Tag Archives: F-35

Commentary

Top ten foreign policy and national security issues for 2012

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Map of Asia
Map of Asia

From the American Enterprise Institute.

Here’s the list:

  1. Iran, and the American retreat from Iraq
  2. Dealing with Islam and China in South Asia
  3. America’s strategy for Pakistan
  4. Defense spending priorities
  5. American support for Israel
  6. The Islamization of Turkey
  7. Collapse of the European economies
  8. Demographic crisis in Europe
  9. Demographic crisis in Russia
  10. Strategy for the Middle East

They have one article linked for each topic, so I chose the Islamization of Turkey.

Full text:

Turkey was a key American ally throughout the Cold War. As one of only two NATO countries to share a border with the Soviet Union, Turkey proved pivotal not only to the defense of Europe but also for American interests in Asia. The Turkish army fought alongside U.S. troops in Korea. Americans embraced Turkey not only for its strategic role, but also for its values. The Turkish government was decidedly Western-leaning. Turkey may have been majority Muslim, but most Turks saw their future tied more to the West than the Middle East.

Over the past nine years, however, Turkey has changed. No longer can Turkey be called a democracy. The Pew Global Attitudes Project now ranks Turkey as the most anti-American country it surveys. Reporters Without Frontiers ranks Turkish press freedom below even Zimbabwe and Venezuela. Turkey has imprisoned more journalists than even China and Iran. As Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has sought to Islamize society, Turkish women have lost both their equality and safety: The murder rate of women has increased 1,400 percent since Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party took power.

Erdoğan has reoriented Turkey’s foreign policy as well. Turkey now not only embraces the Arab world, but it allies itself with its more radical factions: Turkey endorses Hamas, Hezbollah, Sudan’s genocidal dictator Omar al-Bashir, and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Whereas a decade ago, the alliance between Turkey and Israel stabilized the Eastern Mediterranean, today diplomats worry that Turkey’s antagonism toward both Israel and Cyprus could lead to military conflict in the region. In September 2010, Turkey raised eyebrows at the Pentagon when it held secret war games with the Chinese air force without first alerting Washington. Because Turkey increasingly is the obstacle to NATO consensus, its future in the defensive alliance may now be open to question.

Any new president will be faced with serious decisions regarding Turkey. Should Turkey remain in NATO? If so, should the United States share its next generation F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, Predators, and AWACS aircraft with Turkey? Lastly, if Erdoğan fulfills his promise to use the Turkish navy to challenge Israel’s blockade of Gaza, leading to a fight between two traditional American allies, on whose side will the White House be, and what actions would the new president take?

This is a primer, so the articles are fairly short. Just enough to give you background information on the hot spots that the next President will have to deal with. Can you think of any issues they left out? I think that we should also be concerned with the drug cartels in Mexico, the continuous sabre-rattling from Venezuela, threats to our Asian allies from China, and whether we still need to have so many troops in Europe and South Korea.

It’s good for Christians to have some awareness of national security and foreign policy issues. It only takes an hour to read a few articles and to have some understanding of the issues we are facing, so that we can discuss them with others and vote properly. There’s going to be a foreign policy debate for the GOP primary on November 22, 2011, so it would be good for us to study up so we can understand what they are talking about.

News

China unveils new J-20 stealth fighter, rival to the canceled F-22 Raptor

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We need to restart the F-22 plant now
We need to restart the F-22 plant now

Story from Investors Business Daily.

Excerpt:

While America has stopped production of its stealth fighter, China prepares to challenge U.S. air supremacy in the Western Pacific with its own.

China is on another Long March, one it hopes will lead to military supremacy over the U.S. at least in the Western Pacific. It is deploying a carrier-killing mobile missile, the Dong Feng 21D, and is expected to launch its first aircraft carrier this year, the refurbished ex-Soviet carrier Varyag. China is also conducting preflight tests on a fifth-generation stealth fighter expected to challenge the best the U.S. has to offer.

Photographs reportedly showing China’s J-20 undergoing high-speed taxi tests at the Chengdu Aircraft Design Institute in western China have appeared, first on unofficial Chinese and foreign defense-related websites. Such tests are the last stage before actual flight tests.

[…]China’s stealth fighter appears to have “the potential to be a competitor with the F-22 (Raptor) and to be decisively superior to the F-35,” according to Richard Fisher, a Chinese military expert with the International Strategy and Assessment Center in Washington. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the designated replacement for the Raptor, has had its troubles. The general in charge of the program was fired amid concerns of spiraling costs and program delays.

It was felt we couldn’t afford both an F-22 dedicated to air superiority and the F-35, even though the latter is vastly inferior in air-to-air combat and ground defense penetration. The Raptor is perhaps the only plane that could evade sophisticated surface-to-air missile defense systems such as Russia’s S-300 and S-400.

“Only the F-22 can survive in airspace defended by increasingly capable surface-to-air missiles,” declares Air Force Association President Mike Dunn. The F-22 can fly 300 to 400 mph faster and two miles higher than the F-35. The F-35 is cheaper, but you get what you pay for. And it’s still under development. The F-22 is operational now, when we need it.

[…]During recent military exercises with South Korea, the F-22 was conspicuous by its absence. Deploying a squadron of F-22s to Osan Air Base in South Korea would send a powerful “keep off the grass” message to Beijing and Pyongyang. So why haven’t we done it? Why haven’t we sent the world’s most advanced combat aircraft into any potential combat zone?

Perhaps because letting the F-22 Raptor prove its worth would be a visible reminder of the stupidity of building only 187 of them in a world where the Russians and Chinese are building their own stealth fighters, and thugocracies like Iran and North Korea go nuclear. It would be a reminder that the once-feared arsenal of democracy needs some serious retooling.

Let me be clear. The F-35 is overpriced junk. We should immediately resume, and even max out, production of the F-22 Raptor. That’s what Obama would be doing if he cared a whit about national security, and didn’t have his head stuck in the sand. We need more F-22s, and we need them yesterday and we need them deployed to South Korea and Japan yesterday.

It doesn’t help that we are firing Admirals for making insensitive training videos, either. We are the laughingstock of the world because of Obama’s weakness, incompetence and cowardice. Our enemies are laughing at us, and growing bolder.