Robert Farley’s making new allies in his war on the air force, as the service’s top brass decides that this particular historical moment in which the U.S. is fighting two simultaneous wars in which F-22s aren’t useful would be a good opportunity to insist that it needs more money to buy F-22s.

Specifically, they’d like “an extra $20 billion each year over the next five” even though it would be exceedingly odd to make that kind of financial commitment to the service least impacted by current action.

In the Air Force’s defense, I would say that both the point about the aging of the F-15s and the point about the number of F-22s currently on order looking a bit small have some merit to them. But this is an entirely self-generated problem. Instead of finding a cost-effective solution to the problem of aging F-15s — like building new, somewhat upgraded F-15s — the Air Force decided to design an impractically expensive new air superiority fighter. Having done so, the country now can’t afford these planes in the quantity the Air Force deems desirable. It’d be as if the NYPD first insisted that in the future it would only buy cars from Lexus and then wound up puzzled as to why they didn’t have enough cars.

Not my book, though. Instead, check out Alex Rosmiller talking about his book Still Broken, a firsthand account of our whack intelligence system.

(well, hey, why not promote Heads in the Sand, too? gotta keep that PageRank up)

Spencer Ackerman takes note of reports indicating that al-Qaeda is encouraging would-be jihadis to ease off on Iraq (where John McCain wants to keep troops for 100-10,000 years) and instead focus on Pakistan where McCain thinks it would be naive to try to kill them.

Daniel Drezner is not only a blogger, but also the author of such works as The Sanctions Paradox, thus making him an ideal choice for a Megan McArdle podcast about the Cuba embargo and the possibilities for change in a post-Castro era.

John McCain makes no new taxes pledge, also promises to start taxing approximately $1 trillion in currently untaxed compensation.

Just got off a conference call with Susan Rice talking about the contrasts between her boy Barack Obama and John McCain on national security policy. One key point of emphasis was the strange notion coming from the McCain campaign that talking about focused counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan is irresponsible, whereas randomly threatening to start new wars is the height of good sense. As she put it “it’s a strange contrast — he says that somehow it’s naive for a presidential candidate to outline how he would deal with that crucial national security challenge, but it’s appropriate for him to joke about starting another war.” A reporter from the Washington Times challenged her on the “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” business saying McCain was joking. Rice responds that “if he wants to say that he was joking and that’s the kind of joke he thinks is funny, that’s his perogative.”

I see McCain as basically losing on this round. It’s bizarre of his campaign to be trotting out talking points that didn’t work for Hillary Clinton, and already before the Obama campaign’s official counterspin got underway we have Spencer Ackerman kicking McCain’s ass and, indeed, Joe Klein calling McCain soft on al-Qaeda in the MSM.

More broadly, on experience there’s a three-pronged attack. First, Obama does have experience, with Rice citing the fact that he authored “crucial legislation to secure the United States from the threat of loose nuclear materials” and serves on committees and subcommittees dealing with foreign relations, veterans affairs, and homeland security. Second, this means that Obama has actually “acquired more traditional washington foreign policy experience” than most presidents including Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter (Carter in fact served on a nuclear sub and I’m told this gave him a better understanding of nuclear issues than presidents before or after).

Third, there’s more to life than being a prisoner of DC conventional wisdom — “McCain, like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney may have years of Washington experience” but they’ve all made “flawed judgments and as a consequence we’re less safe.” In a crucial point, Rice observed (emphasis added) that a McCain administration would be “very much a continuation and intensification of the failed Bush policy, remaining in Iraq indefinitely not investing adequately in Afghanistan.” According to Rice we need to “show that we have learned from our mistakes in Iraq and elsewhere and are prepared to cooperate and collaborate on the challenges we face,” namely al-Qaeda, nuclear proliferation, and climate change.

I know Steve Clemons has expressed some concerns that Team Obama may have a problematic unwillingness to set priorities in foreign policy, but I thought Rice was admirably clear here. The question of cooperation and the question of priorities goes hand-in-hand. When you’re willing to define what it is you think is really important, then the stage has been set for other countries to work with you. The kind of deterioration in America’s ability to cooperate with other countries that we’ve seen over the past seven years stems not just from “cowboy diplomacy” but from Bush’s grandiosity and lack of focus.

This poll result flagged by Kevin Drum really is depressing. Only 22 percent of 3,400 officers holding the rank of major or lieutenant commander and above support the idea of allowing openly gay or lesbian Americans to serve in the military as a means of boosting recruitment. Fifty-eight percent support lowering education standard, 78 percent supporting offering citizenship to foreigners willing to serve (this sounds like a terrible fall of the Roman Empire idea to me), 38 percent support a draft. This suggests that even if shifts in public opinion have taken some of the sting out of the gays in the military question as an issue of electoral politics, a President Obama or a President Clinton would still face significant resistance from within the armed forces to implementing a changed policy.

Alternatively, and more optimistically, support for a change may be so anemic because officers simply don’t think that lifting the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy would, in practice, generate a substantial number of new recruits. Insofar as that’s what people are thinking, I’m inclined to agree — lower educational standards is a far more practical way of generating additional bodies. Meanwhile, the current downturn in the labor market is likely to produce an uptick in recruiting. Fundamentally, though, the gays in the military issue is a question of justice and equity and not really an issue about recruiting.