Secretary of Defense Gates is finally ready to announce his plans for the defense budget to president Obama and it’s sure to ruffle feathers on both sides of the aisle.

Among other things, Gates will recommend a halt to production of the F-22 fighter jet at 187 aircraft. Meanwhile he wants to speed-up production of the F-35 fighter jet which will eventually total 2,443 aircraft at a total price tag of around 1 trillion dollars.

I’m usually suspect of democrat administrations trying to cut military budgets, but I trust Gates to do the right thing. I think it’s an outrage that contractors like Boeing have gotten away with stealing the government blind with absurd cost overruns. The Pentagon has been in dire need of a revised procurement process for getting new weapon systems.

I agree with Gates that too many top brass at DOD are still stuck in a cold war mentality. We don’t need a shit load of new battle tanks or other conventional land based war machines.

Conventional warfare involving tank battles with uniformed armies are largely a thing of the past. We must always be prepared for that just in case, but we need to look forward and equip ourselves to better fight unconventional guerrilla conflicts.

Low Intensity conflicts in the Middle East and Africa is what the U.S. will be involved with for at least the next couple of decades.

It’s absolutely critical that America maintains military superiority over the rest of the world and whatever it costs to do that we should spend. However, there is no reason to waste hundreds of billions of dollars on weapons we don’t need, weapons that don’t work, and weapons that cost 5x what contractors promised they would.