Word: bomber
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Some folks say the B-2 STEALTH BOMBER is worth its weight in gold, but that's not true: it is now worth three times that, thanks to defense cutbacks. The Air Force says the aircraft cost $44.4 billion to develop. The Pentagon originally planned to build about 130 but has scaled its orders back to 20, or a cool $2.2 billion apiece. And costs may rise, since the Air Force is having trouble getting the much vaunted Stealth radar-evading technology to work properly...
...come to pieces so fast if it had not been essentially hollow? Had we been scaring ourselves with bogeys? The evidence is very strong that the "window of vulnerability" that Reagan armed us against was as false an alarm as the missile gap in Kennedy's day and the bomber gap in Eisenhower's. Had we outspent not only our enemy but also ourselves in battle with a phantom, becoming a debtor nation to accomplish a victory without spoils...
Even his one venture on a grand scale was essentially retrospective in nature. Bush early on identified Saddam Hussein as the new Hitler, and he waged World War II against him, recapturing the exhilaration (and the values) of his heroic bomber-pilot days. The Patriot missile was celebrated as if it were the product of some modern Los Alamos. Bush visited the factory for a rally that resembled his trips to flag factories in the 1988 campaign. The Allies were invoked as they had been against the Axis. When victory came in Kuwait, Bush presumed that V-K day would...
Among the first to be verified was F-4D fighter-bomber pilot Lieut. Colonel Joseph Morrison, shot down on Nov. 25, 1968. He died after he parachuted safely to the ground. But the F-4D is a two-seat aircraft, and Pentagon analysts noted one photo of Morrison's personal effects showed an extra pistol; this led them to confirm the death of his back-seater San D. Francisco. Intelligence analysts now expect that the Hanoi museum material already in hand may clear up 23 of the 135 so-called discrepancy cases, where the U.S. knows an individual survived...
...FORCE. Though the Gulf War demonstrated that modern air power can win wars, this high-tech service will also have to cut back. It is being forced to scale down its ambitious plans for the B-2 Stealth bomber and settle for the 20 planes currently programmed, probably excessively, at a staggering $2.3 billion apiece rather than the 132 that the service originally wanted. ! Similarly, the Air Force will have to face reality on its warplane of the future, the F-22: the Pentagon's request to buy 648 of them for as much as $95 billion beginning...