The Bush/Cheney Whitehouse is killing the Air Force.
In February 2004, Indian pilots squared off against American pilots in an warfighting exercsie called Cope India 04. We got our fannies dusted. According to the now-disgraced Duke Cunningham (R-CA), he claimed that U.S. pilots, flying F-15Cs, were defeated more than 90 percent of the time in direct combat exercises.
The general perception (by the rank-and-file and not by Air Force Generals who want to purchase new aircraft) was that the American pilots were undertrained. The exercise sparked a whole rethink of American "Top Gun" training.
The Bush/Cheney response? Forcing, in June 05, the Air Force's combat squadrons to cut back their training hours by nearly 60 percent -- "leaving frontline units unprepared to go to war," according to Defense News.
The overall Air Force line is that superior hardware beat US forces. That's not true. The Indian Air Force was flying a variety of aircraft at the exercise--ancient MIG-21s, 27s and some more modern Mirages and a few MIG-29s and 30s. The MIG-21s gave the F-15s big problems.
The exercise was somewhat gamed to make things tougher for the US, but a spokesman for the US pilots said ""The outcome of the exercise boils down to [the fact that] they ran tactics that were more advanced than we expected....India had developed its own air tactics somewhat in a vacuum. They had done some training with the French that we knew about, but we did not expect them to be a very well-trained air force. That was silly."
The US Airforce is trying to re-engineer training to make it tougher. But they can't do the job if the White House doesn't let the boys get out and train... We're strangling the very infrastructure that made our Armed Forces so good.
And making me and mine less safe. I'm really getting worried. Are you?