Quote Originally Posted by Cliff View Post
Nevertheless, it does act as an effective constraint on the resources that will be available to the military to execute the strategy...In theory it should be the basis of the National Military Strategy...I think that, in reality, it will mainly be used as a means to justify whatever direction folks want to take, not as a means of assessing the overall defense strategy/programs of record.
That's what's always been true about it -- it is the exercise to divide the pot and strategy has little or nothing to do with it. Actually, the Strategy should drive the QDR to produce an unconstrained requirement sheet and then Congress should make the hard calls on what gets funded. Since Congress really does that but does not want to be seen doing so in case there's a screwup, they fob it off to DoD by statutorily requiring both a National Military Strategy and a QDR. Lights and mirrors, little more.
I understand the CSAF comment is boilerplate, and that we haven't resourced to 2 MRCs in a long time.... which leads to my next question - is explicitly stating our limitations better than keeping a certain level of strategic ambiguity?
Makes no difference in my view. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only guy in the world that can count. That is, most potential opponents have a reasonably good idea of what we can practically do and pay little attention to the rhetoric and news releases which are virtually meaningless.
So really the F-22 is huge for supporting the trooops.
Provided there are opponents for them to be huge with. Who do you see that as being in it's design lifetime; with what and in what quantities? Second question; maintenance costs, OR rate?
I just don't want to see us end up like we did at the start of WWII, Korea, and Vietnam, where we lost air superiority quickly and had to fight to get it back- I don't think we have the resources to take the losses that would entail anymore.
Missed WW II, did make the other two and in the early days of both -- there was no loss of Aerial Superiority in either though in both there were lapses caused by training deficiencies and logistic issues, not by the aircraft involved. There were, however, inadequate for task aircraft in both wars as aircraft designed for specific missions had to be used for other missions.

One could extract from that the quality of training is a more important discriminator than the quality of aircraft AND that using single role, sole purpose aircraft is not the best solution. That might particularly apply in a time of constrained budgets which are certainly going to be here very quickly. That last is almost certainly driving the F22 decision.