Le S\u00e9nat a adopt\u00e9 hier l’amendement McCain sur le projet de loi budg\u00e9taire pour le budget FY2010 pour le Pentagone, qui supprime les fonds notamment destin\u00e9s \u00e0 produire sept F-22 de plus. Le r\u00e9sultat est remarquablement favorable \u00e0 la position de l’administration et contre la poursuite de la production du F-22, par 58 voix contre 40. Ce r\u00e9sultat est une surprise majeure par rapport aux pronostics qui, la semaine derni\u00e8re encore, annon\u00e7aient une d\u00e9faite pour l’administration.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\tPour autant, l’affaire n’est pas termin\u00e9e puisque la Chambre a vot\u00e9<\/a> un projet de budget pr\u00e9voyant la poursuite de la production du F-22 par une majorit\u00e9 encore plus consid\u00e9rable de 389 voix contre 22. Les deux chambres doivent trouver un compromis entre leurs deux versions de la loi budg\u00e9taire du Pentagone. Dans ce compromis, bien que l’affaire F-22 tienne une infime partie budg\u00e9taire de la loi, elle tiendra \u00e9videmment un r\u00f4le politique important. La position de l’administration Obama a \u00e9t\u00e9 de mettre un poids extraordinaire dans cette affaire, pour des raisons qui ne sont pas toujours jug\u00e9es compr\u00e9hensibles (le s\u00e9nateur Chambliss, partisan du F-22, observait apr\u00e8s le vote: \u00abWe’ve been fighting a headwind from the White House and the Pentagon leadership for weeks now. For whatever reason, the White House expended a lot of political capital to seek to terminate the F-22 program.<\/em>\u00bb) Le vote du S\u00e9nat rend encore plus complexe la situation, notamment dans la difficult\u00e9 d’appr\u00e9hender la position des parlementaires telle qu’elle \u00e9voluera, et d’autant plus difficile de d\u00e9terminer l’issue de cette bataille.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \tSur le fond, l’ambigu\u00eft\u00e9 du cas F-22<\/a> est plus forte que jamais, notamment de la part de ceux qui appartiennent au camp anti-guerre et anti-interventionniste et appuient la fin du programme F-22. Il est int\u00e9ressant, par contre, de d\u00e9couvrir le cas d’un commentateur relativement peu connu, certainement peu inform\u00e9 sur les questions de d\u00e9fense et qui ne pr\u00e9tend certes pas l’\u00eatre, qui s’affiche anti-guerre et qui juge assez illogique, pour cette position, de soutenir la position du gouvernement contre le F-22.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \tJoshua Kucera expose, le 21 juillet 2009<\/a>, \u00abThe anti-war case for fighter jets<\/em>\u00bb. S’il accepte \u00e9videmment le principe de l’opposition \u00e0 une telle d\u00e9pense du point de vue anti-guerre, il s’interroge par contre sur son aspect pratique, ou disons tactique. Il observe que le F-22 est un avion de combat qui n’est pas utilis\u00e9 dans les guerres expansionnistes actuelles, d\u00e9finies par les th\u00e9ories anti-insurectionnelles en vogue \u00e0 Washington, et sur lesquelles s’appuie Robert Gates. Au contraire, le F-22 est pr\u00e9sent\u00e9 comme un avion de domination a\u00e9rienne, dont l’un des r\u00f4les principaux est notamment de contr\u00f4ler l’espace a\u00e9rien national, donc un r\u00f4le purement d\u00e9fensif et justifi\u00e9. De ce point de vue, estime Kucera, il est pr\u00e9f\u00e9rable de produire quelques F-22 de plus que d’ajouter 20.000 hommes \u00e0 l’U.S. Army, comme l’a d\u00e9cid\u00e9 Gates, qui vont renforcer le corps exp\u00e9ditionnaire US en Afghanistan. Comme rien n’est pr\u00e9vu dans la programmation du Pentagone pour le F-22, une d\u00e9cision de poursuivre la production aboutirait objectivement \u00e0 r\u00e9duire d’autant les sommes d’argent affect\u00e9es aux structures expansionnistes et bellicistes du Pentagone. (Kucera ne dit \u00e9videmment pas un mot de l’opposition<\/a> F-22-JSF, qu’il ne peut d’ailleurs pr\u00e9tendre conna\u00eetre puisqu’il se reconna\u00eet lui-m\u00eame fort peu inform\u00e9. Il n’emp\u00eache qu’on retrouve dans cette opposition la m\u00eame logique que lui-m\u00eame formule en mettant en opposition les F-22 en plus et les 20.000 hommes en plus: en abandonnant le F-22, on favorise les structures interventionnistes, dont le JSF est \u00e9galement partie prenante. C’est une position coh\u00e9rente qui rencontre ce qui devrait \u00eatre la logique de la position anti-guerre concernant le cas F-22.)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00abBut the second justification, that the F-22 is not suited for fighting counterinsurgencies, is more troubling. I’m not much of a military analyst, but pretty much everyone knows the danger of fighting the last war (or two wars, as the case may be). That should be especially true when the last wars have been utter debacles and should never have been undertaken in the first place (except, you could argue, the first couple of months of Afghanistan, the amount of time it took to dislodge al Qaeda).<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bbGetting good at counterinsurgencies is not a good thing if it makes us more likely to try to attempt more counterinsurgencies, and smarter people than me think that is the danger of going down this road we’re on. To use another defense-related clich\u00e9, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When we get really good at defeating local rebellions against governments that are friendly to us, you can bet that is going to look a lot more tempting. Andrew Bacevich:<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bbAccording to a currently fashionable view, the chief operative lesson of the Iraq War is that counterinsurgency works, with U.S. forces having now mastered the best practices required to prevail in conflicts of this nature. Those who adhere to this view expect the Long War to bring more such challenges, with the neglected Afghan conflict even now presenting itself as next in line. Given this prospect, they want the Pentagon to gear itself up for a succession of such trials, enshrining counterinsurgency as the preferred American way of war in place of discredited concepts like shock and awe. Doing so will have large implications for how defense dollars are distributed among the various armed services and for how U.S. forces are trained, equipped and configured. Ask yourself how many fighter-bombers or nuclear submarines it takes to establish an effective government presence in each of Afghanistan’s 40,020 villages and you get the gist of what this might imply.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bbYet given the costs of Iraq-now second only to World War II as the most expensive war in all U.S. history-and given the way previous efforts to pacify the Afghan countryside have fared, how much should we expect to spend in redeeming Afghanistan’s forty thousand villages? Having completed that task five or ten years hence, how many other villages in Pakistan, Iran, Syria and Egypt will require similar ministrations? And how many more accidental guerrillas will we inadvertently create along the way?<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bbIs a military oriented, by contrast, toward fighting peer competitors less likely to get us into trouble? Air power has not been much of a factor in our recent adventures: When The Atlantic wrote its paean to the F-22 earlier this year, the ace it profiled – the man who has the most air combat kills in the U.S. Air Force – had shot down a whopping three enemy planes, two in 1991 in Iraq and one in Kosovo. (He pilots an F-15, which has been plenty capable enough for the two-bit dictators and their third-rate air forces we have been picking on since the end of the Cold War.)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bbBut, imagine an alternate reality where we subscribe to the old-fashioned notion that the Defense Department is actually oriented toward defense, rather than to project power (Pentagon-ese for getting in other countries’ business). Then sophisticated fighter jets actually are useful, as defense against an air attack. Ground troops – like the 22,000 additional that Gates asked for this week – are less useful, unless relations with Canada or Mexico decline quite a bit.<\/em>\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \tMis en ligne le 22 juillet 2009 \u00e0 09H41<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Le S\u00e9nat a adopt\u00e9 hier l’amendement McCain sur le projet de loi budg\u00e9taire pour le budget FY2010 pour le Pentagone, qui supprime les fonds notamment destin\u00e9s \u00e0 produire sept F-22 de plus. Le r\u00e9sultat est remarquablement favorable \u00e0 la position de l’administration et contre la poursuite de la production du F-22, par 58 voix contre… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[8492,249,250,8491,3531],"class_list":["post-70931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bloc-notes","tag-expansionniste","tag-f-22","tag-jsf","tag-kucera","tag-senat"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70931"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70931\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}