I feel like I first have to qualify this post by stating publicly that I don’t watch every single movie through a political prism. Really, I view movies as a time to relax and just enjoy a good show. Sometimes they are meant to have overt messages, and so it’s unavoidable that I read some sort of political message into them, but usually I just want to disconnect from everything for a bit.
For those of us who have seen Transformers 2, you likely noticed that they mentioned President Barack Obama by name. I don’t really remember this happening in any other movie. In Transformers 1, they had President Bush with his back turned saying something ridiculous and cowboy-ish, and I recall in other movies seeing pictures or other references to a contemporary president. But, I don’t remember a sitting president being named in a movie. There’s certainly nothing wrong with it happening; it just caught my attention.
And so, having been reminded of the political world, my mind wandered for a bit, and it occurred to me that President Obama nearly cost us the war against the Decepticons by canceling the F-22 program.
Maybe you didn’t follow that huge leap there, so let me circle back.
The Decepticons – the bad guy Transformers – came to earth, looked around at our military technology, and picked the best stuff to fight us and the Autobots with. They could have picked the F-15, the Russian Su-30 or Su-37, or any other fighter jet, but they picked the F-22 Raptor because it kicks ass.
Now, about the same time in this alternate reality, President Obama is looking around the US for ways to spend some money. There’s plenty of options (trillions in fact), and he decides to throw some cash at Wall Street ($350 billion+), dump some money into union coffers ($787 billion+), pour some more into the auto industry (I lost track), send a bunch overseas to China ($Priceless), and then propose going further into debt to pay for everyone’s government-run health care ($1-2 trillion). He even spent some in Iraq, pissing off the far-Left. But after all of this, he doesn’t think it necessary to spend a measly $1.75 billion to guarantee American air-superiority for the next generation by producing the F-22 fighter.
Our F-15’s were designed and mostly built in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and have an average age of over 25 years. Recently, there have been numerous crashes involving F-15s that are literally disintegrating. In addition, other countries are rapidly catching up in the fighter jet arena. India, China, Russian, and others are expanding their air forces at record rates and with planes that are better than ours.
While the American fleet of air-superiority fighters ages and deteriorates, and our enemies build more and more sophisticated fighter aircraft, Obama cancels the F-22 and we nearly lose to the alien Decepticons. Way to go.
There is also the weeny guy in the movie that has been sent directly from the Obama Administration to overrule the military and negotiate with the Decepticons – genius! and oh, so familiar – but he is ejected from a plane into Egypt and never paid attention to again…
Filed under: Bad Events, Movies, Politics, Tech
The air superiority issue is a significant one, especially considering force reset, but there’s a few misconceptions here.
The F-15 fleet is aging, and readiness will be paid for with a substantial increase in depot work for the fleet.
The “India, Russia, and China are getting better planes” is really a lot of hot air. None of them are producing 5th generation fighters in enough numbers to be significant, it is the historical equivalent of the King Tiger tank. Cope India is interesting because 3 years later a similar exercise was done in the US with India with strikingly different results, namely only a handful of kills made by the Indians, and countless kills by the US. This was because of a few different factors. US CONOPS says that in exercises such as these the full spectrum of pilots in terms of experience will be used to best simulate the skillset the USAF would use in actual combat, whereas the Indian military used the exercises like a trade show, sending only their best and brightest, such in Cope India. This was not the case with the more recent exercise.
Secondly, the exercises in Cope India were within visual range, whereas the US exercises were both. Turns out that despite SU-30MKIIs being an advanced fighter, the Russians still haven’t figured out how to create an effective and accurate Identification Friend or Foe system. The Indians were shooting down their own aircraft faster than the US could shoot them down.
Does this negate the need for f-22? Hardly. The real issue with air superiority is that we no longer have the numbers needed to combat a full spectrum of threats. Recent RAND studies have basically said even if the F-22 can get double digit kills (which is doubtful since it barely carries enough munitions to do so), this would not be enough against the PLA.
What Gates has done is basically taken a conflict with China off the table and thus significantly reduced the need for F-22s.
Right, what you said. Thank you for posting. Great additional info. What’s your background?
Strategic analyst for Boeing, no longer in sales.