An Air Force B-1B bomber flying above the Pacific. Looks impressive doesn't it? Unfortunately, the last one was built over 30 years ago. The entire Air Force fleet is aging faster than it is being replaced.Wikipedia.
Loren Thompson, Forbes: Pentagon May Come To Regret Prioritizing R&D Spending Over Weapons It Needs Now
Over the last two years, President Trump has made good on his campaign promise to raise military spending. Between 2016 and 2019, U.S. annual defense spending rose $100 billion, an amount greater than the entire military budget of Germany. And the biggest increases are in the weapons accounts—R&D is up by nearly a third, procurement by over a quarter.
This sounds a lot like the Reagan years, when a new president committed to “peace through strength” inherited a debilitated military from his predecessor and pledged to modernize it fast. What followed was the last great military buildup of the Cold War, an investment in new warfighting technology so profound that even now, three decades later, the joint force continues to rely on the weapons Reagan bought.
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WNU Editor: R&D is important, but why the focus on developing new weapons at the expense of buying weapons. Like the above author I follow these developments closely, and I do not have an answer.
5 comments:
http://listverse.com/2018/01/30/10-alleged-secret-weapons-of-the-us-military/ Just maybe..? Probably not, but hey.
I blame the Democrats
I blame Democrat voters.
They get worthless degrees and then we only have a fraction of the good ideals that we should have.
Its a bit like the F22 program.
There is the secrecy matter, in many countries they value security so much that a scientist capable of producing new weapons would never obtain security clearance. We are talking about unpredictable and dangerous people creating weapons the world has never seen, how do you give someone like that access to your secretes?
Todays is also an age where sexism is rampart and woman are gifted STEM jobs because of their vagina. You will find the remaining men in R&D jobs are degraded by their woman colleges who are not up to par. Instead of upskilling its easier to degrade your better pairs. Group stupidity as it were.
Lastly there is the fact private jobs offer people more money for doing less work. Likewise with so much cash on offer you do one job and your retiring. Unlike Russia where they still have a Nationalist ideology and people will work for less for the betterment of the nation, places like America is all about finical gain.
One last thing i would like to add is war isn't about killing your enemy anymore. WW2 showed the power of proper gander and look at how powerful of a weapon of war that was.
I am reminded that as WW2 heated up, the British and American governments met up to plan how to defeat Nazi Germany. They made a deliberate decision to not do any research into weapons that could not be mass produced and enter combat within the 4-5 years they believed when the war would end in Germany's defeat. Any money spent on R&D on weapons that could only enter mass production after that time would be "wasted" - it was far better to take that money and spend it elsewhere on something that could be used to win WW2. For that reason, the US and Britain rarely invested in any designs not already ready for some kind of mass production in 1942. Even the new planes, ships and tanks that came into production later in the war had already been designed and prototyped in 1941 (like Essex class carriers, Iowa class battleships, the Hellcat and Corsair carrier planes, P-51 Mustangs, even the B-29). This is why the British and Americans produced jet fighters later than Germany even though Britain had been the world leader in jets before the war. Germany took the other approach and wasted an incredible number of resources into "wonder weapons" that came too late and too few to change the course of the war in late 1944/1945.
How much you spend on R&D really depends on how far away you think the next war is, and how many resources it'll consume to win it.
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