Air Force Resigned to Fewer Planes?
Last week's resignations of Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Michael Moseley were linked publicly to the service's mishandling of nuclear weapons, from unwittingly sending nuclear-armed cruise missiles across the country to shipping nuclear weapons parts to Taiwan by mistake. But as Noah Schactman first noted in a piece on Wired.com, there was much more beneath the surface. The real bones of contention included fights over control of unmanned aerial vehicles, issues over the relevance of the Air Force's flagship F-22 combat aircraft to current wars, and an unauthorized $81 million Air Force ad campaign touting their centrality to said conflicts; in short, bureaucratic turf wars and budgetary politics.
