Air Force's Big "Roadmap" Tease

F-22s in California, Oregon, Montana and New Jersey. Next-generation bombers in Texas and South Dakota. New tankers at 27 bases spread across the country. These are some of the prospective "bed-downs" Air Force officials outlined yesterday in their "Future Roadmap" for U.S.-based airplanes.

The document is "designed to meet one of the Nation's most pressing needs: recapitalization and modernization of its aging Air Force fleet," the service insists.

But the Air Force Association has another take:

*Although senior Air Force leaders won't say so in so many words, the service's new beddown roadmap is a map of constituencies and effectively puts members of Congress on notice that if they want an Air Force mission in their district, they better support the buying of the new systems. If they don't, and inventories continue to shrink, the missions -- and the bases, and Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve Command units associated with them -- will surely go away. *

It's all part of the Air Force's increasingly-desperate sales pitch for new fighters, bombers, tankers and cargo planes. In the case of the F-22, the air service didn't hesitate to use the recent (mostly temporary) grounding of old F-15s to advance its cause, arguing that the grounding was proof that the government wasn't buying enough F-22s, fast enough.