Tomcats go to the shredder

In a crunching coda to January's F-14 spare parts flap, The Pentagon has decided to scrap the planes entirely rather than risk even relatively innocuous parts finding their way to Iran -- the only remaining operator of F-14s.

This gets my vote for quote of the month:

"One of the ways to make sure that no one will ever use an F-14 again is to cut them into little 2-by-2-foot bits."

The decision means paying several million dollars to destroy them rather than earning millions selling the parts. But that seems a cost well-worth paying.

The only real losers, it seems, are F-14 devotees, who are finding it difficult to obtain them for museums and the like.

F-14, politics, midtopia