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To: Trey McAtee who wrote (4339)	1/20/1999 3:24:00 PM
From: HairBall	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 99985

Trey: OT Well, you show up here ever so often and pass through like a mini tornado...<g> Regards, LG

To: Trey McAtee who wrote (4339)	1/20/1999 10:34:00 PM
From: Lee Lichterman III	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 99985

OT >>well, reagan had to pay for all those neat DoD toys somehow<< While everyone is entitled to an opinion I take offense to the public view that the military has too much spent on them. Go to a B-52 base near you some time and see if you can talk the NDI lab into showing you the X-rays of the wings on some of our bombers. The politics is what ruins the military. According to some of the Boeing engineers, they are totally surprised that there aren't airplanes having the wings falling off and raining down on cities everyday yet we can't get money to fix them. The B-1B is a total waste of money yet it gets 99% of the bomber budget every year so they can try to fix the same problems that were there 14 years ago. Our state of the art bomber is farther behind the power curve than the 50 year old airplane it was designed to replace. It will never work the way it needs to due to the inherent design flaws that make modification impossible. Mean while the B-52 can be modified to do anything with some bailing wire and chewing gum. Will we fix the B-52, no because Boeing is the sole contractor and that doesn't bring money into the other 49 states districts. Meanwhile the totaly useless B-1 has parts made in 48 states so every year we redesign and rebuild more parts that don't fit or work as intended but it creates work that makes the home crowd feel warm and fuzzy. Notice that while Clinton was singing praise about how B-1 finally got to a combat zone after missing out on the first 4 airstrikes over the last 14 years (because there were people actually shooting back in those) he failed to mention that the B-1 was the only plane that dropped "dumb bombs" because it is also the only plane still in the inventory that can't drop anything newer than the WWII technology. The B-1 did drop a few ALCMs in controlled tests at test ranges but we can't talk about how rotten that went. <ng> After 14 years on the ramp, I now work in an Analysis office where we crunch huge numbers for reports etc. We work on Pentium 75s and 133s with 14" monitors and had 16 RAM until we cashed in enough aluminum cans to buy RAM. The reason we have to pay $20 for a screwdriver that breaks off every time we try to use it isn't because the military wants to over spend for useless stuff. It is because some politician made the contract go to his/her home district so he could get votes. I will probably get court martialled for this but here at Mountain Home, we moved the B-1s out here 2 years before the base was even ready. There were no hangars, engine facilities etc for us to be here but Micron wanted to expand and JR Simplot needed a work force. (He is a very very rich man and owns most of Boise Idaho). Therefor Senator Kempthorne said we would move and we would move here immediatelly. The Air Force said no, guess what, we were told we were moving and if anyone said other wise, we would disappear. Guess where I am writing this from since arriving here 2 years ago? I love it here as my last base was not near civilization but as far as the defense of the country and cost saving, Yeah right. We have to truck engines from Idaho to South Dakota just so they can test them tehn truck them back. We Fed X avionics boxes back and forth. My housing had crack in the walls, there were times in Maine when it was 100 below outside and the heat shut down, the list could go on forever with what the military needs but if it doesn't create jobs in the strongest Senators or house Reps districts, we don't get it. We only get more of what we don't need and what won't help us save lives. This is too long and I am venting so.. Don't blame the military or the Presidents for military spending. Blame your congressmen and teh press for how they spin it. Believe nothing you hear and only half of what you see. Lee