Meditations on the Stealth Fighter-Bomber

Poking through the exhausting backlog of posts and comments, I noticed Thesis 13 of the February 15th post and felt compelled to say something about the F117-A Stealth Fighter-Bomber. This is an impulse that also springs up in when confronted by statements about the relevance of dogfighting in modern warfare or by the sight of many heads bowed in silent grief, such as found at your standard funeral or Gallagher show.

It strikes me that spending a lot of resources on $122 million stealth fighter-bombers that apparently have been equipped with the cutting-edge ability to explode midair entirely without the assistance of the enemy (http://www.cnn.com/US/9709/14/f117.crash.update/) may not be the most effective use of our tax dollars. I would be amenable to alternative applications of billions of dollars, for example effective personal body armor for our stone-age infantry who still rely on actual enemy bullets in order to be destroyed. I will also concede that there might be room in the education budget for another billion dollars or so, but after that we're going to have to start employing more teachers or something, and I'm not going down THAT primrose path thank you very much.

And the F117-A Stealth Fighter-Grenade is not the only way the military has been shoving the metaphorical pennies our nation has given it as its metaphorical allowance deep up its metaphorical nose. There is also:

1) missile defense (I will say nothing more about this one);
2) the destroyer (when was the last time we needed a destroyer? Aircraft carrier, alright. Submarine nuclear platforms? Mmmmm.... fine, I'll even give you that one, but destroyers? As far as I can tell, destroyers serve the important military purpose of providing targets for explosive-packed speedboats driven by men with extremely optimistic expectations from the afterlife.);
3) the Stryker personnel vehicle (sales pitch: "Like the Bradley, but way more vulnerable! And more expensive! Act now to get your free flame decal!");
4) and the $640 military toilet seat (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE4DA153EF935A25751C1A961948260).

Oh, and also the needless expense of maintaining a military capable of fighting a two-front war. That too.

See, a two-front war isn't really going to be a problem for a sensible country. As my police-officer friend said in defense of small clip-capacity on his service weapon, "if I need more than eight bullets, I'm screwed anyway and I probably did something wrong to get that way." If we find ourselves in a two-front war, is there any way we didn't have it coming? I don't see Europe AND Asia reaching the point of physical violence without some serious shit-stirring on our part, in which case we get what we get.

I can think of two applications of U.S. military might. One is peace-keeping/nation-building. As the three-ring circus in Iraq has demonstrated, peace-keeping/nation-building calls for a somewhat different skill set than war-making. For one thing, it requires a different set of rules of engagement. A knowledge of local customs and ethnic politics is also helpful, as is the ability to speak the local language, provided it doesn't require employing homosexuals.

The second use of our military is killing people. For that, I'd go with an expanded special forces program. Heck, since we wouldn't have to have so many people, we might even be able to pay them something competitive with Blackwater salaries.

Oh, but that wasn't the point I started this to make. The point I started this to make was in rebuttal to a comment to that post way back when, expressing concern for our economically vulnerable military-industrial complex and their beleaguered R&D personnel. And what about the myriad technological breakthroughs we civilians enjoy as a result of military spending? Where would we be without the internet, you ask? Well, you smug, internet people, I ask you, why not simply modify our work orders? Rather than

Dear Secret Underground Laboratory:

Please develop a computer-to-computer communication system for military use.

Love,

The Pentagon
xoxo

try something like:

Dear Secret Underground Laboratory:

Please develop a computer-to-computer communication system for civilian use.

Love,

The Pentagon
xoxo

I see no reason why we can't simply spend those billions of dollars we're currently spending on self-opening stealth pinatas on non-military research and development ("all you double-dome engineers, your next assignment is to get me 500 miles a gallon. And the biological weapons division is hereby assigned to curing male pattern baldness.").

So, in conclusion: peace-keeping forces to address peace-keeping situations, highly trained killing forces to deal with killing situations. Spontaneously-combusting stealth fighter-bombers to deal with fireworks situations.