of conflicts.

We will do nothing. That is exactly my point. Those were both thoroughly optional conflicts that, in hindsight, should not have been entered into.

I am filled with confidence that you, master strategist and planner you apparently are, have accurately predicted that there is no need in the future for an invasion of a third world shithole.

This is not about making the right policy choice. This is being prepared for the possibility that maybe, maybe the politicians screw up. In which case the army still needs to be able to do the job assigned to them.

Certainly, we should keep a portion of our force trained in low-intensity warfare, in only to contribute to UN peacekeeping missions, but deciding that counterinsurgency is the primary mission of the US military is insane.

And nobody is claiming that this is the case.

That is funny, I didn't recall the US having much choice in 9/11.

Afghanistan is not going to be "winnable" no matter how many copies of How To Eat Soup With a Knife General Petraeus distributes to the officer corp. At this point our best bet is to keep the Taliban insurgency at bay by propping up some local warlord with conventional support or by splitting them through some political means. Any chance of implementing a long-term successful strategy was thrown away when the Administration made the foolish decision to continue Predator strikes into Pakistani territory. So downgrading our focus on counterinsurgency is not going to impact the outcome in Afghanistan one way or another. Frankly, we would have had roughly the same outcome had we simply flattened all the Taliban strongholds from the air and let the Northern Alliance warlords have the run of the country.

I love how you, master strategist, accurately predict complex scenarios, especially the point when the war was lost. Obviously, you must have access to better sources than mere mortals.

In the case of any future conflict; well, it is considerably easier to go from facing a conventional enemy to an unconventional enemy than it is to go the other way. My fear is twofold; one, that we will transform the military into an unconventional fighting force so thoroughly that it is unable to fight conventional wars effectively,

I do not see the US armies disbanding its capabilities to fight a future conventional war.

and two (the one I worry about more) that having such a force, the government will be tempted to use it more often.

By the same argument, the US should not prepare for any war at all.

As an aside, what is this "we" bullshit? You're in Italy, for godssakes.

[MKSheppard]

Changing jobs to "contract labor" is the biggest fake-accountant-savings-metric in all of Christendom.

Actually it isn't. Not in Defense.

"Hi there Private Shepilov! We know you signed up to kill commies and fight the enemies of democracy! Now mop that floor!"

Likewise for seamen:

"We told you you would see the world in the Navy, and you will! You will see exotic locales from the deck of a ship as you chip paint!"

If you unload as much of the non critical crap onto contractors, you free up military personnel for more "killy" tasks, and morale and retention rises; people tend to re-enlist if they're doing things more fun than chipping paint, waxing floors, etc. The extra costs involved in paying contractors vs using military labor is more than offset by not having to train new people as often due to lessened turnover.

As for the "contractor" bit; I get the feeling that a lot of it will go towards reversing the decline in DoD Personnel strength levels:

DoD DIRECT HIRE CIVILIAN PERSONNEL STRENGTH LEVELS

People who work for the DoD but are not employed by the Army, Navy, or Air Force:

FY 1950 1,750
FY 1950 1,750
FY 1951 2,166
FY 1952 2,253
FY 1953 1,986
FY 1954 1,893
FY 1955 1,954
FY 1956 1,899
FY 1957 1,655
FY 1958 1,646
FY 1959 1,756
FY 1960 1,865
FY 1961 1,960
FY 1962 21,457 <----------Holy Christ on a Rocket powered rubber crutch!
FY 1963 33,123
FY 1964 37,796
FY 1965 42,278 <-------Doubled since FY62!
FY 1966 68,927
FY 1967 79,134
FY 1968 77,252 <-----Nearly Doubled Again Since FY65!!!!!
FY 1969 73,975

What event caused this massive increase in DoD employment?



With his presence leaving DoD in 1968 after putting his imprint on the FY69 plan, guess how long it took for DoD employee count to double again?

FY 1992 143,257

NEARLY TWENTY-FIVE YEARS

However, there is hope....

As of January 2006, the "Other DOD Employee" level is down to just 96,207. We're finally erasing the stains of McNamaraism from the Pentagon slowly.

[Vympel]

--Termination of the F-22A; despite it's clear advantages over the F-35; it flies very much higher and faster; while F-35 has no supercruise.

Not to mention the F-35s stealth is rubbish compared to the F-22. F-22 can survive in a modern IADS environment, F-35 can't.

[CmdrWilkens]

1. Fully protect and properly fund the growth in military end strength in the base budget. This means completing the growth in the Army and Marines while halting reductions in the Air Force and the Navy. Accomplishing this will require a nearly $11 billion increase above the FY09 budget level.

Why do the marines need increased growth? (Shep, if you have an answer, then include it without a rant on the uselessness of the marines as a seperate branch ).

Because the Marines have 3 paper divisions but only enough personnel to man 2.5 under the old forumla. Now I'm not sure hwo exactly they will allot personnel once the revised numbers come out but right now 3rd MarDiv is understrength by at least a battalion or two and possibly a full regiment IIRC. Filling the division up to have an equal TOE with 1st and 2nd gives you more felxibility in deployment of personnel in terms of which MEUs go out from where. It also means that you can maintain the entire current schedule of MEU cruises while still putting as much as a full MarDiv on the ground as direct combatants.

[Sea Skimmer]

Darfur!

If the option was sending the infantry in Styker's, Bradley's or MRAP's which would be your APC of choice for an urban environment?

MRAP's are great for one thing
Patrolling streets where you expect to get hit by an IED regularly. Can the latest versions even take 40mm launchers or 25mm cannon?

Hey! MRAPs are also great for killing people in roll overs and tearing down power lines. Thankfully the Army knows this (which is why it resisted them in the first place, besides the shear cost), and production has just recently commenced of a lower, smaller version of the Maxpro to reduce rollovers in Afghanistan.

All the MRAP designs can take a remote weapons station that can support a 40mm grenade launcher or .50cal machine gun, or a manned gun station with the same weapons. The RWS models now being used also have an upgrade option for a Javelin launcher but its not being fitted. You could also easily fit an ASP-30 30mm cannon, just about anything that can take a .50cal can take that gun too. It’s conceivable that a higher velocity 25mm Bushmaster could be fitted to certain models, they managed to put one on a hummve with no cab, but the ammo and feed would take up an awful lot of interior space. No rational reason why you’d ever do that. The 25mm is meant to kill armored vehicles, better guns with longer barrel lives exist for soft targets or buildings.

I mean really.. the French built those absurd looking 4x4 armored cars with 90mm guns all the way back in the 1950s, you can do an awful lot in terms of armament with a 7 ton vehicle if you have a need.

Not to mention the F-35s stealth is rubbish compared to the F-22. F-22 can survive in a modern IADS environment, F-35 can't.

So a certain writer keeps claiming while ever more real Air Forces keep trying to buy it. Somehow a couple pages of PowerPoint from a guy who thinks a hardened aircraft shelter for a 767 radar plane are not only feasible but a vital investment don’t win me over to that thinking. The fact that every US weapon built in the last 30 years has been subject to totally ridiculous levels of criticism and proclaimed the worst waste of money ever doesn’t help either.

Also in all reality, no plane will survive a fully modern intact IADS. The only thing to do is tear it apart from the first minutes of the war. In that respect F-35 is at least equal with longer range (damn lack of variable cycle engines on F-22), a near generation better networking and onboard sensor technology and the ability to carry large, long range internal weapons. It’s also unfortunate that the F-22 wings have proven too weak to support the planned 20,000lb external load, greatly reducing the potential to expand its warload with the stealth bomb pods now under development. Of course those would cause a shitload of drag anyway, and only a handful of nations on earth can afford anything like a fully modern air defence system.

[Redleader34]

--Termination of the F-22A; despite it's clear advantages over the F-35; it flies very much higher and faster; while F-35 has no supercruise.

Not to mention the F-35s stealth is rubbish compared to the F-22. F-22 can survive in a modern IADS environment, F-35 can't.

Isn't the F-22 so shitty that it can't work in a real environment thanks to signal overloading, making it a massive cold war supweapon with no logical foe, and with UCAV and computing technology, it is looking like it would be obslete to smaller, faster, unmanned attack craft?

[phongn]

Isn't the F-22 so shitty that it can't work in a real environment thanks to signal overloading, making it a massive cold war supweapon with no logical foe, and with UCAV and computing technology, it is looking like it would be obslete to smaller, faster, unmanned attack craft?

No.

[Sea Skimmer]

--He won't fund the USAF bomber project until "we have a better understanding of the need, the requirement, and the technology"; in effect, a McNamara Study to Death tactic.

--He won't fund CG(X) until we've "revisit[ed] both the requirements and acquisition strategy" -- again; a McNamara Study to Death tactic.

The military literally has no fucking clue what it wants from either idea, one can't even call them programs, they are just ideas. More studies are simply the only option unless the brass can actually put forward a coherent idea they can stick to. The worst thing would be if they change requirements 30 different times during development and triple the cost for doing it.

I mean when concepts include ‘may or may not be nuclear powered’ and ‘may or may not have 3000 mile range radar’ and ‘may displace 12,500-25,000 tons with an existing or all new hull’ you are not in a position to start spending billions on R&D. The 2018 bomber meanwhile is defined by the date they want it by… and too much time has now elapsed to even make the date. Someone could propose a Typhoon with conformal fuel tanks and F-35 avionics and they’d have to give it thought right now.

The bomber programs McNamara fucked up at least had ‘nuke the communists and do it good’ as a single overriding goal and could thus have never gone all THAT wrong no matter what design was selected. If we worked on CG(X) the same way we’d basically be designing a ship with the goal that it floats and can move.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Considering the debacle that was the DDX, I seriously doubt more money should be spent on a CG(X) unless the Navy can at the least get the system working right. Otherwise, the USN is building a ship that floats but can't shoot much, or barely floats for that matter.

[Elfdart]

--Termination of the F-22A; despite it's clear advantages over the F-35; it flies very much higher and faster; while F-35 has no supercruise.

Not to mention the F-35s stealth is rubbish compared to the F-22. F-22 can survive in a modern IADS environment, F-35 can't.

Isn't the F-22 so shitty that it can't work in a real environment thanks to signal overloading, making it a massive cold war supweapon with no logical foe, and with UCAV and computing technology, it is looking like it would be obslete to smaller, faster, unmanned attack craft?

Chris Kelly thinks so:

LINK

Don't Kid Yourself -- The F-22 Lives

Defense Secretary Gates held a press conference today and laid out his plans for next year's budget. America's arms spending will increase. But it won't increase as fast as it might have. That's why the headlines say "MAJOR CUTS." Defense Secretary Gates ordered four more F-22 fighter-bombers, today, in the budget he presented. But he said he won't order any the year after that, in the budget he won't present until 2010. This is why the headlines say "GATES KILLS F-22."

The budget is being cut in the sense that it's going up. The F-22 has been killed in the sense that we've appropriated all the money we need to keep building them until we have to think about it again.

The good news is that we're calling bad news good news.

We have 183 F-22s. (The world's most expensive fighter aircraft. And one that's never fired a shot in anger, except against Iron Man, and I'm pretty sure that was CGI, and even there, Iron Man won.) Obama wants four more.

The money for the planes will come out of the 2009 war supplement, because the F-22 has never been used in war.

William James would call it the moral supplement for war.

Keeping the F-22 alive while claiming to kill it gives its friends in congress twelve months to come up with new reasons to build more.

As aerospace analyst Richard Aboulafia explains:

"It was a surprise but just enough of a tactical victory to keep the F-22 going and allow political pressure to be brought to bear."

But let's say the F-22 should someday die, I mean for real. Not only would it leave America pathetically vulnerable to attack from Iron Men, it would also be a devastating economic blow to Lockheed, who builds it, and whose shares have barely tripled since September 11th.

The comforting news is that they also build its replacement, the F-35.

Today, Gates announced he was doubling orders for the F-35 from 14 in 2009 to 30 in 2010, at a cost of $11.2 billion.

And Lockheed's stock rose 8.9%.

Here's the thing about headlines about defense spending "cuts": It's like what Mondrian supposedly said about the neon lights of Times Square: "How beautiful! If I only couldn't read English."

There's more from Kelly here.

Finally, there's a perfectly good reason the Raptor has never been to Iraq, and it's not because it's a useless fat turd. You're thinking of Jonah Goldberg. The reason we've never used the Raptor in Iraq is it doesn't work in places where there are wars.

According to Aviation Week & Space Technology, there's just too much radio interference. To quote the man in charge of Air Combat Command, Gen. Ronald E. Keys:

"We didn't anticipate there was going to be this level of jamming. Every patrol is out there with personal jammers. We've got lots of airplanes that are also jamming. At the same time, we've got people trying to listen [to insurgent conversations], a lot of it on the same or overlapping frequencies."

The jammers he's talking about are the ones the troops use to disable roadside IEDs. So the F-22, at $351 million a pop, is an excellent plane; it just doesn't work over a battlefield where one side is using booby traps activated by TV remotes and electronic garage door openers.

So Iraq is out. And anyplace else with TVs, radios and cars.

Iron Man had better watch his ass!

[phongn]

That seems like a rather gross oversimplification of the problems. It may well be the more powerful airborne jammers that are interfering with the F-22's ESM suite, or that the onboard system is having trouble with the sheer quantity of incoming data.

[MKSheppard]

So Iraq is out. And anyplace else with TVs, radios and cars.

Ever hear of something called the inverse square law?

F-22 flies at 35,000+ feet. Jammers are on the ground, with 35,000 feet separating the two.

[Sea Skimmer]

I love the asstarded logic. F-22 radar warning receiver works too well in a situation in which no enemy radar systems exist, therefore F-22 is useless because my god, without a RWR the engines, bomb bays, stealth and radars clearly don’t work either. Yeah sure that’s why it’s not been in combat… not because its just plain pointless to fly something so expensive and short ranged for such limited missions. That’s clearly nonsense. Truly brilliant analysis at work.

Reminds me of the criticism of the F-15 being no better then a modernized F4 Phantom or the M1 Abrams have insufficient machine gun ammo when it had twice as much as the M60 it replaced. If we listened to these kinds of reldciilious complaints about teething trouble making weapons worthless then literally, the US would have no weapon developed more recently then about 1969. China in fact provides a perfect insight into what happens when you more or less freeze technology and concentrate on improving existing models to the exclusion of new development. They did almost nothing else from 1960 until 1988, and the result is even after nearly 20 years of trying to reverse the situation they have a largely obsolete military that doesn’t even compare well to 1991 Soviet forces.

Anyway I’m still just so happy that the FCS vehicles could die so soon, which is exactly what I wanted. Most of the electronics have great merit, but we can package them into anything. Now we just need to break out the plans for the Common Heavy Chassis and get back to work on sensible hulls not made from gluing together carbon fiber (no joke). I hate to think what would have happened had Iraq not kicked the army in the head about 100,000 times (I think that's the estimated IED count now) regarding its ability to avoid passive survivability.

[MKSheppard]

So a certain writer keeps claiming while ever more real Air Forces keep trying to buy it.

You got to admit; the stealth on F-35 and our avonics will be compromised heavily; compared to the F-22; because we can't simply afford to have five different versions of F-35 software for differing countries, debugging just one set is hard enough; and we certainly are not going to give everyone F-22A level stealth, not when it's very likely that the countries will demand a production line be set up in their countries; ala F-16; and I don't think we're going to go through the headaches of Stealth Coating A, Stealth Coating B, and Stealth Coating C.

[MKSheppard]

The military literally has no fucking clue what it wants from either idea, one can't even call them programs, they are just ideas. More studies are simply the only option unless the brass can actually put forward a coherent idea they can stick to. The worst thing would be if they change requirements 30 different times during development and triple the cost for doing it.

How hard can it be for the next generation bomber to put these as the design requirements:

"Must have unrefuelled range of 5,200 nautical miles with a warload of 10,000 lbs at best cruise speed."
"Must have Mach 1.6 supercruise as minimal objective; Mach 3 as objective."
"Must be capable of penetrating an IADS consisting of PATRIOT backed up by F-22 and AWACS."

That would easily make it capable of doing just about everything we need to do.

I mean when concepts include ‘may or may not be nuclear powered’ and ‘may or may not have 3000 mile range radar’ and ‘may displace 12,500-25,000 tons with an existing or all new hull’ you are not in a position to start spending billions on R&D.

Back around the time DDG-51 was coming down the ways; the Navy looked at the concept of "what if a new cruiser, with weapons the same as the CG 47 class, were designed starting with the DDG and expanding into the cruiser mission?"

The navy came up with the CGBL (Cruiser Baseline); which had a WL of 600 ft, beam of 69 ft, and a displacement of 13,500 tons.

[Sea Skimmer]

How hard can it be for the next generation bomber to put these as the design requirements:

"Must have unrefuelled range of 5,200 nautical miles with a warload of 10,000 lbs at best cruise speed."
"Must have Mach 1.6 supercruise as minimal objective; Mach 3 as objective."
"Must be capable of penetrating an IADS consisting of PATRIOT backed up by F-22 and AWACS."

That would easily make it capable of doing just about everything we need to do.

Can’t haul MOP internally.

10,000lb isn’t enough if you ask me, and 5,200 miles is too much range for something so lightly armed. The 2018 idea is pretty clearly aimed as a medium or light bomber using existing systems as much as it can. What you want would cost 50 billion in R&D and not be ready before 2025. So at that point, forget about the 2018 requirement, you’re talking about a project that would really need to meet the 2037 requirement to totally replace all existing heavy bombers. That’s a whole different ball game.

Whose to say that mach 3 performance will be good enough by then and that mighty lasers wont have forced us to resort to missile spam, in which case 12,000 mile range and a 200,000lb payload would be far more useful, or else a hypersonic plane that flies at 150,000 feet minimal. This is why nothing gets done.

The logical quick and easy solution to 2018 is the FB-22, the version which simply has a bigger wing rather then the well publicized stretched fuselage form (which makes it a different aircraft in all reality) so we’d need a minimal of R&D and could produce it on the existing F-22 line.

The navy came up with the CGBL (Cruiser Baseline); which had a WL of 600 ft, beam of 69 ft, and a displacement of 13,500 tons.

Okay that’s basically the size of DDG-1000, things have changed. Like we aren’t going to build a new ship with an SPS-49 radar ect…so you still need to define the capability we want, and then decide how much of it we can actually afford. It’s easy to name a criteria, but hard to defend them. Designing a ship around criteria not adequately justified or studied is how we got the DDG-1000 hull.


I understand, either of us could specify what we want out of every single weapon in a military, but that’s a lot different then actually building the things within the constraints of limited funding and timescales.

[MKSheppard]

[Redleader34]

That comic is terrible shep, and ABM makes the possibility of first strike more attractive, as any possible foe would want to strike before a system is complete. NK is a paper tiger that has more conventional weapons, and Iran is a threat to Israel, and that is an issue that is not for this thread. Then again I find the spending of funds on more and more weapon systems almost perverse in this bad economy.

[MKSheppard]

That comic is terrible shep

How so? It's the freaking truth.

"North Korea just did a wildly publicized missile launch; which shows their increasing technical proficiency in constructing missiles the day before. What shall I do?"

"I KNOW! Lets gut our national missile defense program, capping it at the 21 GBIs already deployed, and kill the planned expansion to 40 GBIs; AND terminate MKV; which enables a single GBI to kill multiple missiles! That'll show the North Koreans!"

You'll note that while he did increase funding for THAAD and SM-3; those are point defense weapons, not area-defense weapons like GBI.

and ABM makes the possibility of first strike more attractive

Not that old canard again.

and Iran is a threat to Israel, and that is an issue that is not for this thread.

Oh hey guess what? The day after we gutted our missile defense; the damn dirty jews carried out a successful missile test.

The Arrow 2 ballistic missile defense system was successfully tested in southern Israel Tuesday morning, when it destroyed a missile simulating an Iranian Shihab 3.

And already, Team Obama is starting to put pressure onto Israel to buy SM-3 instead of continuing development of Arrow 3; a high altitude system which would intercept enemy missiles at 100 miles altitude (528,000 feet), compared to Arrow-2's present 60 miles.

[Coyote]

Darfur!

If the option was sending the infantry in Styker's, Bradley's or MRAP's which would be your APC of choice for an urban environment?

MRAP's are great for one thing
Patrolling streets where you expect to get hit by an IED regularly. Can the latest versions even take 40mm launchers or 25mm cannon?

I was thinking of operations in Africa. The various MRAPS are derivatives from the South African 'Casspir' family that was used extensively in such things as the Koevoet operation in Namibia and seemed to prove their worth in an area full of mines and other explosives laid and left by the various tribal militias.

That would be RPG country at worst if the tribal actually chose to stand and fight.

[Lonestar]

Actually it isn't. Not in Defense.

"Hi there Private Shepilov! We know you signed up to kill commies and fight the enemies of democracy! Now mop that floor!"

Likewise for seamen: see exotic locales from the deck of a ship as you chip paint!"

If you unload as much of the non critical crap onto contractors, you free up military personnel for more "killy" tasks, and morale and retention rises; people tend to re-enlist if they're doing things more fun than chippin aint, waxing floors, etc. The extra costs involved in paying contractors vs using military labor is more than offset by not having to train new people as often due to lessened turnover.

As for the "contractor" bit; I get the feeling that a lot of it will go towards reversing the decline in DoD Personnel strength levels:

Bullshit Shep.

You must be smoking some serious stuff if you say it makes fiscal sense to start taking junior personnel off of ships and replacing them with contractors to do the "crappy stuff". We already do that to a degree in port(with yard workers coming in to weld, cut, do stuff that ships company usually did) with the result that yardwork has been increasingly getting worse. Why? A lot of Yardworkers originate from the Navy, and since the mid-90s when this contractor fetish really took off, we have an entire generation of HTs DCs(for example) who don't know what they are doing as well as they should, then transition over to a yard well they earn "Master welder" pay.

Now, if you want to say "we can replace a large chunk of civilians sitting in a office somewhere with contractors[/i], okay fine, I'll buy that. If only because it's much easier fire a contractor than it is to fire a civil servant. But if we had maybe a few more civilians with IT background in the government, maybe we wouldn't have such retarded execution of various IT programs. But the government has decided that IT is "inherently non-governmental" and it makes more sense to pay Northrup Grumman 250,000 a head for a IT goon making between 80,000-100,000.

[Ziggy Stardust]

Oh, won't someone PLEASE think of the contractors?!?!

Drastic cuts to defense spending proposed Monday by Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates could be felt at several high-powered D.C.-area contractors, but not right away, analysts said.

The region is home to Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, and has significant presence from wNorthrop Grumman, Raytheon and others. “If they’re going to cut the number of orders, it wouldn’t affect the region much,” said John McClain, deputy director of George Mason University’s Center for Regional Analysis. “If they’re going to change the tactical planning and strategy, that could make a difference, but they’d probably use the people they have working for them now.”

Gates proposed capping purchases of Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin’s F-22 fighter jets at 187, compared with the nearly 250 that the Air Force wants. At $354 million each, the aircraft costs more than any in its class. Lockheed warned that halting production of F-22s, along with another recommendation to cancel its VH-71 presidential helicopter, could jeopardize 95,000 jobs in 44 states.

Many of those jobs would be in manufacturing, which is not a part of the Bethesda operations. But unless orders for other goods go up, Lockheed risks a falling bottom line, which could mean job losses in the future.

“If the federal government cuts back on its spending, that’s bound to hurt us here more than in other areas,” said Angie Lawry, a spokeswoman for the Greater Washington Initiative, a regional business association.

Officials for the defense contractors are taking a wait-and-see approach to the potential cuts, and some have more reason than Lockheed to be optimistic.

Gates’ speech was “very positive for the stabilization of ship building,” said Kendell Pease, a spokesman for Falls Church-based General Dynamics Corp., which owns shipbuilder Bath Iron Works. And while the secretary recommended cutting the U.S. Army’s Future Combat Systems armored vehicle program, Pease said that could make room for modernized versions of the company’s current vehicles, like the Striker.

Pease and others emphasized, however, that companies can’t make any decisions until the budget is passed by Congress. “Today was like reading the table of contents,” Pease said. “Until we turn the page and know what the details are, it’s impossible to say what will happen.”

The private sector in support of the federal government accounts for more than 15 percent of the overall Greater Washington economy, or about $66.5 billion in 2008, Lawry said.

And while the number of people who work for the defense sector in particular is difficult to measure, the region has about 140,000 in the aerospace industry, which works closely with defense.

I like this little sidebar:

Proposed cuts
don’t hurt stocks

With the uncertainty over their programs’ futures settled by Gates’ announcement, defense contractors’ shares gained ground. Lockheed rose $5.97 or 8.9 percent to $73.28 in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. Raytheon Co. increased $3.19 or 8.3 percent to $41.66 and Northrop Grumman rose $3.96 or 9 percent to $47.94. Boeing Co. increased 47 cents to $38.16.
– Bloomberg

[Rogue 9]

The rise in Lockheed stock is due to the increased ordering of the F-35, as already mentioned in this thread. Pay attention.

As for the contractors, that's tens of thousands of jobs spread all across the country that you're looking at eliminating if the F-22 is cut for good. If we're cutting somewhere, it ought to be the damn stimulus we're cutting; building shit, whether it be roads or military equipment, is the kind of government spending that creates jobs and kickstarts the economy; not handing out trillions in free money so we can get the credit market into the same unhealthy state it was in that triggered this mess in the first place.