Plus, the Obama defense budget has shown absolutely no seriousness in building the new fleet of aerial refueling tankers that would keep F-22s and follow-on aircraft airborne, halfway around the world. Our current Eisenhower-era fleet is over 40 years old. The bureaucratic effort to start building a new fleet has been a disgrace, with the Government Accountability Office overturning an attempt by a group of Air Force procurement officers to rig the bidding process in favor of French-based Airbus. The latest news is that the procurement team which has been placed in charge of rebidding the tanker will ignore the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) ruling that Airbus is guilty of massive trade violations. In the largest case ever filed before the WTO, the US Trade Representative successfully established that the tens of billions of dollars in “launch aid” Airbus got from European governments is an illegal trade violation. Ignoring the WTO ruling is not only a scandalously self-destructive trade policy, but it is also bad procurement policy. If we want a tanker built quickly, the last thing we need is years of domestic litigation and international trade challenges that will follow if such a blatantly unfair and incoherent position is publicly adopted by two government agencies.
Obama’s campaign to end the Raptor program, and his willful blindness to Airbus’s trade violations on the tanker are evidence that he is simply not serious in addressing future threats to American security posed by countries like Iran.
The world does not stand still. And Iran is but one example of how, if we downgrade and delay our cutting-edge defense programs we increasingly place our future in the hands of the Mahmoud Ahmadinejads of the world.