The youngest B-52 bomber rolled off the assembly line 50 years ago. Remarkably, it’s still flying.

Like many of the aircraft still used by the U.S. military, the B-52 is telltale example of America’s geriatric aviation force. At a time when our military is asked to do more with [...]]]>

The youngest B-52 bomber rolled off the assembly line 50 years ago. Remarkably, it’s still flying.

Like many of the aircraft still used by the U.S. military, the B-52 is telltale example of America’s geriatric aviation force. At a time when our military is asked to do more with less, fiscal constraints have hampered its modernization and recapitalization strategy. Heritage is highlighting these challenges as part of Protect America Month and a three-part America at Risk video series.

The B-52 might be among the Air Force’s most recognizable planes. Its maiden flight was in April 1952 when President Dwight D. Eisenhower occupied the White House and the Cold War posed the greatest threat to America’s security. Today it is still flying out of Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota.

It’s not the military’s only aging aircraft, however. Along with tankers and fighters, America’s aviation force today is jeopardy of sacrificing dominance in the air environment that came with advancements in the 1960s and 1970s. Simply modernizing and updating those aircraft won’t provide the same edge.

David A. Deptula, a retired three-star general, has witnessed this “geriatric aviation force” firsthand. He earned his wings and flew an F-15 for the first time in 1977. Thirty years later, another Deptula boarded the aircraft. His son, Lt. David A. Deptula II, flew the same F-15 at Kadena Air Force Base in Japan.

The Wall Street Journal documented the amazing father-son story last fall to illustrate the challenges facing the aging force. The elder Deptula recounted for Heritage how the fighter was originally designed for a 4,000-hour service life. That was later extended to 8,000 hours.

“We have really flown these aircraft well beyond what originally would be believed as their replacement lifetime,” Deptula said of the F-15s. “And now, because of some of the fiscal constraints that are being imposed on the Department of Defense, there is consideration being given to extending the lifetime even further.”

Before retiring from the Air Force in 2010 as a lieutenant general, Deptula traveled to Kadena for a high-aspect mission with his son. He flew the F-15 and saw firsthand some of its deficiencies compared to newer aircraft like the F-22 and F-35.

He knows the risks associated with flying an older aircraft as well. While serving as the joint task force commander in 1998 and 1999 for Operation Northern Watch, he flew 82 combat missions over Iraq. On one mission, as he was headed to a tanker to refuel, the master caution light came on, revealing a problem with the plane. His fuel gauge went to zero. Meanwhile, he was 500 miles away from his base. Fortunately, he was able to land safely.

“The insulation was so old it simply had deteriorated to the extent where it came off and all of the wiring shorted out,” Deptula explained. “Those are the kinds of things that happen when airplanes get to certain ages.”

While his aircraft was grounded, another set of airplanes traveled from Kadena Air Force Base in Japan, on other side of the world, to replace the one that was being repaired.

In the years that followed, the Air Force was forced to ground its entire F-15 fleet after one fighter disintegrated during a training mission in Missouri in 2007.

Deptula worries that fiscal constraints imposed on the military — including $492 billion of mandatory defense cuts on the horizon — will result in future challenges.

“I hear people talk about, well you know, the U.S. military spends more money than the next 17 nations combined,” Deptula said. “Well, the next 17 nations combined are not committed to maintaining peace and stability around the world. We are.”

Heritage’s James Jay Carafano, an expert on defense and national security issues, worries that under the Obama administration, the military will continue to suffer from ill-advised budgeting.

“Today’s air forces are the oldest in the history of U.S. air forces,” Carafano explained. “Replacing old airframes and ensuring the U.S. maintains its superiority over potential adversaries is a national security priority. Yet Obama has done little to show he takes the challenge of modernizing the air fleets seriously.”

This is the second of a three-part series on the risks of budget cuts to America’s military. It was produced and directed by Will Lamborn. Brandon Stewart and Alison Meyer assisted with production. For more videos from Heritage, subscribe to our YouTube channel.

View this post: http://blog.heritage.org/2012/05/16/video-militarys-aging-aviation-force-puts-america-at-risk

Kaman Corporation, in conjunction with the Aerospace Industries Association, is hosting an employee rally May 21 at their Jacksonville Aerostructures facility to raise awareness of the critical contribution of the aerospace and defense industry to the U.S. economy and to our national security.

Beginning in 2012, [...]]]>

Kaman Corporation, in conjunction with the Aerospace Industries Association, is hosting an employee rally May 21 at their Jacksonville Aerostructures facility to raise awareness of the critical contribution of the aerospace and defense industry to the U.S. economy and to our national security.

Beginning in 2012, the Defense Department will absorb $487 billion in reductions over the next decade. In accordance with the 2011 Budget Control Act, another $500 billion cut will be imposed over the same timeframe unless a legislative remedy is put in place. In addition, sequestration will delay the Next Generation Air Transportation System and stall U.S. efforts to develop space programs in the wake of the shuttle program’s retirement.

We stand together to urge Congress to act quickly to find an alternative to sequestration.

Who: Rep. Ander Crenshaw (R-Fla. 4th)

Neal J. Keating, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Kaman Corporation

Scott C. Donnelly, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Textron Inc.

Marion C. Blakey, President and CEO of AIA

What: Second to None Employee Rally demonstrating the contribution of the aerospace and defense industry

When: Monday, May 21. A tour of the Kaman Aerostructures facility will begin at 9:30am at 227 Gun Club Rd., Jacksonville, FL 32218

Event begins at 11:00am; a barbecue lunch will be served after the event.

Where: Kaman Aerostructures, 780 Whittaker Rd., Jacksonville, FL 32218

Please RSVP to Jim Melvin, 904-485-1605 or james.melvin@kaman.com

When it comes to defending defense, the “right” may be getting its mojo back.

Just a few months ago, pundits were predicting the tea party was more than willing to throw Pentagon funding overboard, along with the rest of the federal budget. Republican [...]]]> By: James Carafano
The Daily Caller

When it comes to defending defense, the “right” may be getting its mojo back.

Just a few months ago, pundits were predicting the tea party was more than willing to throw Pentagon funding overboard, along with the rest of the federal budget. Republican proposals looked as anemic as those of the president. Isolationism was all the rage.

My, how things have changed.

Conservative budget proposals in the House and the Senate now call for reinvesting in defense — keeping boots, buying more planes and ships, beefing up missile defense and our nuclear deterrent rather than gutting military capabilities in accordance with the Obama Doctrine.

No congressional leader helped turn the herd more than Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ). Even as he heads out the door after a 25-year run in Congress, Kyl is reminding conservatives what defense means to conservatives … and our nation.

Yesterday Kyl delivered the annual Jesse Helms Lecture at The Heritage Foundation. He offered three lessons to be kept in mind during all defense budget negotiations.

Lesson #1: Don’t accept imprudent defense cuts or tax hikes. Kyl warned conservatives against letting themselves get trapped into having to choose between slashing the military capabilities needed to defend us or raising taxes. One is bad for national security, the other a disaster for the economy. The problem with Mr. Obama’s plan to balance the budget by strangling defense, Kyl warned, is that “we don’t always have the luxury of deciding where and when we will have to confront evil in the world.” Instead, Kyl promoted an approach that would offset steep budget cuts to the armed forces — slated to take effect automatically — with reductions in other federal spending.

Lesson #2: You can’t run away from your enemies. Kyl acknowledged that Americans are tired of war, but he cautioned against premature withdrawal from theaters like Afghanistan lest we give America’s enemies an opportunity to get back in the game. “If our sovereignty is priceless,” Kyl argued, “shouldn’t we pay the price to preserve it?”

Lesson #3: Stop using false threats of compromising privacy to hamstring counterterrorism measures. There are bad people out there tying to kill us and our government needs to be serious about trying to stop them. Of course, this can be done without compromising our constitutional liberties. But some of the hysterical sky-is-falling harping that greets most every proposal — reasonable as well as extreme — just makes it hard to take commonsense steps to improve security.

Kyl also threw in a robust pitch for missile defense, saying it was time to forget about trying to reassure Moscow that our planned defenses aren’t focused on protecting us from Russian missiles. He pointed out that Washington never asked the Kremlin for assurances that its new generation of missiles and nuclear weapons weren’t a threat to the U.S. or China.

The U.S. should be unperturbed by Russian threats to bomb proposed missile defense installations, Kyl said. “If the Russians want another arms race, fine,” he declared, noting it “didn’t work out for them so well the first time.”

Kyl concluded with a rallying cry for a strong defense: “The world will be safer with another American century, and so will Americans.”

James Jay Carafano is director of the Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation (heritage.org).

Source: http://dailycaller.com/2012/05/11/kyl-for-the-defense/ 

Major General Andrew Davis, Executive Director of the Reserve Officers Association appeared on Secure Freedom Radio to discuss what $500 billion in additional cuts to our military from the Budget Control Act of 2011 could mean.

The cuts are part of the sequestration mechanism [...]]]> By: Travis Korson
CNS News

Major General Andrew Davis, Executive Director of the Reserve Officers Association appeared on Secure Freedom Radio to discuss what $500 billion in additional cuts to our military from the Budget Control Act of 2011 could mean.

The cuts are part of the sequestration mechanism included in the budget.

General Davis, who served during the ‘hollow’ Carter and Clinton years, recounted some of the alarming techniques used to save costs on training:

“I came back from Vietnam in 1971, was on the drill field, left active service and joined the reserves in the late 70s and I was in an infantry battalion headquartered in Chicago and literally we ran through the woods, yelling bang bang during the Carter years because there was no training ammunition. And we were getting ready to do a tank infantry exercise with NATO troops in Europe and we were literally using paper plates to simulate mines because [there were] no training resources.

Read the rest at CNSNews…

In response to President Obama hiding behind our troops and taking credit for their actions [...]]]> President Obama has spiked the Bin Laden Football so hard that Navy SEALS, retired and active duty, are hammering him over his zealous efforts to take credit for their handiwork.

In response to President Obama hiding behind our troops and taking credit for their actions – we’ve released our newest ad entitled CREDIT.

The ad tells a simple but powerful truth: Our service members sacrifice greatly to protect this nation and deserve the credit for keeping America safe, secure and strong.

Rebuilding Iraq during the raging insurgency was no easy task. It required ingenuity, courage and [...]]]> May is Protect America Month at the Heritage Foundation. In addition to a series of events, Heritage is also releasing videos highlighting the importance of a strong national defense. The first one is below.

Rebuilding Iraq during the raging insurgency was no easy task. It required ingenuity, courage and innovative ways to get the job done—sometimes with equipment that offered little protection from the car bombs and rocket attacks launched by America’s enemies.

Kachejian told his harrowing story in a book called “SUVs Suck In Combat.” It chronicles some of the war stories that Americans never heard about the readiness challenges facing our military. The Heritage Foundation chose to profile him as part of Protect America Month, which showcases why we must commit to protecting the United States in an increasingly dangerous world.

Last year, as the federal government approached a limit on how much it could legally borrow, the Obama administration asked Congress to rubber-stamp an increase in the government’s borrowing authority without any spending cuts to match.

When House Republicans [...]]]> By Reps. Buck McKeon and Paul Ryan
Real Clear Politics

Last year, as the federal government approached a limit on how much it could legally borrow, the Obama administration asked Congress to rubber-stamp an increase in the government’s borrowing authority without any spending cuts to match.

When House Republicans made clear that any increase in the debt limit must be accompanied by an even greater amount of spending reduction, the President insisted that he would not accept a debt-limit deal that did not include large tax increases on American families and businesses.

All of this work was made more difficult by the Senate’s failure to pass any budgets at all in 2010 or 2011. Nevertheless, both parties were eventually able to come together and avoid defaulting on the government’s obligations.

We succeeded in protecting hardworking taxpayers by securing a debt-limit increase that contained zero tax hikes.

Instead, we established caps on spending for government agencies, saving roughly $1 trillion over the next decade.

And we established a Joint Select Committee in Congress tasked with producing at least $1.2 trillion in additional deficit reduction. This “supercommittee” was backstopped by an automatic, across-the-board spending cut known as a sequester.

This sequester was never intended to be policy. It was meant to be something both parties wished to avoid, in order to motivate members of the supercommittee to work together.

Despite a good-faith effort to avoid the sequester, the supercommittee’s negotiations broke down over fundamental differences in visions for our nation’s future.

In our view, we shouldn’t be taking more from hardworking Americans to fix Washington’s mistakes. Instead, we should be solving the problem with structural reforms to our entitlement programs to make them strong and sustainable.

Leading Democrats have a different view, and the supercommittee was unable to do its work. As a result, the 2013 sequester is scheduled to impose a $109 billion, across-the-board, inflexible, and arbitrary cut in spending on January 2, 2013.

There is strong bipartisan agreement that the sequester is bad policy and should be replaced.
Sequestration would have a crippling effect on our Armed Forces. Although defense spending accounts for less than 20 percent of the federal budget, half of the deficit reduction efforts to date have come out of defense.

Obama administration officials have testified that sequestration could break the back of a military stretched thin by three years of cuts and ten years of war.

Sequestration would force the greatest Armed Forces in history to its knees, resulting in the smallest Army since 1940, the smallest Navy since 1916, and the smallest Air Force in our history.
We would risk ceding our special role in world affairs to countries such as Russia and China, who are both vastly expanding their military power.

We would risk breaking faith with our all-volunteer military, reneging on sacred promises made to care for the health and well-being of our troops and our veterans.

We would risk the gains made against global terrorism and risk our ability to prevent another September 11th attack.

And we would tacitly accept what our military leadership calls an extraordinary and unacceptable degree of danger in a strategically uncertain and perilous time.

In addition to this threat to our national security, the sequester would also impose deep cuts to programs like the National Institutes of Health and border security, squeezing critical priorities while letting entitlement spending remain on autopilot.

This week, the House is taking action to avoid these dire results by replacing the sequester with common-sense spending reductions that members of both parties should be able to support.

For instance, we propose to stop waste in the food-stamp program by ensuring that individuals are actually eligible for the taxpayer benefits they receive. That shouldn’t be a partisan issue. That’s common sense.

Another issue: We all believe in a strong federal workforce. But federal workers are currently receiving retirement benefits that are far out of line with those received by their private-sector counterparts. Our proposal simply asks federal workers to share more equitably in the cost of their retirement benefits.

The reforms we’re advancing this week will also save billions of taxpayer dollars by prohibiting future bailouts for “too big to fail” institutions. We need to be ending the concept of “too big to fail,” not enshrining it with a permanent bailout fund.

These savings will replace the arbitrary sequester cuts and lay the groundwork for further efforts to avert the spending-driven economic crisis before us.

Unless we act, the sequester will take effect. We do not believe this is in the national interest, and the President claims that he agrees. There is no reason why we cannot work together.

House Republicans are bringing specific proposals to the table. If the Democrats mean what they say, it is time for them to work with us to spare our troops from the consequences of Washington’s failures.

McKeon of California serves as Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. Ryan of Wisconsin serves as Chairman of the House Budget Committee.

A link to the Real Clear Op-Ed can be found here.