I got an e-mail yesterday

Actually I got more than one from bigger and better written blogs than this one.
This one was from Bruce over at Q and O, which I'm surprised they even notice me.
He asked me to say something about the new F-35 Joint strike fighter and it's competition, the Chinese J-20 and the Russian T-50 super-jets.

Russia has always had cutting edge fighters, but couldn't afford to make many of them.
China is now catching up and maybe even surpassing them- and us as we borrow our way into second world status.

Right now we have those @ssclowns in the White House making decisions on our defense budget with the same forethought that your five year old puts into what she's going to wear out into the snow. We have the F-22 at $wow! a pop, and that's ok- for now.
We have the newest and best technology in the F-35 at $OMFG!! a pop, which is the problem.
We only have so much money to go around, no matter what fiscal games Geithner and Bernacke want to play; which is kind of like the Soviet Union was 30 years ago.

We have to start cutting things from all .gov tentacles incluing defense, but we have the hard decision of where to cut. That F-35 isn't the place to cut because we need to develop that technology to be able to stand up to the Chi-coms when we next have a President with a backbone.
Right now, we're deep in our end zone at the two minute warning and down by $Hfshiat to the Chinese because of the boatloads of money we borrowed from them, and we'll be financing their development of the J-20 for years just on interest. I saw an Australian report that says if when we go to war with the Chinese, that we won't have enough missiles to stop them in the air, much less gain air superiority. What we need to look at is building more advanced tech planes to be able to avoid being annihilated in the first wave and be strong enough to take the fight back to them.
To even be able to have an air arm, we'll have to spend more money now to build up an inventory of smart planes and hopefully the Republicans in the House can make the choice to put out the money for more than a handful, because we will need them.

If you're looking for offsets, here are some from the top of my head--
The Dept of Education has been in charge of steadily declining test scores for over 40 years, how many F-35's would eliminating that buy?
The Energy Department was appointed to reduce our reliance on foreign oil- they banned us from drilling on land, they keep forcing us to drill in deeper water, AND now they won't even let us drill in the gulf- with oil looking at OVER $100/bbl- how many planes would ending that 45 year old bureaucracy buy?
Homeland security?
The USS John Murtha? -motto "In cold blood."
Amtrack?