Budget may close Lackland AFB terror lab - Or, losing focus on the war on terra?

[Wickerman]

By Gawd, they are simply stupid...

http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/military/stories/MYSA011207.01A.lackland_battlelab.2f60932.html

Budget may close Lackland terror lab

Web Posted: 01/11/2007 11:44 PM CST

Sig Christenson
Express-News Military Writer

The Air Force is moving to close a Lackland AFB lab charged with studying ways to better protect U.S. troops, one of them a fire retardant that could spare soldiers from burns suffered in roadside bomb blasts.
The Force Protection Battlelab, touted by the service as helping "the Air Force stay one step ahead of the terrorist threat" after a 1996 attack masterminded by Osama bin Laden, would close next fall.

A clearinghouse of sorts where high-tech systems have been scrutinized since its debut in the year after the Khobar Towers blast in Saudi Arabia, the lab and six others like it are victims of an Air Force so desperate to cut costs it will eliminate 40,000 jobs by 2011.

"I will tell you it is inconceivable to me that the Air Force would shut the Force Protection Battlelab at this point in our history when we're trying to do everything we can in the world to make our deployed forces safer," said retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Ronald Coleman, former commander of the Air Force Security Forces Center at Lackland.

Air Force budget plans call for doing away with the Lackland battlelab and its 23 jobs — all but three of them military — in the 2008 fiscal year. The lab's commander, Col. Bob Tirevold, said Thursday the facility is awaiting a final decision. But battlelabs have been pegged for cuts "to pay some bills" for "higher-priority" missions in the Air Force, he said, adding: "It is a proposal to close battlelabs, but until the budget's approved it's not final."



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