a.  Increased inexpensive threats. 

  - Cheap hand-held anti-aircraft missiles are rapidly proliferating; have been, for years.  Three decades ago, when still expensive & reasonably controlled, these hand-held anti-air missiles spelled the end of Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.  Today, F-15s, F-16s, & even titanium-bathtub A-10s, are actually increasingly vulnerable to decreasingly expensive hand-held anti-air missiles. Surrendering control of the air is not an option, not for winning a war.  

 - Current accounting for threats. Currently, our aircraft (fighters, bombers, cargo, etc) cannot fly low-altitude combat patterns without significant risk… including taking off for a mission, and coming down to land at the end of a mission. The trade-off? Increased air-to-ground distance, from high altitude, makes many specific combat situations more difficult to prosecute and/or survive.

  - Vulnerable, how? Our current fleet has few F-22s, relying mostly on aging 1970s-technology fighters.  Anti-aircraft defenses have matured over time.  F-15s, F-16s, & A-10s are metallic (with radar vulnerability) and unducted (with heat-seeking vulnerability). The vulnerabilities necessitate pilot distractions from mission, to actions needed merely to stay alive.  The flight environment is probably OK, for now, though certainly it’s not optimal.  Certainly, the environment will NOT be OK in another decade.

b.  But the F-22 (and F-35) would be essentially immune. 

  - Stealth technology operates against both radar and heat-seeking guidance systems, even if low-flying planes wisely employ simple countermeasures. (It’s foolish to forsake relatively inexpensive ‘countermeasures insurance’, just like it was foolish to forsake ‘insurance’ guns on 1^st-generation missile-armed jets!)

  - Even now, F-22’s & F-35’s non-metallic construction are inherent defenses combating ground fire … they don’t reflect well on radar-guidance systems! 

  - It seems that both the F-22 & F-35 have stealth-standard exhaust ducting that ‘cools’ exhaust enough to give heat-seeking missiles considerable trouble. 

Dear Presidential Hopefuls:

A President Obama scares me. I spent twenty years in uniform to fight socialists – violent revolutionaries bent on government control & power in the name of Worker’s Paradise. That was two decades of my life to fight these enemies, whether foreign or domestic. 

But a President McCain doesn’t inspire me, and hardly even reassures me. Frankly, a political history like his is one of appeasing liberals on their pet issues, while not even achieving quid-pro-quo from them.  His ilk have not been political champions in the fight against socialist revolution, especially not against their political usurpations within our own borders. Even in this 2008 election, Sen McCain's ilk have proved wimps when disavowing state-level political ads that dared to tell the unvarnished truth about opponents; they were concentrating on cream-puff ads. We will see if recent changes in Sen McCain's ad styles remain, and we will see how he heals with damage caused by prior disavowals & distancings.

Yes, I want “change”.  But I want change the opposite direction from which Republicans & Democrats alike have been going in the last five years. I like a stand against earmarks. But that doesn't go far enough. I want change of the kind that boldly proclaims, and ACTS, to get the Federal government smaller overall. I want change that refocuses the Federal government from wealth-redistribution to governmental chores that equally benefit all citizens: national defense (including military, border, and strategic materials), internal infrastructure (interstate roads, rails, bridges), space exploration (with environment favorable not just to NASA), international trade agreements (especially to account for foreign governmental subsidies and slave-labor), parental freedom to raise & educate their own children, the constitutional right of ALL men to live from conception to natural death (unless one proves to be an uncontrollable menace to others’ right to live), and a judicial system that actually punishes offenders (so they never want to come back to jail/prison).