Thursday, February 8, 2007

Pricey planes and big budgets

In my column on the soon-to-be late, lamented, Darth Vaderesque Stealth fighter this week, I said the plane was retired partly to deal with budget pressures. Since President Bush has just proposed a military budget that some analysts are comparing to the massive ones of the late Cold War, that claim needs a bit of context.

Basically, the Air Force says it's being asked to do too much -- from deploying spy satellites to maintaining the fleet of older planes to designing new ones to rescuing people during Katrina -- given its budget. ($128.8 billion last year.) Air Force spokespeople stress that the service is the only truly global one -- wherever the conflict is, Baghdad or the Taiwan Straits, we'll need planes. Without an additional $20 billion more a year, for the next several years, the Air Force will be forced to fly dangerously old aircraft. (The Government Accountability Office, for its part, mostly blames poor planning on the part of the Air Force.)

All of which is to say: The Air Force generals probably aren't happy with the military budget released Monday. The Air Force got about $8 billion more for 2008, but inflation will chip away at some of that. And the Air Force's proportion of the budget actually dropped relative to the Army's and Marine Corps. Some observers say this may rekindle the old inter-service rivalries.

Today, the Globe's Bryan Bender points out that some military goodies not related to the current war were slipped into the President's Iraq-war budget -- including some pricey planes. Still, the Air Force probably feels disrespected.

Posted by Christopher Shea at 05:25 PM

Print | E-mail to a friend | Permalink | Subscribe via rss