from CDI

Two weeks ago, with help from combat aviation innovator and designer Pierre Sprey, I circulated a piece about the self-dismembering F-35 program.  More recently, I submitted a revised and updated version to Military.com, but even before the editors there had a chance to run the piece, the F-35 disemboweled itself some more.  While reports two weeks ago had the new estimate for cost overruns to be “as bad” as those the program’s uniquely qualified Joint Estimating Team (JET) found in 2008, newer reports state them to be perceptibly worse and that nothing has happened to fix the problems identified last year.  Also, new doubts about the program have emerged with another foreign partner (Denmark), and today we are told by an Inside the Navy article that  “the test article of the Marine Corps’ short-take-off, vertical-landing variant of the JSF — has once again been delayed until December due to poor weather, Kent (John Kent, Lockheed Martin spokesman) said.”  That would give a new meaning to the term “all weather fighter aircraft” – that is, a fighter that cannot fly in all, rather any, weather.

Cutting edge, indeed.

At least as interesting is the reaction to the – unsurprising – unraveling of the program by Pentagon management.  The JET report is described inside the Pentagon as “radio active” – and management as desperate to find a way out of the new numbers, which – by the way – the QDR’s experts on aviation have apparently decided to ignore.  Some are now suggesting inside the building that the JET analysis should be whittled down to something that top management finds more (politically) acceptable.

Pray tell: all this shows that the Pentagon has changed its stripes and is reforming exactly how?

“Tactical Air’s Gloomy Future” was first published by Military.com on Nov. 9, 2009. It is reproduced below.

“Tactical Air’s Gloomy Future”

by Winslow Wheeler

The Defense Authorization bill just signed into law by President Obama pretends a bright future for the Pentagon’s Joint Strike Fighter.  The program is fully funded, and Congress even added separate authority for the alternate GE engine, advice sure to be taken when the definitive DOD Appropriations bill is enacted later this year.  Meanwhile, in the real world, the F-35 program continues to fall apart.  The latest – but hardly last – shoe to drop is a new internal analysis (breathlessly refuted by Lockheed) that the cost growth stage for this airplane is just beginning.

Lockheed’s refutation of the Joint Estimating Team (JET) analysis of cost growth and delays in the F-35 program borders on the hilarious: new computer aided design, simulation, and desk studies (un-validated by empirical testing) make cost growth in truly modern defense technology a thing of the past, they assert.  Indeed, just like in DDG-1000, LCS, FCS, VH-71, etc., etc., etc…..

How pathetic.

Even sadder than Lockheed’s desperate grasp for reasons to do nothing to fix the self-dismembering F-35 program is the fact that the future of Western combat aviation relies on it.  The 2,456 models of it on order for the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps will ultimately replace almost all tactical aircraft now in our inventory, except for the F-22, for which production beyond 187 aircraft was cancelled this past summer.  Major allies, including Britain and much of the rest of Western Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, and Israel have all made commitments to buy the aircraft.  Sales to many others (there’s a long list) are postulated, and those who do not intend to buy the F-35 will probably copy it to the extent their treasuries, government bureaucracies, and technological development permit.

Unfortunately, the F-35 is unaffordable, and it is a technological kluge that will be less effective than airplanes it replaces. It will undo our air forces and our allies’, not help them.

Few agree now, but in time the finger pointing will start. That’s when someone will have to pick up the pieces to give our pilots a war winning aircraft.  The road between here and there will be neither smooth, pretty, nor short, but it is time to take the first step.

A financial disaster?  Impossible.  Visiting the F-35 plant in Fort Worth, Texas last August, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates assured us that the F-35 will be “less than half the price … of the F-22.”

Technically, Gates is right – for now.  At a breathtaking $65 billion for 187 aircraft, the F-22 consumes $350 million for each plane.  At $299 billion for 2,456, the F-35 would seem a bargain at $122 million each.

However, F-35 unit cost has barely begun to will climb.  In 2001, the Pentagon had planned to buy 2,866 aircraft for $226.5 billion – $79 million per airplane.  In 2007, that unit cost increased to $122 million, thanks to more cost and fewer airplanes being planned.

In the next few weeks, the program will have to admit to another increase.  Gates and Deputy Secretary William Lynn have re-convened a “Joint Estimating Team” (JET) to reassess F-35 cost and schedule.  Last year, while a part of the Bush administration, Gates basically ignored the Team’s recommendations, but the new JET is about to reconfirm them: the F-35 program will cost up to $15 billion more, and it will be delivered about two years late, and there are rumors the JET’s findings may even be worse.

Moreover, those address only the known problems.  With F-35 flight testing barely three percent complete, new problems – and big new costs – are sure to emerge.  Worse, only 17 percent of the aircraft’s characteristics will be validated by flight testing by the time the Pentagon has signed contracts for more than 500 aircraft.  Operational squadron pilots will have the thrill of discovering the remaining glitches, in training or in combat.  No one should be surprised if the final F-35 total program unit cost reaches $200 million per aircraft after all the fixes are paid for.

This kluge is not “affordable,” either.  The latest version of the F-16, heavily laden with complex electronics and other expensive modifications, costs about $60 million, twice its original price – in today’s dollars.  The A-10, which the F-35 will also replace, cost about $15 million in today’s dollars.  Thus, to replace the almost 4,000 F-16s and A-10s built with just over 1,700 F-35s, the Air Force will have to pay far more to buy less than half as many airplanes.

In an age when the Air Force budget looks to increase only marginally, if at all, while simultaneously planning to buy several other major aircraft (new aerial tankers, new transports, new heavy bombers, and new helicopters), the plan to distend the fighter-bomber budget is a pipe dream.

While most, but not all, in the Pentagon and Congress remain oblivious to the unaffordability of the F-35, some of its foreign buyers are becoming horrified.  Despite their governments’ investment of hundreds of millions, parliamentarians and analysts in Australia, Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands are expressing real concerns. The F-35′s single largest international partner is the United Kingdom.  There, the Royal Navy and Air Force have just decided to reduce their F-35 buy from 138 aircraft to 50.  The reason: “We are waking up to the fact that all those planes are unaffordable.”

The problems with the F-35 are not limited to its cost.

As a fighter, the F-35 depends on a technological fantasy.  Having failed to develop in the 1950s, the 1960s, and the 1970s an effective (and reliable) radar-based technology to shoot down enemy (not friendly) aircraft “beyond visual range,” the Air Force is trying yet again with the F-35, like the F-22 before it.  Both have the added development of “stealth” (less detectability against some radars at some angles), but that new “high tech” feature and the long range radar have imposed design penalties that compromised the aircraft with not just high cost but also weight, drag, complexity, and vulnerabilities.  The few times this technology has been tried in real air combat in the past decade, it has been successful less than half the time, and that has been against incompetent and/or primitively equipped pilots from Iraq and Serbia.

If the latest iteration of “beyond visual range” turns out to be yet another chimera, the F-35 will have to operate as a close-in dogfighter, but in that regime it is a dog.  If one accepts every aerodynamic promise DOD currently makes for it, the F-35 will be overweight and underpowered.  At 49,500 pounds in air-to-air take-off weight with an engine rated at 42,000 pounds of thrust, it will be a significant step backward in thrust-to-weight and acceleration for a new fighter. In fact, at that weight and with just 460 square feet of wing area for the Air Force and Marine Corps versions, the F-35′s small wings will be loaded with 108 pounds for every square foot, one third worse than the F-16A. (Wings that are large relative to weight are crucial for maneuvering and surviving in combat.) The F-35 is, in fact, considerably less maneuverable than the appallingly vulnerable F-105 “Lead Sled,” a fighter that proved helpless in dogfights against MiGs over North Vietnam. (A chilling note: most of the Air Force’s fleet of F-105s was lost in four years of bombing; one hundred pilots were lost in just six months.)

Nor is the F-35 a first class bomber for all that cost: in its stealthy mode it carries only a 4,000 pound payload, one third the 12,000 pounds carried by the “Lead Sled.”

As a “close air support” ground-attack aircraft to help US troops engaged in combat, the F-35 is too fast to identify the targets it is shooting at; too delicate and flammable to withstand ground fire, and too short-legged to loiter usefully over embattled US ground units for sustained periods.  It is a giant step backward from the current A-10.
It is time to start fixing this mess.  Needless to say, the complexities of Pentagon procurement regulations and especially the circle-the-wagons mentality of the Pentagon and Congress present serious hurdles to be overcome, most of them ethical.

First is the need is to accept the facts as they exist, rather than as Lockheed and self-interested bureaucrats in the Pentagon would prefer them to be.  That will mean accepting the JET recommendations as currently written – not watering them down to make them palatable, or ignoring them as they were in 2008 under Gates’ first term as SecDef.

Let’s watch closely and see if the original JET findings are watered down by Deputy Secretary Lynn or others who helped to father the Joint Strike Fighter in the Clinton Administration, or others, such as Acquisition Czar Ashton Cater, who will have to re-jigger the Air Force’s entire long range budget to accommodate more F-35 cost.  His having been forthright about underhanded Air Force behavior on the F-22, perhaps we can hope that Gates will insist on ethical behavior on the F-35.  We shall see.

Comparing the original JET findings with whatever comes out the other end should be easy.  The details of the study were reported by Jason Sherman at InsideDefense.com; other outsiders are familiar with just what is in the JET analysis, and quick reaction professionals like Colin Clark at DODBuzz will surely have a field day if top Pentagon management tries to fudge what’s in the JET study.  The glare of public understanding is always a good way to appeal to the patriotism of top Pentagon management.

In addition to listening to the facts, we will need to exercise the professed spirit of the new Weapon System Acquisition Act, signed into law by President Obama last May.  While the fine print of the new law is hopelessly riddled with loopholes to protect business as usual, the bill purports to control costs and inspire competition, especially the “fly-before-buy” competitive approach that has worked so marvelously well the few times it’s been tried.

This is the same vision that President Obama expressed to the VFW in Phoenix last August when he said he wanted to stop “the special interests and their exotic projects that are years behind schedule and billions over budget.”  Clearly, no one has told the President that the F-35 is a leading poster child for those evils.

Finally, the biggest step, would be to suspend further F-35 production until the test aircraft, all of them now funded, can complete a revised, much more thorough flight test schedule.  Once we know the F-35′s realistically demonstrated performance and problems, and the full extent of its costs, we can make an informed decision whether to put it into full production. To do that, the upside down F-35 acquisition plan — which buys 500 aircraft before the “definitive” test report (the one that only flight tests 17 percent of F-35 characteristics) is on Gates’ desk — needs to be radically recast into real fly-before-buy plan.  Just the kind of plan the new Acquisition Reform Act pretends to advocate.

In the almost certain event that the F-35 is found by uncompromised, realistic testing to be an unaffordable loser, there are viable alternatives.  If an active consensus develops to reverse the current aging and shrinking of the existing tactical aviation inventory (as opposed to today’s silent conspiracy encouraging those trends to worsen), a short term, affordable fix to restore combat adequacy is needed: Extend the life of existing F-16 and A-10 airframes for the Air Force and continue purchasing F-18E/F aircraft for the Navy and Marine Corps. For the part of the inventory that most urgently needs immediate expansion, the A-10 and the close support mission, hundreds of airframes now sitting in the “boneyard” can and should be refurbished – something that can be done at extraordinarily modest cost.

Just a life-extension program will not address long term needs.  Accordingly, competitive prototype fly off programs should be immediately initiated to develop and select new fighters to build a larger force that is far more combat-effective than existing the F-16s, F-18s, and A-10s.  Just such programs — that lead to an astonishing 10,000 plane Air Force within current budget levels — are described in detail in “Reversing the Decay in American Air Power,” a chapter in the anthology America’s Defense Meltdown: Pentagon Reform for President Obama and the New Congress (Stamford University Press).

You can almost literally hear the howls of protest right now. The F-35 is too big to fail.  Gates himself seems trapped by that logic; he said “My view is we cannot afford as a nation not to have this airplane.”  We take the opposite view. The F-35′s bloat — in cost, leaden weight, and mindless complexity — guarantees failure. It will shrink our air forces at increased cost, rot their ability to prevail in the air and support our ground forces, and will needlessly spill the blood of far too many of our pilots.

We have to take the first steps to better understand the extent of the F-35 disaster and to reverse the continuing decay in our air forces.

After decades of waiting, and after the bulk of the expense necessary to develop both the B-2 and F-22 has long since been spent, these programs have now been cancelled at token procurement levels.

When war with the Chinese comes, the U.S. military will have but 80 or 90 available F-22s and, perhaps, 18 B-2s with which to suppress the massive Chinese air defense system.

All remaining U.S. aircraft — the legacy, or teen series, fighters and the F-35 — will not be able to operate in sufficient proximity to the Chinese S-300/400 air defense missile to pose a threat to that system. With the S-400 Triumf system operational, all U.S. air opera-tions will then remain at risk throughout the duration of any conflict with the Chinese.

Given China’s immense advantage in manpower and great depth in conventional armament, a secure airspace above these assets may portend a stalemate, at best, in any war between that nation and the U.S. The aftermath of such a standoff is the likely reduction of the U.S. military to the status of a second-rate power, a circumstance that will pave the way for strategic blackmail against the U.S. and its interests in the Pacific and, eventually, in the Western Hemisphere.

It is hard to imagine that these consequences escaped the authors of the F-22 program’s demise, circa July ’09.

This programmatic, premeditated build-down of our strategic capabilities should be called treason.

The cancellation of the F-22 is also timed to preempt any further efforts by the Japanese and Australians to buy the aircraft. The whole point is obviously to abort the Raptor, regardless of who is willing to pay for it.

Objections over the cost of the aircraft, which will, in time, be almost indistinguishable from that of the F-35, are only a ruse. The vital issue, now accomplished by our internationalist-dominated Federal Legislature and President, is the elimination of the F-22 from any future Pacific war zone.

All this is indicia of a globalist agenda to effect a power shift. The F-35 program, sold as a substitute for the F-22 and allegedly a much more intelligent investment because it is better for bombing Mujahedeen, may prove its greatest value as a slight-of-hand trick to cover this retrograde move in the quality of American airpower.

Lacking super-cruise capability, all-aspect stealth or a 60,000 ft. operating altitude, the F-35 is a “5th generation aircraft” only in terms of its sophisticated avionics suite, a set of marvels mostly related to its tactical bombing function. Its performance limitations and high wing loading mean it cannot disengage at will from even current threats such as the Sukhoi Su-30.

Do not buy the proposition, made by many defenders of the F-22′s axing, to the effect that sub-launched cruise missiles and unmanned air vehicles will handily suppress Chinese air defenses. The UCAV programs are not of the scale of a replacement fighter aircraft, and both the UCAV and the cruise missile depend on intact satellite communications… something the Chinese can reliably deny the U.S. in time of war.

-Dale Williams

Related reading:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2009/07/a_good_day_for_the_chicoms.asp

This is also a very good day for the ChiComs: less for them to worry about, not only from us but from the Japanese (this pretty much kills export of F-22). And it is a big step in confirming the long-term decline of US defenses that the Obama budget/program represents. Even if much/most of his domestic program doesn’t make it, he’s begun locking in yet another decade of defense neglect.
There will soon be a crisis of American airpower: old F-15 and F-16s, aging F-18s and not enough of them to fill carrier decks, too few F-22s (that you’re going to be very reluctant to use) and late arriving (and limited) F-35s (and what’s the likelihood that F-35 goes forward according to plan?), plus a dinky and old bomber fleet. I haven’t worked out the numbers, but if you look forward 7-10 years, the picture has got to be very ugly.
But then again, since there are going to be no tankers, it doesn’t matter that there are no fighters.

http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?p=4298309

Quote:

Originally Posted by Elbs I agree. The full capabilities of the F-22 has to be taken into concept. It’s more than a beast of an air superiority fighter. Like it’s mentioned, the newer Russian air defense systems are very long ranged and could place most of the USAF legacy SEAD platforms at risk, and they’re available to anyone with cash to blow. I wouldn’t want to be the F-16 jock who has to fly into an S-400/S-300 threat envelope to fire a HARM down it’s throat. I believe it’d be much safer to kill or suppress that SAM with a long-range JDAM or an SDB with a folding-wing kit, dropped from an F-22.

Investor’s Business Daily, BLNZ

Defense Spending: The TARP bailout may hit $24 trillion, but the Senate says the F-22 is too expensive to build and maintain. So why are the Japanese so desperate to buy this “unnecessary” Cold War weapon?

By a vote of 58-40, the Senate on Tuesday voted to remove $1.75 billion set aside in a defense bill to build seven more F-22 Raptors, adding to the 187 stealth technology fighters already in the pipeline.

After some hope the production lines would be kept open, the Senate succumbed to arguments by the administration and others that the fighter was too expensive, too hard to maintain and not built for the wars America is fighting these days.

President Obama welcomed the Senate vote, saying he rejected the notion that the country has to “waste billions of taxpayers dollars” on outdated defense projects.

Well, the inspector general in charge of overseeing the Treasury Department’s bank-bailout program now says the massive endeavor could end up costing taxpayers almost $24 trillion in a worst-case scenario. Yet we can’t afford to build just seven more F-22s?

Keeping the F-22 production lines open would be a real stimulus saving real jobs. Lockheed Martin, the main contractor, says 25,000 people are directly employed in building the plane, and another 70,000 have indirect links, particularly in Georgia, Texas and California. Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., a supporter of the program, says there are 1,000 suppliers in 44 states. That’s wasteful?

Speaking to the Economic Club of Chicago last Friday, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates repeated his assertion that “the F-22 is clearly a capability we do need — a niche, silver-bullet solution for one or two potential scenarios — specifically the defeat of a highly advanced enemy fighter fleet.”

But the “F-22, to be blunt, does not make much sense anyplace else in the spectrum of conflict,” he added.

Air dominance is not a “niche scenario,” and while we’re lucky the Taliban does not have an Air Force, other potential opponents do. It would prove quite useful over the skies of North Korea, if necessary, or in thwarting a Chinese threat in the Taiwan Straits. Gates forgets that it was high-tech “Cold War” weapons such as the stealthy F-111A that shattered Saddam Hussein’s air defenses and infrastructure and controlled the skies during Operation Desert Storm in Iraq.

Retired Lt. Gen. Michael M. Dunn, chief executive of the Air Force Association, notes that in last year’s conflict in Georgia, the Raptor was the only aircraft in our inventory that could have penetrated the defended airspace and had a chance of surviving.

The F-22 Raptor is also perhaps the only plane that could evade the sophisticated S-300 surface-to-air missile defense system Russia has contracted to sell Iran. Russia’s S-300 system is “one of the most lethal, if not the most lethal, all-altitude area defense” systems, according to the International Strategy and Assessment Service, a Virginia-based think tank.

Gates and the Pentagon prefer the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. But many believe its lesser abilities have been further compromised by making it a one-size-fits-all aircraft for all services in all conflicts.

Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., in whose state final assembly occurs, says, “The F-35 was designed to operate after F-22s secure the airspace and does not have the inherent altitude and speed advantages to survive every time against peers with counter-electronic measures.”

In an interview with Human Events, Japanese ambassador Ichiro Fujisaki said Tokyo wants F-22s to replace its aging F-4s and F-15s. Japan is facing an increasingly capable and unstable North Korea armed with nuclear weapons and the weapons to carry them. It also confronts a future superpower in China, with which it has territorial disputes.

Japan wants the F-22 to deal with both threats. It will soon have to deal with fifth-generation Chinese fighter aircraft and aircraft carriers to carry them. Japan is wise to prefer the F-22, which can fly 300 to 400 mph faster and two miles higher than the F-35.

We would be too.

by Michael M. Dunn, HumanEvents.com

When it comes to defense planning, this much is constant: It is not possible to predict the future. That’s why we should prepare for a wide range of threats. That, in fact, is the key lesson of Iraq and Afghanistan. The nation over the past few decades largely ignored investing in irregular warfare capabilities because leaders thought we would never engage in it after Vietnam. They were wrong and the country paid for this mistake with tremendous sacrifice.

Failure to acquire the full “moderate-risk” military requirement of 243 F-22s repeats this mistake, just at the other end of the spectrum.

Critics decry the F-22 as a “Cold War weapon,” representing unnecessary overkill for today’s threats. What these detractors fail to realize is that the air dominance we currently enjoy over Iraq and Afghanistan will not always be as easily attained and maintained elsewhere. The rapid proliferation of advanced surface-to-air missiles and other anti-access technology is limiting when and where the vast majority of Air Force aircraft can operate. During last year’s conflict in Georgia, the F-22 was the only fighter aircraft in the Department of Defense inventory that could have penetrated the defended airspace and had a chance of surviving. Considering that air dominance is the precondition for any successful US combat operation, this is a serious problem.

Retired Gen. Merrill McPeak, who was the Air Force chief of staff during the 1991 Operation Desert Storm and who credited air power with winning the war, was the first four-star officer to endorse the one-term senator in his presidential campaign. Now he’s criticizing the president on a key defense decision.

by Rowan Scarborough

The most senior retired military officer to back President Obama’s run for the White House says the president is making a “real mistake” in terminating F-22 production.

Retired Gen. Merrill McPeak, who was the Air Force chief of staff during the 1991 Operation Desert Storm and who credited air power with winning the war, was the first four-star officer to endorse the one-term senator in his presidential campaign. McPeak traveled with Obama to bolster the candidate’s commander-in-chief credentials, much to the chagrin of the general’s fighter pilot colleagues.

But now McPeak is breaking with Obama on the president’s most contentious defense budget decision: ending production of the Air Force’s top-line fighter at 187 aircraft.

“I think it’s a real mistake,” McPeak told FOXNews.com. “The airplane is a game-changer and people seem to forget that we haven’t had any of our soldiers or Marines killed by enemy air since 1951 or something like that. It’s been half a century or more since any enemy aircraft has killed one of guys. So we’ve gotten use to this idea that we never have to breathe hostile air.”

McPeak’s comments come as Obama is in the throes of a major battle with Democrats and Republicans who have voted in committee to fund seven more F-22s.

Obama sent a letter to Congress Monday with a blunt warning.

“I will veto any bill that supports acquisition of F-22s beyond the 187 already funded by Congress,” Obama wrote. “To continue to procure additional F-22s would be to waste valuable resources that should be more usefully employed to provide our troops with the weapons that they actually do need.”

Defense Secretary Robert Gates ramped up the pressure Thursday, attacking Congress for trying to keep the $65 billion program alive.

“If we can’t get this right, what on earth can we get right?” Gates said.

But McPeak said the F-22 has the capability to deter attacks.

“We do not want to field an Armed Forces that can be defeated by someone simply by topping our capability,” he said. “The F-22 is at the top end. We have to procure enough of them for our ability to put a lid on, to dictate the ceiling of any conflict.”

The radar-evading fighter/bomber’s role is to control the skies in a future war against a major foe. McPeak and F-22 backers in Congress say 187 planes are simply not enough to do that job given the fact that some will be needed to train pilots and others will be in regular depot maintenance. That may leave only about 100 planes available for a war.

The Air Force had at one time wanted over 700 F-22s, but eventually lowered the figure to 381, then acceded to the 187 number.

“We certainly need some figure well above 200,” said McPeak. “That worries me because I think it is pennywise and pound foolish to expose us in a way this much smaller number does … That’s taking too much high-end risk.”

Gates defends the termination by saying more money needs to be spent on current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also is increasing production of the multi-service single-engine F-35, a slower aircraft carrying fewer munitions, to augment the F-22. Both planes are to replace the Air Force’s aging fleets of F-15 and F-16 fighters.

Obama and Gates are upping the pressure as pro-F-22 forces seem to be gaining steam in Congress.

Obama has two Senate heavyweights on his side — Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Arizona Sen. John McCain, the panel’s top Republican.

Yet Levin and McCain were unable to defeat an amendment in committee offered by Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., to add seven planes. They will try to kill that provision next week.

In another act of defiance toward the White House on the F-22, Rep. John Murtha’s panel added a down payment in the fiscal 2010 defense bill for 12 more jets.

“I think the F-35 is going to be a good airplane, when we get it,” McPeak said. “It’s just not going to be surprisingly good” like its successor, the F-16. He said the F-35 has been “compromised” in an effort to build versions for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.

McPeak also said he opposes Gate’s decision to retire 200 tactical aircraft, mostly F-16s, over the next year.

“Certainly driven by cost, not driven by the fact that we don’t have lots of work for these guys to do,” he said.

Still, McPeak said he has no second thoughts about backing Obama.

“Barack Obama is doing a tremendous job,” he said. “I think he’s a great president, and has a shot at being put up on Mount Rushmore. … My bitch is with Secretary Gates who I do not think has shown a lot of judgment here on these calls regarding the Air Force budget. … His principal advantage is he is not (former Defense Secretary) Don Rumsfeld. And that virtue can only be played out so long.”