Defense procurement: adventures in bad logic

Spencer Ackerman thinks we're spending our defense dollars on the wrong equipment:

It’s only a slight exaggeration to say we don’t use combat aircraft in the wars we’re fighting. You have to come up with a baroque set of Michael Bey-esque geopolitical calculations by which we would use combat aircraft in any conceivable war...The most likely scenario for using combat aircraft in a U.S. war is an alien invasion.

What is relevant to the wars we fight are (a) remotely-piloted aircraft like drones, (b) surveillance aircraft like drones, (c) helicopters, and (d) especially airlift, to get our ground troops from Point A to Point B. And as you can see from the chart, we don’t spend nearly on that stuff what we spend on combat aircraft.

To sum up: We don't need combat aircraft because we don't fight against great powers anymore. We do need stuff for counterinsurgency, because we fight a lot of counterinsurgencies now.

Leaving aside the obvious side-question ("How about we just stop fighting counterinsurgencies?"), let me address this logic.

Consider this statement: "Since Americans are obviously more likely to catch colds than to get dysentery or cholera, we should stop spending all this money on expensive water treatment facilities, and focus more on buying people face masks."

Do you agree with that? If so, you are stupid. But you don't agree, because you are not stupid; you know that our large amount of spending on water treatment facilities is the very reason that we don't see a lot of dysentery and cholera cases. The patterns of the past obviously won't hold if we change our policy (But people don't actually always realize this. Example: "Hey, housing prices will rise forever no matter how much we bid the price up!").

Now consider this statement: "Since America is obviously more likely to fight counterinsurgencies than to fight great-power conflicts, we should stop spending all this money on expensive combat aircraft, and focus more on counterinsurgency equipment."

The assumption necessary to believe this statement is that combat aircraft do not deter great-power conflicts. Well, are you prepared to make that statement? And if so, on what basis? You better have a good case, because I guarantee you that there are many military types who would tell you that U.S. air superiority is important in deterring great-power conflicts, and that air superiority requires us to maintain a big fleet of expensive combat aircraft.

Now maybe the people who would tell you that are flat-out wrong. Or maybe they are lying, due to their vested interests in the military-industrial complex. But how sure are you that this is the case? Apparently Spencer Ackerman (and others who make this argument, like Matt Yglesias) either just assumes that this is the case, or else he has failed to detect his own bad logic.

Great-power conflicts have become nonexistent in this day and age. But was that because of something exogenous, like economic growth, or was it because of stuff we did? And is there a danger of renewed great-power conflict if we stop doing that stuff? Maybe, maybe not, but we had better think a little harder about it than Ackerman and Yglesias appear to be doing.