It has been almost 90 days since General McChrystal asked Barack Obama for more troops. No decision has been made. The General still waits as our soldiers keep dying.

But that might actually be a better alternative to any decision Obama might make.

As awful as that sounds, new information is proving Barack Obama’s got his first major military decision disastrously wrong and the repercussions to our national security will be far reaching in light of China’s growing aggressiveness.

Back up to January. Barack Obama had just been sworn in to office and the Pentagon then began reviewing whether the F-22 Raptor program should get more funding. Despite lots of talk about saving and creating jobs, the Obama administration nudged Defense Secretary Robert Gates to kill the F-22, an advanced stealth fighter for which no nation has put up a competing system.

In April, Robert Gates said he intended to kill the program. In July, Senators tried to keep the funding alive citing threats from China. But, Barack Obama’s administration said those threats were overestimated and Obama threatened to veto the entire defense budget if F-22 funding were left in.

Gates said Monday he’d heard no “substantive” argument for keeping the jet for national security reasons, pointing out that China has no planes that can compete with the more than 1,000 advanced fighter jets the U.S. will have by 2020.

Gates said that the gap between the two countries’ aerial arsenals will only widen.

Unfortunately for the United States military, that turns out to be flat out wrong.

According to Aviation Week, China not only is building a 5th generation fighter to compete with the F-22, but they’ll begin testing it this year.

Beijing’s fighter announcement suggests a serious failing in U.S. intelligence assessments, mocking a July 16 statement of U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates that China would have no fifth-generation fighters by 2020.

Note that China announced this while Obama was in China sucking up to them.

There’s a nice little piece over in today’s Wall Street Journal authored by General Merrill McPeak, expressing his dismay at the premature termination of the build-out of the originally-planned fleet of the F-22 Raptor - the kick-*ss air-superiority fighter pictured above.

The piece is rather good, so I’ll let you go read the whole thing via the link.

I’ll just note a couple of things here:

The future air combat capabilities we should build are based on the F-22, a stealthy, fast, maneuverable fighter that is unmatched by any known or projected combat aircraft.

….

It’s been more than half a century since any American soldier or Marine has been killed, or even wounded, by hostile aircraft….

That first item is simply a statement of fact, while the second is a truly-astonishing description of an unparalleled military achievement.

But there’s a kicker at the end of this piece, which we’ll note below the fold….

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Although it has yet to see combat in the air, the F-22 Raptor air superiority fighter is the object of an intense dogfight on Capitol Hill. The debate has made for some strange bedfellows. On one side, there are the antis - the Pentagon, Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin and Sen. John McCain among them - who want to wrap the program up and shut down the production line. One the other, the pros - Sen. Saxby Chambliss, Sen. Chris Dodd and the Air Force Association - who want to see more of the advanced fighters built.

The Raptor is beyond impressive:

The F-22, which entered service three years ago, blends key technologies that formerly existed only separately on other aircraft - or not at all. Its stealthiness will make trigger-happy combatants shoot at birds. It has agility, air-to-air combat abilities and penetrability far beyond that of the F-15 Eagle which entered service 33 years ago. It cruises at Mach-plus speeds without using fuel-guzzling afterburners.

No other fighter on the planet can touch it. So what’s the problem?

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President Obama and defense secretary Gates are still determining whether to end production, 183 planes in, of the F-22 Raptor, the world’s most advanced Air Superiority fighter. The rationale of those who are advocating cutting off the program is as simple as it is misguided: a belief that “the fighter, conceived in the Cold War, is a vastly expensive and over-capable weapon irrelevant to current threats.”

As several observers have pointed out in recent years, the global threats America faces now and is likely to face in the future demand that we do not declare ourselves technologically advanced and capable “enough,” and proceed to rest on our laurels until an opponent engages us in another Cold War-type development-for-development tech and arms race.

For evidence that resting on our laurels on national defense is the last thing we should be doing, we need look no further than the recent actions of our old Cold War adversary, which, in an effort to make itself internationally relevant again (and to take advantage of a president who has sent, in his first two months in office, the strong signal that he is hopelessly in over his head on policy, both domestic and foreign), is replicating its 1980s efforts to expand both influence and footholds into the Western hemisphere.

Back then, a strong president rebuffed the Soviet Union’s attempted advances into the American half of the world (and, ultimately, drove the USSR to destruction). Now, though, we appear to lack the strong, principled, intelligent leadership that we had during the 1980s — a fact that makes it all the more important that we have the best tools of national defense available.

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