Commentary Wild blue yonder

The aircraft arrayed around the spacious lawn of Maxwell Air Force Base, home of the Air University, mostly represent longretired types. The largest, however, is a glistening B-52 bomber, which represents a still-employed component of the Air Force’s aging fleet: The youngest B-52 entered service in 1962. Sons have flown the same plane their fathers and grandfathers flew.

But, then, the average age of all the Air Force aircraft is 27 years; fighters, more than 30 years; bombers and helicopters, more than 40 years; refueling tankers more than 50 years. America’s security challenges change much faster -- think of the Soviet Union’s demise and the Islamic State’s rise -- than new technologies can be conceived, designed, approved, built and deployed. The F/A18 and the F-16 were designed about 45 years ago.

On April 15, 1953, two U.S. soldiers in Korea were attacked and killed by a propeller-driven aircraft supporting Chinese and North Korean troops. Since then, no U.S. ground troops have been attacked by an enemy aircraft. Such has been the permissive environment guaranteed by U.S. air dominance, not since Vietnam has a U.S. pilot used his aircraft’s bullets to down an enemy fighter plane (although air-to-air missiles downed enemy aircraft over the Balkans).

The Air Force’s dominance in controlling the air and in supporting ground troops might have been what an F-16 pilot here calls a “catastrophic success,” distracting attention from the rapidly evolving challenge of multidomain, combined-arms warfare on land, on and under the sea, in the air, and in space and cyberspace.

From Dec. 8, 1941, through August 5, 1945 -- the day before Hiroshima -- there were no radical technological disjunctions during World War II. Aircraft, aircraft carriers, tanks and radar were prePearl Harbor technologies. Future wars, however, will be won by information superiority that produces superior decisions. Which means that China gave a chilling glimpse of the future when in January 2007 it successfully launched an anti-satellite weapon.

Beginning with the liberation of Kuwait in 1991, airpower has been the first, and sometimes the only, recourse of presidents. In 1991, six weeks of air attacks enabled U.S. ground forces to finish Iraq’s army in 100 hours. In 1999, in three months of combat over Serbia and Kosovo, airpower sufficed to enable diplomacy to attain the political objectives. In 1991, in the first night of the Gulf War air campaign, U.S. airpower struck more targets than the Eighth Air Force struck in Europe in all of 1942 and 1943.

These recent episodes may, however, be remembered not as harbingers of future conflicts but as punctuations ending an era. In this, its 70th year as an independent service, the Air Force, like the other branches of the military, but more than any other, is being required to rethink its mission in light of rapidly evolving threats and technologies.

The Air Force is in charge of two legs of the nuclear deterrence triad -- strategic bombers and Minuteman ICBMs -- but also has been delivering 70 percent of the bombs against ISIS. For decades, the Air Force’s strategic role was defined by President Dwight Eisenhower’s configuration of U.S. forces for long-range deterrence of the Soviet Union in order to reduce the need for massive forward-based forces. In 2009, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who perhaps possesses broader knowledge and experience of national security matters than any American has ever had, said: “If the Department of Defense can’t figure out a way to defend the United States on a budget of more than half a trillion dollars a year, then our problems are much bigger than anything that can be cured by a few more ships and planes.” Indeed, safety might come from buying fewer ships and planes, and more drones.

And developing hypersonic (more than five times the speed of sound) weapons that can strike anywhere in the world in less than an hour. And electromagnetic kinetic weapons (railguns) with muzzle velocities of 5,000 miles per hour, twice as fast as the muzzle velocity of a high-caliber bullet. Directed-energy laser-based weapons operating at the speed of light are about 134,000 times faster than railguns.

What Air Force people call “fast movers” -- fighter planes, the fastest bombers -- are mere plodders compared to weapons that are not far over the horizon. And compared to the pace of geostrategic and technological changes that challenge even the fine Air University’s capacity to comprehend them. George Will’s email address is georgewill@washpost.com.

Focus, America, focus. The most urgent task right now is to make sure a stake is driven through the heart of the Republican effort to gut Medicaid and balloon the ranks of the uninsured.

I know that the Russia investigations are charging ahead, with Capitol Hill appearances by members of President Trump’s inner circle scheduled for next week. I know that Trump gave an unhinged interview to The New York Times on Wednesday, bizarrely undermining his own attorney general. I know that one of the few remaining giants in Washington, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has received a tough medical diagnosis.

There will be time to digest all of that. At present, however, health care is still the main event.

Keep in mind that this isn’t the first time the GOP’s gratuitously cruel effort to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act has looked dead. Back in March, House Speaker Paul Ryan called off a showdown vote and glumly declared, “We’re going to be living with Obamacare for the foreseeable future.” But he managed to get a revised bill passed in May, prompting President Trump to hold a sophomoric victory rally at the White House.

That bill would have caused 23 million people to lose health insurance over a decade and slashed Medicaid spending by more than $800 billion, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The action then shifted to the Senate, which came up with legislation that would grow the numbers of uninsured by 22 million and cut Medicaid by $772 billion. Experts who tried to parse the details gave differing opinions on which version was more heartless.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s attempt to ram through his monstrosity collapsed in a heap last weekend, as both the far-right and moderate wings of the GOP caucus balked. In desperation, McConnell then proposed an approach that Trump once ruled out but now eagerly embraces: Repeal the Affordable Care Act now and worry about replacing it later.

According to the CBO, taking the repeal-only route would mean 17 million more uninsured within a year and 32 million more in a decade. Insurance premiums would soar, and in more than half the nation’s counties there would be no insurers willing to service the individual market. Appalling.

McConnell’s gambit appeared to fail Tuesday when three GOP moderates -- Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia -- announced they would vote no. Their stance means McConnell lacks the votes even to open debate on repeal-only, let alone pass it. That should be the end of the story.

But it would be a mistake to take anything for granted. Senate naysayers are under tremendous pressure to give in, and the reason has nothing to do with health care. It’s pure politics.

For seven long years, since the day the Affordable Care Act was passed, Republicans have been vowing to eradicate it “root and branch,” as McConnell likes to say. And for seven long years, the GOP has reaped political benefit from that categorical promise -- while giving no serious thought to what a replacement system would look like.

Obamacare, you will recall, was once Romneycare; it was fashioned after a system Mitt Romney successfully implemented when he was governor of Massachusetts. It is based on ideas originally developed at the conservative Heritage Foundation, ideas the Republican Party once liked -- until President Obama embraced them.

While Obama was in office, Republicans in Congress could blithely pass repeal bills knowing the president would never sign them. Now that Trump sits in the Oval Office with pen in hand, however, repeal becomes a real possibility -- as do the awful consequences.

McConnell says he will bring the bill up for a vote next week anyway. In effect, he threatens to call the opponents’ bluff. Fortunately, they do not appear to be bluffing. There is no indication that a lunch Wednesday for GOP senators at the White House -- at which Trump basically threatened revenge against anyone who votes no -- or a smaller gathering of senators later that evening changed any minds.

But the right-wing message machine will continue to loudly accuse no-voters of committing political treason. So it is more important than ever to remind senators that the repeal-and-replace bill is monumentally unpopular -- polls last week showed its approval rating between 12 percent and 17 percent -- and that the legislation’s cost would be paid in human suffering. We would return to the days when medical expenses were the leading cause of personal bankruptcy.

Keep the pressure on. The war is not yet won. Eugene Robinson’s email address is eugenerobinson@washpost. com.