Is The U.S. Military Prepared To Adopt New And Different Technologies For Future Conflicts?

Two F-22 Raptors fly over the Pacific Ocean after a refueling mission, March 9, 2009. The Raptors are deployed from Elmendorf Air Force Base, Alaska, to the 90th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron on Andersen Air Force Base, Guam. U.S. Air Force photo by Master Sgt. Kevin J. Gruenwald

Is The U.S. Military Ready To Embrace New Technologies That Will Define Future Wars? -- Walter Pincus, Washington Post

Is the Air Force’s determination to buy 2,000 F-35 Lightning II joint strike fighters for more than $850 billion comparable to the 1939 efforts by the last chief of the U.S. Cavalry, Maj. Gen. John Knowles Herr, to try to limit the Army’s use of armored units?

“Not one more horse will I give up for a tank,” he said.

The F-35 is “a plane conceived in the 1990s whose massive budget threatens to strangle a new generation of unmanned systems at birth,” wrote the Brookings Institution’s Peter W. Singer in an Oct. 22 Foreign Policy article that calls on the Pentagon “to think big and look to the past in order to prepare for the chaotic technowars of the future.”

The F-35 and the horse cavalry were one of the “eerie parallels” as Singer warned that “not merely tactics or operations, but fundamental organizational questions” are involved. That means the military services have traditionally had a hard time adapting to the emergence of new technologies and new threats to national security.

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My Comment: I am sure that the U.S. military is more than ready to embrace new technologies that will define future wars .... but budget considerations will probably be the deciding factor. Why spend hundreds of billions on 2000 fighter jets when unmanned drones and missile systems will be just as effective .... and cheaper .... a disturbing fact that is raising questions that with time and budget debates are becoming more difficult to answer.