Budget Cuts Force Half of Air Force Bombers to be Grounded

While the US military was busy spending hundreds of billions of dollars developing the barely flyable F-35, they seem to have neglected their fleet of aging aircraft and overworked maintenance crews. According to a recent investigation from Fox News, more than half of the B-1 bombers at one air base can’t fly, and other squadrons are in desperate need of parts. Some maintenance crews have even been forced to scavenge for parts from aircraft housed in museums. After years of constant deployments coupled with recent budget cuts, America’s air power is crumbling.

And this issue isn’t just found in the Air Force. Last month an investigation of the Marine Corps discovered an even more dire situation.

However, the rhetoric in these reports hides the military’s real problem. After all, Fox News is little more than a mouth piece for the government and the military-industrial complex. These institutions are simply using the media to beg for more money, even though the US still has the highest military budget in the world by a wide margin.

The real problem isn’t just money. It’s that our government is still deploying our military all over the world while cutting the budget. They’re asking our military to do more with less funding, when they should be rolling back America’s overseas empire. That, and maybe they shouldn’t have spent rougly a trillion dollars on the F-35, which is more than enough money to keep our current planes in operation, and pay for a more modest next generation aircraft. The wastefulness and imperial ambitions of our government is the real problem.