(Fred Weinberg) – Every year—even during the anti-military administration of Barack Obama—we open our most highly classified military installations to the folks who pay for them so we can have a good old fashioned air show.
It seems fair since we invented the airplane.
Last week it was Nellis Air Force base, Fightertown USA, the home of the Air Warfare Center.
Among the 200,000 or so folks who showed up I certainly hope was a representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran and their nutjob President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And if we are really lucky, some of his friends from Hamas, Hezbollah the PLA and Al Qaeda.
If they were there, here’s what they would have to report to President Nutjob:
“The Americans have a plane that cannot be seen or heard until it launches an attack which can wipe out any facility we can build. They call it the F-22 and only America has both the technology and the wealth to produce such a weapon.
“What’s worse is that any of their planes—from the World War Two B-25 to the F-22—is much better than anything we have.
“And they are not afraid to show it off to 200,000 people because they know we can’t build anything like it because our best engineers live in the United states where they fled when we took over the country in 1979.”
On the cover of this issue is a shot of the F-22 with its weapons bay doors open.
Just five years ago, the Air Force was doing operational testing and evaluation of the plane at Nellis and asked us not to shoot pictures of the plane with its bays open.
Now, they fly the plane over a crowd of 200,000 people, many with sophisticated photo gear, with the doors proudly open.
If our Islamo-fascist enemies could understand logic, they would understand that the Air Force is sending a message.
The message is that we as a people really don’t care what they know about our weapons systems because should they or the North Koreans put us into the position to have to disarm them of their nuclear fantasies, we can do it with just one of these planes and they’ll never see it coming.
The truth is that our current President and his administration would have liked this particular airplane to have never been built.
There is no question it is an extremely expensive weapon system and the planes it will replace are still very potent against enemies such as Iran and North Korea—largely because neither nation has much of an air force or the ability to develop one.
But the assumption that we may never have to fight a conventional war against aircraft built by Russia or China may be faulty.
Under those circumstances, not having the best air superiority platform in the world would be a big and costly mistake. Much more costly than the cost of the F-22 program.
Simply put, the F-22 is just another example of American Exceptionalism.
As is the concept of throwing open to the world our most closely held secrets.
(Mr. Weinberg publishes the Penny Press Weekly)