I remember my grandfather, a WWII Navy vet, calling the USAF the "junior birdmen" in reference to Tom Lehrer dubbing "Up in the Air Junior Birdman" the USAF official song. . .

I don't see most of this as piling on at all, LawVol. It is somewhat incongruous for the Army and Marine Corps to be stretched absolutely to the limit; dealing with casualties, retention issues, personnel shortages, plus all the equipment and procurement issues that accompany 6 years of sustained war, and then to see the Air Force come along and say, "by the way, we need hundreds of billions of dollars for a spanking-new fighter fleet."

I think that now, more than ever, its imperative that the Army take control of CAS aircraft, and develop a SLEP for the A-10 or a successor. You simply aren't going to convince the USAF that they exist to support the soldier on the ground, and thus without that change in mission and purpose, you aren't going to see procurement priorities that mesh with "what their customers want," namely the CAS and airlift capabilities.

That said, here are my questions. Is the USAF really that worried about its F-15s, F-16s, and so on in a bombing campaign against Iran or maybe North Korea? Or is it because of the general air-worthiness condition of the fleet?

Second, why isn't the Navy offering similar rumblings about their F/A-18Cs, S-3s, etc? Or, for that matter, their ships, some of which are aging rapidly (submarines in particular. . .)

Finally, I'd just like to point out that every service right now is upping their procurement and personnel requirements, as they always do while in crisis mode. The funds demanded right now are enormous (I'm thinking of McCaffrey's call for a 800,000 man active-duty Army, the fighter force recapitalization, and the Navy's Virginia submarine program, among others) and everybody is going to have to live with some cuts. The past has shown how hard it is bureaucratically to minimize a service's role and funding level to support another, and the dangers in doing so (Truman's emphasis on the USAF before Korea; emphasis on the Navy before WWI)

Matt