A new Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment monograph suggests that the Air Force should cut in half its buy of F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighters to pay for the kind of force the service will need by 2028. Author Thomas Ehrhard, now special assistant to the Chief of Staff, believes the service will need the money it saves for other higher priorities like a B-3 bomber. Ehrhard considers the F-35 a “middle-weight” aircraft that lacks the capability to meet high-end challenges and that “is over-specified and overpriced for low-end challenges.” The B-3, on the other hand, will be “a critical and indispensible element … for decades to come,” Ehrhard writes. He advocates buying more than 100 at a rate of 12 per year, starting with a manned version but progressing to unmanned “to turn it into a truly global surveillance-strike asset.”
U.S. Southern Command recently announced its first lethal strike on a suspected narco-trafficking vessel in two months, and the first under a newly formed permanent counter-cartel task force. The U.S. is also reportedly planning to transfer MQ-9 drones to Colombia to bolster its counter-cartel efforts.