CSM: Base closings hint at new air strategy

[unhappycamper]

Base closings hint at new air strategy
By Brad Knickerbocker | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
from the August 23, 2005 edition

ASHLAND, ORE. – When his Cabinet tried to get Calvin Coolidge to up the budget for military aviation back in the days of open cockpits and silk scarves, the president is said to have quipped, "Can't we just buy one airplane and have the pilots take turns?"

It is a joke many in today's Air National Guard would not find funny. Under the Pentagon's plan, which its base-closing commission will vote on this week, 30 Air-Guard sites from Cape Cod in Massachusetts to Houston to Portland, Ore., would be closed or downsized; 29 of 88 flying units would end up with no aircraft.

<snip>

"The Future Total Force will allow us to provide combat capabilities in a way that only a global power can provide them: striking with little notice, anywhere in the world, with precision; moving our armed forces and their equipment to any location, at any time, to support our national objectives," Michael Dominguez, assistant secretary of the Air Force for manpower and reserve affairs, said at a recent seminar in Washington. "As the single global power, we can't be content with dominating local commons - the planet is our commons. And, for good or ill, the world looks to us to enforce the rules, maintain the security, and sustain the stability of the global commons."

<snip>

"Rumsfeld is trying to create more of a force that can intervene in third-world hot spots," says national security analyst Ivan Eland of the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif. "Creating a force that makes it more flexible and easier to intervene overseas means the politicians will be tempted to use it more, thus creating more blowback attacks on the US homeland."

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http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0823/p01s02-usmi.html

[HysteryDiagnosis]

1. thus creating more blowback attacks on the US homeland."

Ahhhhh Dumbsfeld never fails to illuminate and amaze.

[teryang]

2. As the single global power

Aerospace contractors get carried away with this nonsense. After what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, you'd think they'd learn.
The truth is they can't move everything thing they need anytime, anyplace. The fact that they think they can proves their military incompetence. Substantial power projection is maintained by sea not air. Land warfare is not sustainable by air.

Our military is being bled white in Asia and the incompetent neo-con leadership still use the jingo about "the world's only superpower." They've got quite a nerve telling that lie when they're taking a thrashing in the "commons" from a relatively small population of dedicated insurgents.