(Click on Image to Enlarge)
Ike’s Arsenal Eisenhower poured money into the Air Force to develop its Cold War triad of nuclear threats—land-based and sea-based missiles, ICBMs and bombers. The heavy spending didn’t let up under JFK. | Reagan’s Build-Up Claiming that the United States had “unilaterally disarmed” before he took office, Reagan oversaw a massive defense build-up. Some say the the Soviet Union’s struggle to keep up brought on its demise. | Bush’s Surge The historic peak of Army spending authority came during two land wars—in Afghanistan and in Iraq, where the military was in the midst of a 30,000-strong troop surge. Source: Department Of Defense, Budget Authority by Branch
Mark Perry, Politico: The Pentagon’s Fight Over Fighting China
The Joint Chiefs keep ordering up ambitious new war plans. But their biggest battle might be with each other.
At first, it’s hard to see Operation Desert Storm as anything less than an unparalleled American military victory. The battleship U.S.S. Missouri began the campaign to forcibly remove Iraqi forces from Kuwait by firing four Tomahawk cruise missiles at military command and control centers in Baghdad in the early morning hours of January 17, 1991. “I’ll never forget the day we launched these,” a Missouri crew member who witnessed the Tomahawk attack later wrote. “We listened to CNN radio from Baghdad after we had launched our birds. For an hour, everything was calm, but we knew sorties were on the way. Then all hell broke loose.”
In all, the United States fired 297 Tomahawk missiles from ships and submarines during the Gulf War, of which 282 reached and destroyed their targets. Nine of the missiles failed to fire, six fell into the water after their launch, and two were shot down. The Tomahawks’ carefully tabulated success rate of 94.94 percent was revolutionary, the most precise delivery of munitions on target in the history of warfare. And the Tomahawks were just one of an array of air assets used in the war’s earliest days to destroy Iraq’s military and leadership infrastructure.
WNU Editor: This is a long read, but it gives an insight into how Pentagon planners go about planning to fight the next war.