Concerning the "Pentagon Plane Folly" and the quote, "The Pentagon's Defense Science Board and the Rand Corporation have found there is no compelling need for new tankers," I wholly agree. When I came home from a year in Vietnam, flying cargo planes (C-7A's), I was assigned to train in KC-135 Stratotankers. I refused duty in January, 1972, declaring conscientious objection and eventually, 6 months later into in-service resisting, resigned my commission.PENTAGON PLANE FOLLY: Controversy surrounds a $35 billion Pentagon contract for aerial refueling tankers, awarded February 29 to Northrop Grumman and the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Corporation (EADS). Rival Boeing, once favored for the contract, is pushing the Government Accountability Office to overturn the decision.
Opponents protest that the deal will outsource American jobs--or, as Frank Gaffney of the Boeing-tied Center for Security Policy put it, support "anti-American" (i.e., European) labor unions. But the EADS/Northrop Grumman team is building a plant in Mobile, Alabama, to assemble the new tanker, and Boeing has plenty of foreign suppliers that would have been tapped had it won the contract. The controversy has more to do with who gets the profits than who gets the jobs.
Besides, dirty dealing cost Boeing a no-bid contract in the first place. Company executive Michael Sears and Pentagon official Darleen Druyun both went to jail after Boeing lured her with a private-sector job while she was working on negotiations for the tanker deal. Boeing's criminal behavior opened the door for the EADS/Northrop Grumman bid.
Truth be told, neither company deserves the contract. The Pentagon's Defense Science Board and the Rand Corporation have found there is no compelling need for new tankers. Rather than arguing over where the jobs should be, someone in Congress needs to stand up and say that there are better uses for the $35 billion allocated for these unnecessary planes. -- WILLIAM D. HARTUNG AND FRIDA BERRIGAN
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080421/noted
The entire air war would have been made much more difficult and limited without these planes.
They were initially designed for detente, the cold war, keeping B-52 nuclear bombers aloft, and the Air Defense Command F-106 interceptors (dubya's folly). Again, they were used to rapid-ferry aircraft to attack Libya in the 80's, and of course, to ferry large quantities of aircraft to the Middle-East Wars.
Their main reason for existence is to allow the stealth bombers global reach. This is how they fly from the USA to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, and how an air strike into Iran would be propagated, enabled. The folly of this kind of armament capability is that, once the initial air strikes have been made, we as a nation have no clue about what to do afterward. We take no responsibility for the aftermath. There is no sense of restraint.
This weapon is more dangerous because of the rapid response capability it gives the president, without due consideration to congressional oversight into aggressive militarism, not to mention the absurd costs of the stealth bombers added onto the cost of the new tankers. They and the bombers should be made illegal as weapons of mass destruction. We need defensive capability and co-operative international military capability, not this over-reach into the world with its potential for catastrophe.
( e-letter i sent to The Nation, http://www.thenation.com/bletters/20080421/noted )