Pentagon acquisition Czar Jacques Gansler warns that candidate George W Bush's plan to skip a generation of military hardware won't work. Bush wants to cancel the JSF (regarded as the Democratic Party's Aircraft) to design the next generation of unmanned combat attack planes. Gansler warns that doing so would cut the Air Force in half by 2010 due to the mass retirement of F-16s. Gansler insists that the US already skipped the generation between the F-15/16 and the F-22/JSF. Gansler notes that the Pentagon needs $90 billion in procurement funding every year to reach its modernization goals, but that even with a few magic rabbits pulled out of the logistics and infrastructure accounts neither Gore nor Bush could get the procurement figure above $75 billion.-Stephen V Cole