Andrew Cockburn writes in today's LA Times:
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The world may be in turmoil, but in the defense business there are signs of a return to normalcy. After dreary decades in which the U.S. military had to live without a presentable threat with which to justify its spending on high-technology weapons, the Chinese stepped up to the plate. With ominous talk gaining currency in Washington of actual cuts in the U.S. defense budget, our Asian friends have suddenly offered a titillating peek from an airfield in Chengdu at their newest warplane, described as a radar-evading "stealth" fighter like our own F-22.
...
To those with fond memories of the Cold War, when it seemed that the arms race was a two-nation affair, things are moving in a familiar pattern. Reading Aviation Week & Space Technology in those days left you with your heart in your mouth, as it regularly broadcast the news that Soviet techno-military ingenuity was on the point, again, of overwhelming our own puny and underfunded efforts. "The Soviet Union is producing and fielding inventory aircraft with major performance improvements at twice the U.S. aircraft production rate," ran one typical jeremiad in June 1982. "The NATO technological lead is decreasing."
It was never true. Soviet warplanes always suffered from a fundamental deficiency of "short legs" — insufficient range — due to heavier airframes (retarded (deficient metalworking technology) and shorter-lived engines (ditto), not to mention myriad other deficiencies. Whenever actual examples of some highly touted Soviet warplane arrived on public view in the West, the reality invariably fell far short of the advance billing. When the MiG-25 Foxbat, once promoted in Aviation Week and elsewhere as a wonder plane that could fly vast distances at 3 1/2 times the speed of sound, was inconveniently delivered by a defecting pilot to Japan in 1976, it turned out to have one-third the advertised range and engines that melted well short of the advertised speed.
...
Unfortunately, while some may applaud a Chinese initiative to spend the money that Wal-Mart sends them on a weapon of dubious utility, we too may end up paying a price, as the "threat" of China's J-20 is invoked to justify further increases in our own bloated defense budget.
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Read more:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-0112-cockburn-threat-inflation-20110112,0,4020395.story
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