We Were Once Masters of the Air: It's High Time to Restore US Air Power

Dwight Eisenhower: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

People forget the context. Eisenhower said all this in the days after Stalin died, hoping to convince the new Soviet leadership to disengage from the arms race. It did not work. And Eisenhower had zero qualms about saying something and smoking something else: the US had about 500 nukes when Eisenhower became president and about 20000 when he stepped down.

> Bulk build and just overwhelm the manufacturing capacities of your enemies for pennies on the dollar.

Why would China not win this arms race?

DoD forgot how to make things for pennies, and the institutional wall[1] against commodity is too high and too thick. It'll take a sizeable and strategic US defeat to overturn the applecart.

Best case, we manage to get a few decent drones for $10m a pop, but we still risk getting shanked by a frickin' mob of Chinese crap, because they don't need to go that far to get into theatre. I dig what Anduril's trying[2] to do with Roadrunner, but it's still too damn expensive - the hard kill mechanism still results in a total loss-of-vehicle.

[1] I.e., quivering mass of overpaid box checkers getting salaried as Analyst IIIs.

[2] There's some whispers, too, that Anduril isn't actually able to operationalize any of their widgets at any sort of scale, but I don't have any inside eyes on this. I DO see, though, that their fab capacity is . . not amazing.

There will be no return of US Air Power until the MIC makes robust, cheap effective planes instead of expensive boondoggles that are hangar queens.

In History, the Germans relied on low-numbers of high technology planes during WW2. They were swamped by thousands of cheaper 'good enough' planes mass-produced by the US and the Soviets.

The US persists on making the same mistake now as the Germans did in the 1940s.