UPDATED: Obama Reissues F-22 Veto Threat in Letter to McCain; Levin and McCain File Amendment To Stop Plane; POGO Tracks Votes

The Senate should debate the F-22’s fate this week . Sen. John McCain, ranking member of the Senate Armed Services committee, has pledged to lead the fight against the F-22, which the committee approved over the objections of McCain and Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the committee. Following is an op-ed by Winslow Wheeler and Pierre Sprey calling for an end to a plane they argue doesn’t work nearly as well as claimed and is far too expensive.

Former Air Force Secretary Mike Wynne argues below that Defense Secretary Gates’ acquisition decisions last week reflect that the United States is focused so intently on “becoming the armed custodians in two nations, Afghanistan and Iraq” that the country is engaging in a “strategic drawdown.” Although the decision to curtail F-22 production attracted much ink in the last week, Wynne argues that the F-22 decision– while important — must be analyzed together with Gates’ other decisions to understand that the Pentagon is “reducing the President’s options to protect U.S. interests.”

America has done a lousy job of ensuring we have a crop of well trained and experienced strategists and must act to fix this. That is the conclusion of Barry Watts, one of the leading US experts on transformation and its discontents and a top analyst of weapons systems. Few failures are as fraught with consequences as poor strategic decision making. We may have the best weapons and and best trained troops, but if we use them badly the results are unlikely to transcend the abilities of the fine men and women who serve in the military. The last decade should be ample proof of the poor quality of our national security strategists.

Anti-satellite weapons. There. We’ve got your attention. The topic we are really discussing — space situational awareness (SSA) is something lots of people know very little about because almost everything about it is so highly classified. Read on for a proposed international plan to lessen the chances of satellites colliding.

Congress is awash in acquisition reform, as it was the last time a Democrat was elected president. Robbin Laird, a defense consultant with a wide practice, wonders whether acquisition reform serves the country or may saddle it with aging and technically inferior weapons.

Tough love remains one of those concepts our society embraces mostly in the negative. It’s just, well, too tough. The following commentary certainly constitutes a fine example of tough love, coming from two of the country’s more distinguished military and airpower analysts. Essentially, Robert Dilger and Pierre Sprey argue that the country should scrap plans for the F-35 and F-22 and build what they call “austerely-designed and affordable aircraft tailored to missions that actually win wars…”

The increase in piracy off the Somali and Yemeni coasts has prompted international shipping companies to call for a blockade of the region. Some companies have already decided to go round South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, incurring huge cost increases as high as 30 percent, rather than risk piracy. Defense consultant Robbin Laird writes about what the Obama administration should do to address this crisis.

The debate about guns or butter hotted up last week, with Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) calling for an enormous decline in defense spending of 25 percent and the head of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, Rep. John Murtha (D-Penn.) saying money for weapons will have to come from spending slated to fund more Army personnel. Defense consultant Robbin Laird weighs in on the likely impacts of the financial crisis on defense spending.

Remember the Chinese shooting down their weather satellite? Remember the Chinese using a laser to paint a US satellite? Remember the US shooting down its own crippled spy satellite, US 193? The debate about how to protect space assets is heating up and one of the top national security space experts, Bob Butterworth, weighs in below for what I will call (in the best Chinese tradition) the third way, arguing that space defense does not require weapons in space.

In one of our periodic commentary pieces, former Air Force Secretary Mike Wynne tells us what the US and its allies should do in the wake of the Russian incursion: “Russian actions challenge the West to revisit its ability to defend the states bordering Russia, including the new states of NATO, against Russian military petro-power. Beyond Georgia or Europe, there is the question of the credibility of Western responses to states like Russia that take into their own hands the fate designing borders. After all, the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein led to a unified Western response to restore the territorial integrity of Kuwait. But to do this required a 6-month military buildup before a response could be generated.”

Each of the military services deem themselves free of any pretense of restraint by budgets approved by the president and secretary of defense, but the Air Force has put itself in a category all its own for its unbridled lust for extracurricular money.