Garrison Davis

Plus, Pete warned, it might not survive a war with China.

Hegseth's plan was to just have the military use satellites for all their airborne tracking needs.

And if we had to have, you know, a plane doing some of that, we could just have Navy E-2D Hawkeyes as a temporary replacement.

Now, most of my listeners are not Air Force generals, and neither am I, but I've read stuff guys who know that kind of thing have written, and I'll tell you this, it's a bad fucking idea, or it's widely agreed by the experts to be a bad fucking idea.

For one thing, the E-7, which is what we would have been replacing our E-3s with, has already proven itself in combat.

The Aussies sent theirs over to Iraq during the fighting against ISIS, and per task and purpose, it, quote, was so reliable that whenever American F-22 fighters were in theater, the U.S.

Air Force asked the Aussies to support the U.S.

jets.

16 retired U.S.

Air Force four-star generals took the unprecedented step of writing a letter to Congress and begging them to reverse Hegseth's decision.

Their reasoning why boils down to this.

Satellites aren't ready to track airborne targets, and the Hawkeye is too small for the job.

Congress ultimately reversed course, but it's uncertain when, if ever, new E7s will arrive.

Certainly not in time for whatever the Trump administration is going to do next.

In the meantime, the Air Force is down roughly 10% or more of its functional fleet of AWACS, and we don't even have boots on the ground anywhere.

Now, what I think happened here, what I think is behind all of these bad decisions, and this is not something I can verify, this is opinion, is that AWACS aren't sexy.

They're not like a cool weapons system.

They don't kill people directly.

They facilitate other soldiers and sailors and airmen from killing people using other weapons systems.

But you can't threaten somebody with just an AWAC.