By Noah Schachtman, Danger Room @ wired.com,  April 3, 2012

It’s a story so convoluted, only Washington could serve it up. Eighteen months ago, the Pentagon’s chief ordered the Air Force to start building a king-sized blimp that could spy on whole Afghan villages at once. That blimp is almost ready for flight testing. But the Air Force doesn’t want to deploy the thing, for reasons both sensible and not. So now a pair of influential senators are demanding that the Air Force send the blimp to the skies above the warzone.

“We believe it would be a significant failure to stop work and not deploy this much needed platform to Afghanistan,” Senators Thad Cochran and Daniel Ionuye complain in a Feb. 14 letter to Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter (.pdf), obtained by Danger Room [....]

Cochran and Inouye, two long-time backers of all things military, run the Senate Appropriations Committee. They are, for all intents and purposes, the Senate’s moneymen [....] Crossing Cochran and Inouye is inadvisable, given their considerable power of the purse. That’s why it’s particularly unfortunate that some of their substantive ideas for defense are, well, batty [....]