F-22A in a spot of bother (major report)

[Starglider]

The US however wants to do everything at the same time. They want to have the best in every area, etc, etc. That they are bankrupting themselves doing so is irrelevant - anybody who points it out is unpatriotic or a traitor.

US military spending in 2008 was 4.6% of the GDP. That doesn't count supplementary funding for Iraq and Afghanistan, which takes it up to 6%ish. Defense spending peaked at 6.2% of GDP under the Regan build-up, 9.4% in the Vietnam War, 14.2% in the Korean War and 38.7% in WWII. For comparison the USSR was spending something close to 20% of the GDP (it's hard to estimate) on its military right before its fall. The UK currently spends 2.5% of GDP, France spends 2.6% and Germany spends just 1.1%.

From this precedent it seems highly unlikely that the current level of US military spending will 'bankrupt the country' - although it could be an exacerbating factor to another, primary cause, such as mass dumping of the dollar as a reserve currency. Furthermore arguments that 'the US should spend less on defense' are of little value without specifying how the US should change its foreign policy goals; the current US military is actually fairly well matched to the notional goals that politicians have set for it.

As for Germany, 1.1% is already too low, if one expects the country to make a fair contribution to the defence of Europe and the pursuit of the EU's overseas interests. I used to give Germany a pass on that because it overcontributed to the EU's general budget, but per capita it's nearly on a par with the UK and France now (Scandinavia is still getting screwed), so that excuse no longer flies.

[Vympel]

T-74s (I think... Skimmer?) manned by crews who had fought and crushed British tanks (in Iranian hands) in the largest pitched tank battles since WWII.

T-72s. Which were always a minority of Iraq's army, which were mostly locally produced versions that sucked hard, and which had sub-standard ammunition.

Further, the majority of Iraqi's army was decisively sub-par. Only the Republican Guard units were remotely competent, and that's not saying much.

[JointStrikeFighter]

T-74s (I think... Skimmer?) manned by crews who had fought and crushed British tanks (in Iranian hands) in the largest pitched tank battles since WWII.

T-72s. Which were always a minority of Iraq's army, which were mostly locally produced versions that sucked hard, and which had sub-standard ammunition.

Further, the majority of Iraqi's army was decisively sub-par. Only the Republican Guard units were remotely competent, and that's not saying much.

However the general belief at the time was that iraq was the hot shit.

[Simon_Jester]

And they were incompetent relative to whom? To us, because we put in the effort to train and work out doctrine superior to theirs. This is not an advantage we can count on having if we don't work to maintain it.

There's a point at which we have done enough work, but we can't do no such work and expect to have a superior military whenever we want it.
________

Germany is doing that to. However, we are downsizing the forces optimized for conventional battle at the same time. The US however wants to do everything at the same time. They want to have the best in every area, etc, etc. That they are bankrupting themselves doing so is irrelevant - anybody who points it out is unpatriotic or a traitor.

How is creating an army designed for occupying nations rather than defeating their field armies a sign of peaceful, nonimperial intentions? Empires need occupying armies just as much as they need conquering armies, if not more.

Besides which, what happens if everyone retrains their armies for light infantry counterinsurgency work, and then runs into some obnoxious minor power that bought up all the heavy weapons it could find to make itself good at conventional war? Like it or not, someone has to train their forces to blow up tanks and shoot down planes. Otherwise, the world will see a crisis and send in its counterinsurgency forces... only to have them get pounded flat by an army that retained all those tanks and planes and artillery that the West decided to call "obsolete."

And Germany is counting on the US to do that for them. If both Germany and the US agree that we need to put peacekeepers in country X, and the conventional military of country X decides to fight back, guess who gets to take down the Xlander army and air force? It's not going to be the Bundeswehr, let me tell you that.
_______

You are forgetting one very simple thing. Yes, you can not tell today what you might need in 30 years, but you CAN say what you need in the next 5 or 10. So what you do, is optimize the armed forces for what you need today, while retaining the capability to upsize in the case something comes up that makes it more likely that you need that upsized force. A huge new enemy that would require the massive armed forces the US has today will not suddenly appear out of nowhere. It will require massive political shifts and then lots of time in order to raise the armed forces capable of being a threat to the US. Time which the US has to react to this new threat. There is at this time no credible conventional threat to the US in the foreseeable future.

So... we shouldn't build advanced new weapons like the F-22 until some new enemy shows up, at which point we would be able to churn out hundreds of them in a few years?

That doesn't strike me as a good plan. Wouldn't it be better to build the advanced weapons now and hold them in reserve for later? What happens if there's an unexpected flaw in our design? Under your plan, we'd have to work out the bugs while a new powerful enemy was going on the rampage, because we wouldn't have the weapons to test until the moment when we needed to use them.

Moreover, that relies on the US reacting to the threat in real time, rather than realizing it's going to need to fight a war about six to twelve months before the war actually starts. Democracies do not have a good track record of realizing they're going to need to fight a war far in advance, as I'm sure you're aware.

The strategy you propose reminds me of Britain's "ten year rule," and that did not go well. It's all very well to say "we don't expect to fight a major war in the next ten years, so we don't need to spend much on weapons." But how do you know when you're going to need to fight a major war in ten years? How do you make sure you don't get overconfident and keep your ten year rule in place until five years before the war breaks out?
__________

Except if they are incapable of going in in the first place. Or if they can only go in if they are invited in. Or if they can only go in as part of a world-wide (or NATO-wide) alliance.

In which case said military is likely to be incapable of doing its job, because it won't be a "military" at all. It will be a gendarmerie, and like a gendarmerie it will be in deep trouble when people make a serious decision to shoot back. Not if, when. That's the problem with sending your military into tiny local conflicts far away. Even if one side invited you in, the other was already willing to fight and die to win the conflict. Why would that change now that an international gendarmerie has showed up?

For a gendarmerie to work, the gendarmes have to have a real military that they can call for support if someone with serious weapons or organization starts trying to fight them. Who is expected to supply this military? And if such a military is not available, how do you stop your gendarmes from winding up like the Dutch peacekeepers at Srebenica?
________

If one of those countries decides to spend serious money building up its military, it would take about ten years to be in the same general position that Iraq was in 1991: a military stronger than anything that the local powers can fight. In which case either they get to stomp all over their neighbors for a few decades, or someone from outside has to come in and break their conventional army.

But there you have your timeline! If it takes 10 years for such a threat to emerge, then downsize to such an extent that it will take you 10 years to rearm in order to face that threat.

The Western democracies tried that, once. Germany made us regret it. Which makes this whole discussion seem a bit ironic to me...

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Sub-par compared to the U.S. and the USSR, sure. Compared to everyone else? Not really.

For the tanks, sure they were export versions (funny, I only learned the designation "Monkey Model" a couple days ago), but they were T-72s and not third-world knockoffs, and they certainly held up on their own against British made Chieftains against Iran (even if they were 'Monkey Models' too.) They certainly weren't so inferior (or so poorly trained) as to justify the crushing defeat the Iraqis endured.

You are comparing a tin-pot Middle Eastern country with a Western professional army? Who are you kidding? And they had local knock-offs of the T-72 which were even worse than the Soviet manufactured copies because they lacked the know-how to even manufacture the advanced armor. Do a pictorial comparison between the T-90 (Which by the way was based off the T-72) and the T-72 and you will notice a number of things the Iraqis did not have, starting with the Kontakt-5 ERA.

If the Iraqis were even remotely equipped with a decent number of the older T-64 or had proper T-72 with Kontakt-V ERA and were competently used, the Gulf War would have been bloody different.

[Darth Wong]

US military spending in 2008 was 4.6% of the GDP. That doesn't count supplementary funding for Iraq and Afghanistan, which takes it up to 6%ish. Defense spending peaked at 6.2% of GDP under the Regan build-up, 9.4% in the Vietnam War, 14.2% in the Korean War and 38.7% in WWII. For comparison the USSR was spending something close to 20% of the GDP (it's hard to estimate) on its military right before its fall. The UK currently spends 2.5% of GDP, France spends 2.6% and Germany spends just 1.1%.

From this precedent it seems highly unlikely that the current level of US military spending will 'bankrupt the country' - although it could be an exacerbating factor to another, primary cause, such as mass dumping of the dollar as a reserve currency.

I don't see why the country's greater past levels of military spending necessarily indicate that its current level of spending is economically prudent. Yes, the US spent much more on its military in the past, but it almost did destroy its economy during WW2, and it got lucky afterwards, in the sense that it became the sole supplier for much of the world's postwar rebuilding process. It ran a huge trade surplus with the rest of the world which gave it much more flexibility to spend money, not to mention the relatively huge taxes of that period (90% rates for the very wealthy). Without any of those conditions in place today, it seems unreasonable to suggest that those historical spending levels have any bearing on what is a responsible spending level today.

Furthermore arguments that 'the US should spend less on defense' are of little value without specifying how the US should change its foreign policy goals; the current US military is actually fairly well matched to the notional goals that politicians have set for it.

Do you have a reading problem or something? Almost all of the people who think the US should spend less money on its military do think the US should scale back its foreign policy ambitions.

[Thanas]

Besides which, what happens if everyone retrains their armies for light infantry counterinsurgency work, and then runs into some obnoxious minor power that bought up all the heavy weapons it could find to make itself good at conventional war? Like it or not, someone has to train their forces to blow up tanks and shoot down planes. Otherwise, the world will see a crisis and send in its counterinsurgency forces... only to have them get pounded flat by an army that retained all those tanks and planes and artillery that the West decided to call "obsolete."

Would you like some salt with that strawman?

And Germany is counting on the US to do that for them. If both Germany and the US agree that we need to put peacekeepers in country X, and the conventional military of country X decides to fight back, guess who gets to take down the Xlander army and air force? It's not going to be the Bundeswehr, let me tell you that.

Why not? Pray tell me what currently prevents the Bundeswehr from pounding states. Guess what - it is not the state of the mechanized troops, it is logistics and the constitution. Two things that won't change and have got nothing to do with conventional or non-conventional forces. Germany never had the power projection capability of the USA even when it was much more militarized during the cold war - and it never was intended to have it.

So... we shouldn't build advanced new weapons like the F-22 until some new enemy shows up, at which point we would be able to churn out hundreds of them in a few years?

One more strawman. Nobody is saying scrap the F-22. We are talking about seven additional fighter planes.

That doesn't strike me as a good plan. Wouldn't it be better to build the advanced weapons now and hold them in reserve for later? What happens if there's an unexpected flaw in our design? Under your plan, we'd have to work out the bugs while a new powerful enemy was going on the rampage, because we wouldn't have the weapons to test until the moment when we needed to use them.

I hear there is such a thing called weapons testing. Surely, with ~200 fighters in existence, at least some of them can be relegated to it? Once again, reply why seven additional planes are a must for weapons testing.

The strategy you propose reminds me of Britain's "ten year rule," and that did not go well. It's all very well to say "we don't expect to fight a major war in the next ten years, so we don't need to spend much on weapons." But how do you know when you're going to need to fight a major war in ten years? How do you make sure you don't get overconfident and keep your ten year rule in place until five years before the war breaks out?

Put yourself in Germany's geostrategical position. Where do you think are Germany's enemies? The EU is pretty much a safety guarantee.

[K. A. Pital]

For comparison the USSR was spending something close to 20% of the GDP (it's hard to estimate) on its military right before its fall.

God, Starglider, you should avoid speaking about stuff because you're embarassing yourself. The open budget was 70 billion rubles, total spending factoring covert "civilian-disguised" spending was estimated at 210 billion roubles. That's nowhere close 20% of the GDP.

[Starglider]

For comparison the USSR was spending something close to 20% of the GDP (it's hard to estimate) on its military right before its fall.

God, Starglider, you should avoid speaking about stuff because you're embarassing yourself. The open budget was 70 billion rubles, total spending factoring covert "civilian-disguised" spending was estimated at 210 billion roubles. That's nowhere close 20% of the GDP.

You don't give a source or a year. According to The National Economy of the USSR in 1990, GDP in Rubles was 722 billion in 1985 and 938 billion in 1989. So using your figure (which is nearly twice than the figure I had), military spending was between 30 and 38 percent GDP, depending on which year you mean. The USSR surviving peacetime military spending above 30% GDP for decades only strengthens my argument.

[Julhelm]

Why is it that the USAF must always be allowed to have it's own separate aircraft from that of the Navy, even when they fulfill similar requirements: F-15/F-14, F-16/F-18, and now F-22/Nothing. Meanwhile the navy-designed F-4 proved to be so superior to the USAF's own century series that they adopted it. It just seems like such a giant waste of money having to design separate airframes for the same task when a single airframe designed for carrier ops from the get go could fulfill both adequately.

And why does congress never smack down on the ridiculous interservice rivalry that persists in the US?

[Starglider]

Why is it that the USAF must always be allowed to have it's own separate aircraft from that of the Navy, even when they fulfill similar requirements

A design compatible with navalisation imposes a small but noticable performance penalty (stronger structure, aerodynamics to allow lower takeoff and landing speeds). I imagine the USAF sees accepting that as subordinating their needs to the USNs (on top of the fact that 'similar' is a long way from 'identical', at least in the eyes of mission planners).

And why does congress never smack down on the ridiculous interservice rivalry that persists in the US?

Perhaps because different congressmen have facilities and suppliers for different services in their districts, and they're bound to support the one with more local presence?

[K. A. Pital]

Bleh, my bad Starglider. 20,1 billion and 71 billion respectively for "official" and "uncovered". That is for 1990. Gorbatchov's declassification program uncovered 71 billion instead of 20,1 billion officially alloted for the military.

In 1991, the planned figure for expenses would have been 105,6 billion in 1991 prices correspondingly - around 8,65% from the planned GDP in 1991 prices.

[Vympel]

And why does congress never smack down on the ridiculous interservice rivalry that persists in the US?

Because Congress (theoretically: We The People) exists to service the military.

[Darth Wong]

I asked this question many pages ago and no one responded, so I'll ask it again: what dire consequences do the militarists here see befalling the US if it does not get any more F-22s? Chinese tank divisions rolling through Pennsylvania? Please enlighten us on the nightmare future that the enemies of the F-22 will inflict upon us all.

[Simon_Jester]

I asked this question many pages ago and no one responded, so I'll ask it again: what dire consequences do the militarists here see befalling the US if it does not get any more F-22s? Chinese tank divisions rolling through Pennsylvania? Please enlighten us on the nightmare future that the enemies of the F-22 will inflict upon us all.

I don't want to fail to answer your question, but I'm probably going to screw it up anyway. I will try to explain why some people think it's a problem if we don't get those extra Raptors.
______

The US still believes that it needs a military that can at least match anyone else's, for reasons we've already gone into. Among them:
-The US is de facto an imperial power, and has many client states and interests in distant parts of the world that it has made (or might soon make) commitments to.
-A lot of nations, implicitly or explicitly, rely on the US military to step in and help them defeat aggression against their soil. This includes countries that are arguably not American client states, such as Japan or Germany.
-If the US truly needs to fight a war in the near future, it's likely to be on short notice against a distant enemy whose identity we don't know well in advance. The invasion of Afghanistan was a good example; the US honestly had casus belli there. But to do that, the US needs to maintain distributed forces spread out over much of the world... which requires a substantial edge in quality to offset the inevitable local advantage in quantity.
-Even if we don't have to fight the most advanced nations in the world, which are nuclear powers, we may still have to fight their weapons. Most of the world does not design its own jets, tanks, or artillery, but instead buys them from other countries. Therefore, if we are to have an advantage in quality, we must have it not only over what a country like Iran could design for themselves (which would suck), but also what they might buy from some other country (which might not suck).

These are the arguments the militarists (?) make for maintaining a large, expensive US military that has better weapons than just about anyone in the world.
_______

Right now, the F-22 is hot shit. Indeed, it is the hottest shit in the world, so hot that its opponents accuse it of steaming. But it's not going to seem so hot in 2030. Anything the US could design in the 1990s (when most of the actual work on the F-22 was done), other people can design in the 2010s.

If you accept the arguments above (which American 'militarists') do, then this is a problem. In trying to deal with the objectives above, the US is in trouble if it has technological parity with an enemy, let alone inferiority. Therefore, they reason, the US must have aircraft as capable as the F-22, because the US must (they believe) maintain air superiority wherever needed or desired into the mid-21st century.

Right now, the US only has two aircraft in the works that will be worth anything in the 2030s or 2040s. This is true both because technology is making older planes obsolete, and because planes built during the Cold War are already showing their age and will be decrepit by that time. One is the F-22, the other is the F-35. The F-35 is not optimized for air-to-air combat, and there are serious worries about its general performance and capability.

Therefore, it is not hard to imagine a world around 2030 or 2040 where the US Air Force has nothing but obsolete decaying Cold War vintage airframes, F-35s that don't work nearly as well as planned and are quite vulnerable to enemy AA weapons and fighters... and the F-22 Raptors.

In which case maintaining Raptor production and having quite a lot of them starts to make a bit more sense.

[phongn]

Why is it that the USAF must always be allowed to have it's own separate aircraft from that of the Navy, even when they fulfill similar requirements: F-15/F-14, F-16/F-18, and now F-22/Nothing. Meanwhile the navy-designed F-4 proved to be so superior to the USAF's own century series that they adopted it. It just seems like such a giant waste of money having to design separate airframes for the same task when a single airframe designed for carrier ops from the get go could fulfill both adequately.

Different costs and requirements. The F/A-18, for example, is a twin-engined bird (more maintenance) than the single-engined F-16 (which in original incarnation was a day-only fighter incapable of using BVR missiles!). The F-15 and F-14 have different design roles (nevermind the cost of the Tomcat's expensive weapons systems). Even the F-4 wasn't quite the same between USAF and USN service, and the USAF wanted the F-108 anyways.

And, as Starglider noted earlier, carrier design imposes additional expenses.

[Starglider]

I asked this question many pages ago and no one responded, so I'll ask it again: what dire consequences do the militarists here see befalling the US if it does not get any more F-22s? Chinese tank divisions rolling through Pennsylvania? Please enlighten us on the nightmare future that the enemies of the F-22 will inflict upon us all.

This isn't complicated. The Korean, Vietnam and Gulf wars were all major conventional conflicts that occurred when a US ally was invaded by a militarist regieme. In the Korean War, the US did not have air superiority (though the USAF was in a dominant position), and as a result US ground troops were lost to enemy air attack, as well as numerous pilots and aircraft to enemy fighters. In the Vietnam war the US had air superiority over South Vietnam, which allowed US ground forces to operate freely without being subjected to air attack. However the USAF and USN still lost over a thousand aircraft over North Vietnam, mostly due to ground fire, but 76 aircraft were shot down by enemy fighters. In the Gulf war, the Coalition had total air superiority. The US lost just one fighter to enemy aircraft (an F/A-18 unsurprisingly), and a relatively low number to ground fire, due to effective air defense suppression and the very high quality of its aircraft (mostly teen-series fighters procured in the late Reagan era).

"During the first three days of the war, when control of the air was greatly contested, what it basically amounted to was the Iraqi aircraft would take off, pull up their landing gear, and blow up." - General Charles Horner, on the performance of USAF F-15s.

Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom were invasions (followed by occupations) of nations with negligable air defence capability. One can hardly assume that future wars will be limited to this type. If the US allows its air force to decay to 'slightly superior aircraft, substantially superior training' rather than 'overwhelmingly superior' the air dimension of future wars will look like Vietnam or even Korea, in that the US will still win but will take a lot more casualties, both in the air and potentially on the ground. A small number of F-22s (allowing for attrition and the reality that only a fraction of the fleet can be deployed to a given theatre) will be hard pressed to defend the swarms of legacy strike fighters (F-16s etc supporting the US offensive) and interdict enemy strike fighters (enemy PAK FA equivalents) attempting to destroy US forces.

Historically, the US has generally been more willing to spend money than the lives of its troops.

[Darth Wong]

In other words, the US ability to dictate what happens in countries thousands of miles from home will be degraded. And this is necessarily a bad thing because ...?

[Starglider]

In other words, the US ability to dictate what happens in countries thousands of miles from home will be degraded. And this is necessarily a bad thing because ...?

Firstly, degrading the USAF's capabilities will make no difference to the chances of another Afghanistan or Iraq occurring. Existing forces are quite sufficient to destroy such weak opponents. As has already been pointed out by several posters, diverting funds from high-tech conventional weapons to anti-insurgency forces makes such invasions more likely.

Secondly, history has shown that the US is quite willing to commit forces without an overwhelming advantage, as long as the decision makers think there is a reasonably good chance they will win. You would have to slash US defence spending by at least 50% to rule out overseas engagements - even then you'd just force the US to rely on its coalition partners more. Since that isn't going to happen, degrading the tools available to do the job is just going to mean more soldiers dying.

Thirdly, this decision is being made by the US defense department, based on the demands they expect their politicians to place on them and the desire to protect their own troops. Whether it is a 'bad thing' from your point of view is irrelevant. Gates will have made a bad decision if shifting funds from the F-22 to more ground troops produces more US casualties in the long run.

[Nephtys]

In other words, the US ability to dictate what happens in countries thousands of miles from home will be degraded. And this is necessarily a bad thing because ...?

That again, is the argument of SHOULD the US or any country exert foreign influence. A state looks out for it's own interests. If the US believes projecting power overseas is a worthwhile expenditure of resources balanced against say, how foreign nations would view such actions, then that's a good policy.

As far as I can see however, the US military presence in many regions is a stabilizing factor (outside of the obvious shitstorm about Iraq). The US in South Korea is their defense against NK aggression. Turkey and Japan are in a better position of security from nuclear sabre-rattling from Iran or North Korea. There's a greatly reduced chance of a war between mainland China and Taiwan because of US commitments.

[Darth Wong]

Firstly, degrading the USAF's capabilities will make no difference to the chances of another Afghanistan or Iraq occurring. Existing forces are quite sufficient to destroy such weak opponents. As has already been pointed out by several posters, diverting funds from high-tech conventional weapons to anti-insurgency forces makes such invasions more likely.

The fact that some people think so does not actually make it so. Such activities are driven by political factors, which are in turn driven by the US sense of its own massive superiority.

Secondly, history has shown that the US is quite willing to commit forces without an overwhelming advantage, as long as the decision makers think there is a reasonably good chance they will win. You would have to slash US defence spending by at least 50% to rule out overseas engagements - even then you'd just force the US to rely on its coalition partners more. Since that isn't going to happen, degrading the tools available to do the job is just going to mean more soldiers dying.

Bullshit. If the conditions are such that more soldiers would die, then Americans will be more reluctant to engage. Appealing to WW2 or Vietnam is a waste of air; political conditions have changed. Back during WW2, Americans were perfectly content to restrict their entire knowledge of the war to government propaganda.

Thirdly, this decision is being made by the US defense department, based on the demands they expect their politicians to place on them and the desire to protect their own troops. Whether it is a 'bad thing' from your point of view is irrelevant. Gates will have made a bad decision if shifting funds from the F-22 to more ground troops produces more US casualties in the long run.

Appealing to the status quo in order to justify the status quo is a worthless argument.

[Darth Wong]

In other words, the US ability to dictate what happens in countries thousands of miles from home will be degraded. And this is necessarily a bad thing because ...?

That again, is the argument of SHOULD the US or any country exert foreign influence. A state looks out for it's own interests. If the US believes projecting power overseas is a worthwhile expenditure of resources balanced against say, how foreign nations would view such actions, then that's a good policy.

As far as I can see however, the US military presence in many regions is a stabilizing factor (outside of the obvious shitstorm about Iraq). The US in South Korea is their defense against NK aggression. Turkey and Japan are in a better position of security from nuclear sabre-rattling from Iran or North Korea. There's a greatly reduced chance of a war between mainland China and Taiwan because of US commitments.

If the world actually needs this, then perhaps other parts of the world really would step up and take over some of this role. Otherwise, why do we not consider the possibility that the world just might be able to get along without the US trying to control everything that happens in it?

[Nephtys]

In other words, the US ability to dictate what happens in countries thousands of miles from home will be degraded. And this is necessarily a bad thing because ...?

That again, is the argument of SHOULD the US or any country exert foreign influence. A state looks out for it's own interests. If the US believes projecting power overseas is a worthwhile expenditure of resources balanced against say, how foreign nations would view such actions, then that's a good policy.

As far as I can see however, the US military presence in many regions is a stabilizing factor (outside of the obvious shitstorm about Iraq). The US in South Korea is their defense against NK aggression. Turkey and Japan are in a better position of security from nuclear sabre-rattling from Iran or North Korea. There's a greatly reduced chance of a war between mainland China and Taiwan because of US commitments.

If the world actually needs this, then perhaps other parts of the world really would step up and take over some of this role. Otherwise, why do we not consider the possibility that the world just might be able to get along without the US trying to control everything that happens in it?

Because it's not the WORLD who is asking for this. It's the United States, for it's own self-interest. US Policy shouldn't care what other nations think, except if what they think harms US interests. If losing foreign standing is outweighed by some other policy decision's benefits, then it's worth the trade.

[The Spartan]

That's a very dangerous position to hold. The Spartans (the real ones) tried that and it was the begining of the end for them. Other nations/empires have met similar fates.

[Starglider]

Appealing to the status quo in order to justify the status quo is a worthless argument.

You're not even arguing the same point as the people defending the F-22. They are criticising Gates for doing his job badly. Gates was not appointed to 'deliberately weaken the US to restrict the options of future Presidents by making US intervention cost more lives'. There would be a huge outcry and probably a lynch mob if he was. The job description is not 'test the theory that removing the umbrella of US defense from numerous countries will somehow cause less invasions'. It is 'defend the interests of the US and its citizens as well as you can, given the budget congress has authorized, and give your leaders as many options as possible in any crisis'. Failure to act on that would be dereliction of duty. As it happens Gates believes that future US Presidents will mostly want to invade and occupy third-world countries and is trying to support that, which is not dereliction of duty, it's just shortsighted. I don't know why you're even in this thread when you don't seem to think the problem is Gates or the F-22, but the entire US government. In light of that viewpoint singling out either of those two for special attention seems pointless.