White House Trades New Weapons for Troop Support
NewsMax.com Wires
Tuesday, March 13, 2007


WASHINGTON -- The White House plans to shift $3.2 billion in defense spending - partly from new weapons like the Lockheed Martin Corp. F-35 Joint Strike Fighter - to support troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, a trade publication reported on Monday.

In a letter to Congress detailing revised plans for its fiscal 2007 emergency wartime spending request, the White House said it would reduce spending on three aircraft programs by $923 million, freeing up money for armor kits and transport vehicles needed by U.S. troops.

The letter was obtained and released by insidefense.com on Monday.

"Items . . . that have been used as offsets have been deemed less timely or lower priorities than those in the current request," said the letter from the White House Office of Management and Budget.

It said it would remove $388 million for five Lockheed C-130J transport planes; $146 million for one CV-22 tilt-rotor aircraft built by Boeing Co. and Bell Helicopter, a unit of Textron Inc.; and $389 million for Lockheed F-35s.

Instead, it would spend an additional $1.5 billion on armor kits and transport vehicles, including $500 million for Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, the newest generation of tactical vehicles designed to protect troops against mines and roadside bombs.

General Dynamics Corp. has already won a contract for some of the new vehicles, but Britain's BAE Systems Plc and Armor Holdings are also in line to get orders for the new vehicles, said defense analyst Loren Thompson of the Virginia-based Lexington Institute.


Thompson said the proposed changes confirmed defense industry fears that money was beginning to flow out of weapons programs and into personnel and other near term needs.

He said it also marked a reversal of the Pentagon's decision last fall to include all the costs of the global war on terror in its supplemental funding request.

"What these changes show is the tug back and forth between near-term needs and long-term moderation, and as usual, near-term needs are winning out," Thompson said.

It's just starting to sink in to me how long USAF will be using F-15s and F-16s.

Think of using a P-51 up till about the 1980's.....

OK... something a little closer. Think if we still used F-100's .... or used F-4s till 2010...

My prediction is that even with fancy upgrades.... and how the military industrial complex hates buying spare parts... I don't even want to think of what F-15s and F-16s operating in the year 2015 or 2020 will be like with the procurement holidays that unfortenately happen with spares. Not a pretty picture.

This dramatic slow down in JSF production will kill us. Suddenly building more F15s and F-16s ( An F-15K like jet and a USAF inspired Block 6x jet ) as gap fillers doesn't sound like such a bad idea. But hell, we don't even have money for that. We are screwed.

Here you go. Until operation useless dirt is completed, expect more of the same. Expect to see traditional big mil hardware manufacturers to create anti-war / "bring the troops home" posters and hit the streets en masse. Their big hardware gravy train is being upset.



http://www.newsmax.com/archives/article ... 2341.shtml

My opinion it will be a higher figure siphoned off as the Walter Reed debacle and some other things.

Okay, people, let's not get TOO upset here. We're talking about the supplemental budget, where the USAF tried to sneak in an extra two or three F-35s beyond those in the regular budget. That is, of course, until McCain, perhaps rightly, had a hissy fit about it. I have to agree that war supplemental budgets should be used to fund your war, and not what you'd like to have, say, five years from now. Very, very naughty on the part of the USAF, if you ask me...

Okay, people, let's not get TOO upset here. We're talking about the supplemental budget, where the USAF tried to sneak in an extra two or three F-35s beyond those in the regular budget. That is, of course, until McCain, perhaps rightly, had a hissy fit about it. I have to agree that war supplemental budgets should be used to fund your war, and not what you'd like to have, say, five years from now. Very, very naughty on the part of the USAF, if you ask me...

What a democracy!!, hundreds are dying every day....
So are we going to pay more for F35 in this case or have it in around 2020 for the US to keep up the troops for nothing???

Not to mention cuts in education, cuts in health care, etc.

Ok, it hit me today and let me say that I am shocked and dismayed. The liberal nut-job-anti-defense-nuts have not picked up on the fact that the F-35 as_of_today costs $190,000,000 per copy. My god in heaven, they were all over the B-2 and the F-22 in their infancy for costing what they cost.

My god in heaven, it must be a sign of the impending apocalypse that no one's crying how much the F-35's currently cost. One-hundred-and-ninety-million dollars each: we need to cancel this program now and spend it on the rain forrests, immediately.

Where are all the nut jobs at?