Liberal Talk Radio

Gregg Easterbrook writes in Slate about how trusty old B-52 bombers have gotten really good at dropping precision bombs. Or rather, newer, more accurate bombs mean that we don’t have to fly in low with risky, expensive fighter gets to get the drop on the bad guys:

Bombers dropping JDAMs did the heavy lifting of the 2003 attack on Iraq. The result was one of the greatest technical successes in military history—thousands of targets hit right on the nose, with only a few errant bombs that struck civilian areas, and zero combat losses as the bombers flew well above the range of ground fire. At one point during a battle in Afghanistan, U.S. soldiers beamed the location of some Taliban up to a B-52, which dropped JDAMs exactly on the Taliban unit less than 1,000 feet from American forces. The idea that a high-altitude bomber could conduct close-air support—aiding troops in battle without accidentally hit the good guys—would have been considered nonsense by Air Force planners just a decade ago. In the Afghanistan and second Iraq campaigns, a few dozen bombers did the work tacticians assumed would require hundreds of fighter planes.

So if these bombers are so good, we can drop the $320 billion next-generation fighter plans, eh? Fat chance:

…almost two decades of lobbying and logrolling stand behind that $320 billion fighter purchase plan. The fix is in with key congressional committees, and the pork has been elaborately scheduled for division among constituents and congressional districts. The aerospace contracting lobby does not want any change in the copious money flow now authorized for new fighters.

Air Force senior leadership is thick with former fighter jocks, who find the new F-22 superfighter and its companion multiservice F-35 sexier than bombers. Piloting modern bombers is not meaningfully different from flying Boeing 737s for Southwest Airlines—there’s no nailed-to-your-seat maneuvering, no sense of rocketing through the sky. Air Force leaders know that a new bomber designed for satellite-guided weapons would likely be a vanilla aircraft—a modified Boeing airliner could fill the role.

This is why it’s important to constantly question military spending, kids. Sometimes I think to myself, “self, what business do you have criticizing the military budget? you’re not in the meetings, you don’t know about the 20-year threat from China.” But then I read articles like this, and I’m reminded that the defense budget is just like the rest of the government’s budget: crafted by well-meaning people who nonetheless have their own biases and prejudices.

In this case, it’s a perfect storm of (a) Air Force senior brass who like spending money on new toys, (b) standard military-industrial-congressional pork, and (c) a Democratic party too afraid to look “weak on Defense” to challenge the status quo.

Seriously, $320 billion? What we need are more boots on the ground. But, as I wrote over a year ago*:

“Boots on the ground” don’t have a large constituency in Congress, at least until some smart contractor offers a legion of battle-droids that can be dropped into a conflict zone to negotiate reconstruction efforts and make peace among rival political factions. Call it the PetraeusBot 3000 and price it at $25 billion per brigade (when purchased with the lucrative maintenance contract, of course!). Build it at a new factory in Alabama and you’ll guarantee it all the Congressional votes it will ever need.

Admittedly, this is the sort of thing that security firms like Blackwater USA are offering (not the battle droids, natch… but give ‘em time!). Which probably explains why they’ve been so successful.

*That’s right, bee-yotch: I was into Petraeus before being into Petraeus was cool. I totally have his first album. It’s a rare import.