Quote Originally Posted by ganulv View Post
I don’t mean to come off as catty, but what is your metric for full funding? The U.S. military budget is already four to five times that of China’s. The federal government could spend even more on airpower, yes, but in a world of limited resources is there any realistic reason to argue that it should?

Even if your logic holds I don’t know that the U.S. really needs any more economic competition from China than it already has.
Ganulv-

I was trying to respond to pvebber's theoretical China question... I agree that our absolute budget still is way bigger than China's, and the federal debt is a bigger threat than anything else- meaning budgets will get cut. Warden would argue that the airpower (again airpower is not just Air Force) budget should be boosted at the expense of other military accounts - and I was attempting to show how he might apply that additional airpower to the China scenario.

I think that given the current fiscal environment and our current commitments it is unlikely that any of the services will get a significant budget boost over anyone else. One feature of our current system is that everyone has supporters in the public and in Congress, meaning true tradeoffs are very difficult to get.

One note on budget, though - the USAF budget (proposed) for FY12 is $166B. Of that, $30.92B is not controlled by the USAF, but goes to joint organizations (a lot of classified stuff for three letter OGAs). Another $9B pays for space procurement for systems like GPS, comm sats, launchers that support the entire joint force (and a lot of other folks). That's a total of $39.92B, or 24% of the USAF budget that essentially goes to supporting the entire DoD. I'm not complaining about this - I just think folks don't realize how much money the USAF spends on space to enable the entire joint force. It's not all Raptors and white scarves! The Navy and Army are actually buying more aircraft in FY12 than the USAF.

V/R,

Cliff

Link to Budget docs:
Air Force Financial Management Budget Site