"Huh."
"Hell, Charlie, go read a book. There must be a half a dozen biographies already written about me by now. None of the authors have ever spoken to me, but they are all experts." I shrugged again. "Moving on to more interesting topics, what do you think you are going to do when you get out of the Corps?"
"I'm going to go back to motocross, but I might also try grand prix, you know, road racing. I had a chance right before I went into the Corps to try that and it was really wild. I've been in contact with Bucky, and he and his father are still interested in sponsoring me. At least long enough to see if I can still keep up with the younger guys."
"You'll be twenty-one, and you're worried about younger guys?", I asked, incredulous.
"When I went pro I was sixteen, Dad."
I shrugged at that. Twenty-one and over the hill? Ridiculous! "Okay. That should be a lot more interesting than the Marines, anyway."
"Huh?"
"Charlie, if you wanted to stay in, the Corps is going to restrict your duty."
He gave me a dirty look at that. "You promised you wouldn't do that!"
"I lied." I held up my hands to ward off any attacks. "Listen, I don't worry about you, but think about what would happen if it became known to the bad guys that the son of the American President was around. Suppose you had been in Afghanistan? There ain't a one of those bastards I would trust with a busted nickel. Both sides would have been gunning for you, and even if you stayed safe, how many of your buddies and squadmates would die keeping you alive. I am responsible to them, just like I am responsible to you."
"Huh."
"What kind of casualties would we take keeping you safe? I won't take that chance. As long as I am the President, you can't get anywhere near combat.", I told him.
He looked out the window and muttered a quiet, "Shit!" After a few more minutes he looked back at me and nodded. "I want to finish my tour with the 3rd of the 2nd. Can I at least do that?"
"Sure. I'll try to keep from invading anybody through next fall."
"Thank you."
I wasn't overly sorry if he didn't get a chance to be a hero. In my experience, the only people excited by action were those who hadn't seen any. Once you had been up shit creek, you never really wanted to paddle back up there. You went, because you had signed up and said you would go, but you did it with clear eyes and a clear head. Kids wanted excitement. Grownups could live without it.
As far as being Presidential was concerned, I had known that I was going to face opposition to the weapons program cuts, and I had known it was going to be serious. Even so, knowing intellectually was not the same thing as seeing it in action. For the last few months things had been building, ever since the National Security Summit I had convened in March at Camp David. The cuts had become official on April 4, when the individual Deputy Undersecretaries in charge of the Army, Navy, and Air Force announced the specific program cuts and changes. That made the evening news, for sure, as well as the Sunday news programs. It wasn't just the military that was pissed, so were the chickenhawks and neocons, and every Congressman or Senator from a state or district where the stuff was being built.
It was by pure happenstance that the Army came out the best, simply because they didn't have any gigantic spending programs planned. They had invested the money in the Eighties and Nineties, and their newest major acquisition program was the Stryker, which I was leaving alone. Still, since I had been in the Army, this was used as 'proof' that I was biased in the Army's favor.
In some ways, the Navy hadn't been as badly hurt as it could have been. Even the admirals knew that the DD(X)/CG(X) simply wasn't needed and was just way too expensive to actually build. It was already projected to cost almost half of what a nuclear powered aircraft carrier cost, and would probably go higher. Likewise, the Littoral Combat Ship was still on the drawing boards, and was nowhere near any kind of production point. On the other hand, I was happy to keep funding the stuff that worked, like the Arleigh Burkes, and new transports and auxiliaries, and the Navy kept the Spruances and Kidds in commission.
The admirals and generals weren't stupid, because dummies don't make it to the top in any system. They knew they couldn't fight me on every single weapons program. This was one of those useful rules of war, he who attacks everywhere, attacks nowhere, and he who defends everywhere, defends nowhere. You have to be picky. Some battles you can't win, so be choosy and fight the battles you want to fight. They decided to fight for the F-35 Lightning II, the Joint Strike Fighter.
The F-35 was the latest and greatest aerial wonder-weapon, a state of the art airplane that could almost think for the pilot, and would protect him from anything while dealing out death and destruction to everybody. Well, that was the advertising spiel, anyway. On paper it looked great. We would take everything we learned from making the F-22 stealth fighter, and make it into an all-in-one fighter-bomber, capable of both attacking other planes and carrying bombs and missiles to attack ground targets. It would be somewhat slower than the F-22, so that would make it less expensive. Even better, it would come in three versions. One version would be owned by the Air Force, and would be a conventional fighter to fly from regular landing strips. Another version would be the same plane for the Navy but converted to operate from carriers, with a tail hook and the modifications to be catapult launched. Finally you had a version just for the Marines, which took all this whiz-bang wonderfulness and turned it into a vertical lift off and landing platform. You would get marvelous economies of scale from selling the three planes to the military.
That was the theory, anyway, and Lockheed-Martin was pushing it hard. The plane had been on the drawing boards since 1996, and the Pentagon had run tests on it and a competitor from Boeing. They had actually built prototypes, and in early October of 2001, shortly after I became President, the Pentagon had picked the F-35 over the Boeing F-32 and moved it into the next step of the system, which was a more detailed design and engineering program that would lead to a contract to build the planes. Now it was in my lap to kill it off.
I knew, from my knowledge from before, that this gizmo was going to be a monumental boondoggle. While I had never really followed the technical stuff then, the program had been such a disaster as to make all sorts of national headlines. The Navy version never really worked; the stealth features and the overall shape of the plane didn't allow a tail hook to be installed, and by the time they fixed that it was a totally different bird from the Air Force version. The Marine vertical takeoff version was even more dangerous than the AV-8 Harrier it was replacing, and the Marines issued orders to not use that feature, which made it an incredibly expensive land based fighter. Only the Air Force version actually performed as expected, and at $100-plus million a plane was several times more expensive than the perfectly fine aircraft it replaced. Already foreign buyers were starting to ask some pointed questions about affordability, and the price was still less than half what it would ultimately become.