How serial war became the American way of life (2009)

By David Bromwich

Here’s part of the way that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently defended his decision to stop production of the F-22 Raptor, the U.S. Air Force’s giant boondoggle of a fighter jet. “Consider,” the secretary of defense said,

“that by 2020, the United States is projected to have nearly 2,500 manned combat aircraft of all kinds. Of those, nearly 1,100 will be the most advanced fifth generation F-35s and F-22s. China, by contrast, is projected to have no fifth generation aircraft by 2020. And by 2025, the gap only widens. The U.S. will have approximately 1,700 of the most advanced fifth generation fighters versus a handful of comparable aircraft for the Chinese

Only in the parallel universe that is Washington, D.C., would that be considered ‘gutting’ defense.”

So we’ve already made it to 2025 and, the Secretary of Defense tells us, the U.S. will still, according to present Pentagon planning, have an air force the likes of none on Earth. But don’t stop there. That’s just medium-range planning when it comes to the U.S. military and future war fighting. According to David Axe of Wired’s Danger Room blog, the Air Force has just released its “Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009-2047.” In what Axe describes as an “acronym-dense 82 pages,” it suggests that “tomorrow’s dogfighters might not have pilots in the cockpit.” The Plan sketches out how “ever-larger and more sophisticated flying robots could eventually replace every type of manned aircraft in its inventory — everything from speedy air-to-air fighters to lumbering bombers and tankers.”

Whether this proves fantasy or reality, the thing to note here is that date: 2047. Now, that’s long-range planning of a sort that no other part of the U.S. government is ever likely to do. And that’s because, as David Bromwich, who writes regularly and incisively for the Huffington Post and the New York Review of Books, points out, the U.S. now regularly imagines itself as a serial warrior into the distant future. Tom

America’s Wars

https://tomdispatch.com/david-bromwich-america-s-serial-warriors/

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