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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jvbigo who wrote (65702)	8/27/2010 12:00:17 PM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 218195

the economic crisis, which is forcing Western countries to cut expensive military equipment. Robert Gates, America’s defence secretary, has ordered that production of the F-22 should end this year, capping the fleet at 187—a final cull for the Raptor, whose numbers were once supposed to reach about 750. In Europe orders for the Typhoon—a fighter made by Britain, Germany, Italy and Spain—will fall. And on both sides of the Atlantic the rising cost of the stealthy F-35 Joint Strike Fighter means its order book could shrink sharply. On August 9th Mr Gates announced a new set of money-saving measures: among them cutting at least 50 of the 900-plus generals and admirals; eliminating the joint-forces command, which promotes integration among the services; cutting funds for contractors; and reducing staff in Mr Gates’s own office. There are sound military reasons for this internal cost-cutting, especially the need to redirect money to the war in Afghanistan. But Mr Gates knows that after a decade of ever-rising defence spending, “the gusher has been turned off”; now his greatest fear is that defence spending will be cut to curb the budget deficit. His dread is already reality for many European colleagues. This week Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, Germany’s defence minister, said he favoured suspending conscription, with the option of resuming it later, in order to create a “smaller but better and more operational” army that would shrink by a third, to about 165,000. The move is part of Germany’s plan to cut €8.3 billion ($10.5 billion) from the defence budget by 2014. Even Britain, which has the largest European force in Afghanistan, is likely to cut defence spending by 10-20% over the next five years, following an overdue defence review in the autumn. Spain cut defence spending by 9% this year; Italy will chop by 10% next. Less drastically, France is freezing defence expenditure. To Americans, it all looks like a dis-arms race. NATO’s longstanding call for allies to spend at least 2% of GDP on defence has been lost in the clamour over wider public-spending cuts. economist.com