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  1. #1
    Senior Member AirborneSapper7's Avatar
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    Obama To Kill Navy’s Tomahawk, Hellfire Missile Programs… China & Russia Build Up

    Obama Seeking To Kill Navy’s Tomahawk, Hellfire Missile Programs… China and Russia Continue to Build Up

    Posted on Monday, March 24th, 2014 at 6:38 pm.
    by: Thomas Jefferson

    President Barack Obama is seeking to abolish two highly successful missile programs that experts say has helped the U.S. Navy maintain military superiority for the past several decades.
    The Tomahawk missile program—known as “the world’s most advanced cruise missile”—is set to be cut by $128 million under Obama’s fiscal year 2015 budget proposal and completely eliminated by fiscal year 2016, according to budget documents released by the Navy.
    In addition to the monetary cuts to the program, the number of actual Tomahawk missiles acquired by the United States would drop significantly—from 196 last year to just 100 in 2015. The number will then drop to zero in 2016.
    The Navy will also be forced to cancel its acquisition of the well-regarded and highly effective Hellfire missiles in 2015, according to Obama’s proposal.
    The proposed elimination of these missile programs came as a shock to lawmakers and military experts, who warned ending cutting these missiles would significantly erode America’s ability to deter enemy forces.
    “The administration’s proposed budget dramatically under-resources our investments in munitions and leaves the Defense Department with dangerous gaps in key areas, like Tomahawk and Hellfire missiles,” said Rep. Randy Forbes (R., Va.), a member of House Armed Services Committee.

    http://www.redflagnews.com/headlines...ue-to-build-up

    http://www.conservativeinfidel.com/u...ontinue-build/
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    Obama Wants to Stop Tomahawk Missiles in 2016. But the Navy Is Firing Them at ISIS.

    Melissa Quinn / @MelissaQuinn97 / September 27, 2014 / 37 comments



    The USS Arleigh Burke, a guided-missile destroyer, launches Tomahawk cruise missiles Sept. 23. (Photo: U.S. Navy)

    President Obama ordered the launch of 47 Tomahawk cruise missiles last Monday night from the USS Philippine Sea and USS Arleigh Burke, all aimed at targets in Syria as part of what he calls a military campaign to “degrade and destroy” the terrorist group ISIS.
    However, the future of the Tomahawk program is threatened because of Defense Department budget cuts. The cruise missiles may not be produced at all for the Navy by 2016 – when America still could be fighting ISIS, brutal jihadists also called the Islamic State or ISIL.
    “As we saw in this week’s airstrikes against ISIL, Tomahawk missiles are among the most valuable and precise tools in our military arsenal,” House Armed Services Chairman Buck McKeon told The Daily Signal, adding:
    They provide unmanned, all-weather, deep-strike attack capability against both fixed and mobile targets, which makes them particularly useful against terrorist groups … that transcend nations and borders.
    At 20 feet long and 2,900 pounds, Tomahawk missiles can be launched from both surface ships and submarines, the Navy says, and travel at 550 miles per hour. The weapon, which has wings that fold out, is powered by a jet engine.
    Historically, the Pentagon has purchased roughly 200 Tomahawks a year from manufacturer Raytheon, at about $1.4 million per missile. But Obama slashed that number to 100 for all of 2015 – just double what the Navy fired into Syria in one day.
    The Navy has 4,000 Tomahawks stockpiled. That supply would last roughly 80 days if 50 Tomahawk missiles were fired daily, as they were Monday. Pentagon officials have warned that waging war with ISIS could last years.
    “This sure ups the cost of the action,” @SBucci says.
    Steven Bucci, a former top Pentagon official who oversees defense and foreign policy studies at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal:
    It is interesting that after making the decision to close down the Tomahawk production line as a part of cutting defense spending, the Obama administration relies on them to kick off their Syria strikes. This sure ups the cost of the action, as the missiles will really have no replacement.
    As part of plans to pare Pentagon spending, Obama proposed $118 million in cuts to the Tomahawk program in 2015. Procurement of the missiles is to be eliminated by the following year, budget documents from the Navy show — five years earlier than the president proposed in his 2014 budget.
    >>> Raw Footage of First U.S. Strikes Against ISIS in Syria
    “We had been sustaining a 200 Tomahawk-per-year rate,” Navy acquisition executive Sean Stackley told DoD Buzz in March. “In 2015, we’ll drop down to 100. In 2016, we will revisit the question of whether the time is right to stop production of Tomahawks.”
    The president called on the Pentagon to find a replacement for the cruise missile within a decade.
    [Article continues after infographic below.]
    Infographic by Kelsey Harris/The Daily Signal

    As a result of sequester cuts that went into effect in 2013, the Department of Defense faces $1 trillion in decreased spending through 2021. The cuts have left top Pentagon officials scrambling to determine where to decrease funding.
    Despite the reduced spending outlined in Obama’s budget, key House and Senate committees joined in calling for a boost in missile production beginning in 2015.
    During markups of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2015, the armed services committees in both chambers supported continued production of Tomahawk missiles.
    In the Senate Armed Services Committee’s revision of the NDAA, lawmakers allocated an additional $276.3 million to maintain a rate of 200 per year.
    >>> Commentary: Hits and Misses in the House FY 2015 National Defense Authorization Act
    The Senate Appropriations Committee, similarly, in July called for $82 million to continue producing Tomahawks.
    “This is a prime example of the dangerous cuts our military leaders are forced to consider.”-@BuckMcKeon
    McKeon said:
    Unfortunately, this is a prime example of the types of dangerous cuts our military leaders are being forced to consider under the new sequestration budget regime. It is my hope that the next Congress will reverse defense sequestration and ensure that vital national security programs like the Tomahawk system are adequately funded.
    In March, just after Navy spokeswoman Lt. Caroline Hutcheson confirmed the service would reduce its Tomahawk purchase, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., expressed skepticism during an Armed Services Committee hearing.
    “This is really rolling the dice, in my view,” McCain told Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus, “when we haven’t even begun the assessment of what a new weapon would look like.”
    >>> Armed Services Chairman on Obama: ‘Our Foreign Policy Is a Mess’
    Mabus, though, argued the current supply of Tomahawks would be “sufficient” to “carry us through any eventuality that we can foresee.”
    Mackenzie Eaglen, a defense analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, said the Obama administration’s campaign to “degrade and destroy” ISIS could change the outcome of the Tomahawk program proposed by Obama.
    “The caveat for ending the program next year, by the Navy, was always that there would be no unanticipated events that would drain current stockpiles of Tomahawks before a new missile is ready,” Eaglen told Marketplace.
    In an April paper for The Heritage Foundation before the rise of ISIS, Bucci and another foreign policy expert, Ted Bromund, advised against stopping the Tomahawk program in 2016, calling it “an error in both defense strategy and alliance policy.”
    Citing Mabus’ defense that the current stock was adequate for the foreseeable future, Bucci and Bromund argued that most U.S. military operations “are not foreseen.”
    At the start of the Iraq War in 2003, for example, coalition forces fired upward of 725 missiles, accounting for one-third of the entire inventory.
    Eight years later, in 2011, the United States and the United Kingdom launched more than 160 Tomahawks in the opening days of the campaign in Libya.
    >>> Commentary: Defense Cuts Leaving the U.S. Navy Toothless?




    @MelissaQuinn97


    http://dailysignal.com/2014/09/27/ob...y-firing-isis/
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    Mad World News

    Obama Defense Chopping Leads To Shortage Of Tomahawks
    http://dcgazette.com/obama-defense-c...-of-tomahawks/



    Obama Defense Chopping Leads To Shortage Of Tomahawks
    Somebody wasn t thinking ahead: The U.S. Navy’s current reliance on the Tomah...
    dcgazette.com

    Obama Defense Chopping Leads To Shortage Of Tomahawks

    09/30/2014 News



    Somebody wasn’t thinking ahead:
    The U.S. Navy’s current reliance on the Tomahawk, known as “the world’s most advanced cruise missile,” comes just months after the Obama administration attempted to significantly cut funding for the weapon and then eliminate it completely it in 2016, a move that drew heavy criticism from defense experts and lawmakers.
    With the military relying on the weapons in its strikes against ISIL targets in Syria, defense leaders have begun to warn that the Pentagon could quickly run through its Tomahawk stockpiles, a problem exacerbated by defense budget cuts known as sequestration, defense sources say.
    The House Armed Services Committee (HASC) is now expressing concern that the Pentagon has “insufficient weapons inventories” and that the Obama administration’s proposed termination of the Tomahawk missile program in fiscal year 2016 would worsen “a deficient inventory problem,” according to defense insiders and sources close to the committee.
    Oopsie. Obama wants to send bombs and missiles rather than troops into a war zone and there’s a good chance we could run out of missiles. Didn’t anybody think of that? Of course not.
    The U.S. Navy deployed 47 Tomahawks last week during its strikes in Syria, which amounts to 47 percent of its planned purchases of the weapon in 2015, according to the American Thinker. There are currently enough Tomahawks left “for roughly 85 days of a campaign, at the current rate of use,” the report states.
    We were only going to buy 100 FOR THE YEAR????? It’s not like this is asset level equipment. The darn things blow up on contact. We can’t superglue them back together again and use them twice. Why stint on this particular weapon?
    With a stockpile of about 4,000 Tomahawks—and the administration still contending that cuts are needed despite its reliance on the missile—defense insiders warn that the inventory could quickly run low as the military campaign against ISIL continues in Syria and Iraq.
    “You could see that if you’re starting to really ramp up [use] and be more aggressive, it wouldn’t take you too long to expend a significant portion of that [inventory],” one defense insider told theWashington Free Beacon. “If you’re firing 600 to 800 during a campaign … it starts to chip away at it pretty fast.”
    Chip away? We’d be bleeding as if from an artery. 4,000 is not very many if we are going to conduct any sort of sustained campaign.
    The low stockpile of Tomahawks has highlighted how deepening defense cuts are impacting on-the-ground realities, according to Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon (R., Calif.), HASC’s chairman.
    “As we saw in this week’s airstrikes against ISIL, Tomahawk missiles are among the most valuable and precise tools in our military arsenal,” McKeon said in a statement provided to the Free Beacon. “They provide unmanned, all-weather, deep-strike attack capability against both fixed and mobile targets which makes them particularly useful against terrorist groups like ISIL that transcend nations and borders.”
    They sound like a wonder weapon…so, of course, Obama and Company want them out of the arsenal. Not just out of the arsenal, but not even in production with no comparable replacement close to testing let alone deployment. In addition, according to the article quoted above, once the production line is shut down it is difficult to get it restarted.
    “Without a suitable replacement it would be unwise to shut off that production line,” said the defense source. “It’s not like flipping a switch to reactivate suppliers who have been turned off.”
    Mackenzie Eaglen, a former Defense Department official, explained that while the stockpile should be adequate into the near future, replenishments will be needed during the next year.
    “Given the fact that most military officials are predicting a years-long campaign against ISIL, there is little doubt that some replenishment will be required over the next 12 months,” said Eaglen, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). “If and when that happens, it will call into question the Navy plan to shut down this production line.”
    The Washington Free Beacon piece quoted describes lawmakers being “concerned” about the low levels of Tomahawks in the arsenal and working to restore defense cuts made due to sequestration. Such defense cuts are leaving us vulnerable in a world hell bent on destroying us. At least it sounds like Congress is not happy about that.

    http://dcgazette.com/obama-defense-c...-of-tomahawks/
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