Reading the Pictures: F-22 Slapped Around A Little, But Oh Still So Hot

There's whitewash and greenwash and there's also Raptorwash.

So the media is trumpeting a major victory for the White House because the Senate voted, under threat of a veto, to "only" build 187 more F-22 Raptors instead of 194. Then, there's also the big deal being made about the supposedly huge $1.7 billion dollars savings without bothering to mention that's only "a third of a percentage point of the overall 2010 defense request," as the grief-stricken WSJ reports. And then, before anyone starts to celebrate, also keep in mind that the House -- all those members blindly eyeing aerospace jobs, and contribution -- voted for the full allotment so it remains to be seen how many Raptors actually disappear.

Meanwhile, what's just as impressive to me is how, rain or shine, the media reflexively caters to the defense industry's visual propaganda about the "rejection" of this deficient and dangerous lemon-of-a-weapon system in story after story with the most sexy, sexy, sexy, sexy, sexy, sexy pictures of this phallic piece of hardware.

...Now, on the other hand, if the media (not that the military had anything to do with it) had gotten any closer and better a view of the last time one of these wrecks went down (the shot above being typical, as well as one of the few I could find of the episode outside Edwards Air Force Base in March), perhaps our Representatives would be maybe another fraction of a percent tighter or so with our billions.

See also: CNN coverage of March crash with cool PR videos vs. Mr. Weather Guy

(image: AP. caption: An emergency operations team prepares to move into an area where an Air Force F-22 fighter jet, on a test fight from nearby Edwards Air Force Base, crashed in the Mojave Desert about 25 miles west of Barstow, Calif. , Wednesday, March 25, 2009. )

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Comments

[iblogleft]

The complete ignorance in our aerospace industry does not lie solely in the military industrial complex.

So good of people to stand up front and claim knowledge only available in hindsight as to the validity of a program now. Convenient.

Every aircraft we produce crashes before they are produced. All of them.

You can claim this program is/was/will be a failure till the day you die, it matters not. Fact is, we needed a new system at the time, we decided to make it, we built them, and they are here. They are, and will continue to be, the most effective air superiority fighter in the world for another 20 years. The fact that the Soviets Union never mass produced the su-35 or variants that were to be the f-22's adversaries cannot be used as an argument against creating the program.

It is completely rational to command an end to this extremely expensive program, in retrospect. But to say it never was needed, and to leave out a myriad of complete failures in other programs is simply ignorant, and again, convenient.

Simply put, the f-22 is not the bad guy you claim. Should we end production, yes. Should it be the poster child of bad decisions? Not by any stretch of the imagination.

[RoveRoveRoveYourBoat]

WARMONGER PORNOGRAPHY

[Durango]

Gotta start somewhere.

And while I support the cutbacks I gotta say. Those are some very cool planes.

Would love to get a ride in one anytime.

Now that I mention it: Since they will probably be little use in actual combat, how about sending some around the country so giving people rides?

We paid for them after all.

[LloydDrako]

187 is not the number of new Raptors that would have been built, it's the number of F-22s currently in the fleet. The bill the Senate voted down would have added 20 more. As the first even modest defeat suffered by the military-i­ndustrial-­congressio­nal complex in years, it's no small thing.

Damn! They are sexy, though. . . .

[wadenelson1]

All the F-22's in the world wouldn't have helped us on 9-11.

The next war is in cyberspace. We need computer geeks, not fighter-bombers to win that one.

As usual the Pentagon is fighting the last war. Or the one before that.

[karela]

I get your point, but you didn't mention this point: This is the first time that we've had ANY success against the military industrial complex and we only got it because Gates had the courage to push for it and the President had the courage to disapprove strongly enough to threaten a veto on the Defense Spending bill. It may not be as big as we'd like, but it is a definite crack in the armor and where a crack begins, strong shoots can take hold. Pay attention and help things move in the direction they need to go. Bad things happen when America goes to sleep and allows them to happen. Far too many of us slept through W.'s entire Presidency, but Obama woke us up and we need to make sure that we stay awake.

[TrooAmerican]

Is this project much different than the Osprey, which after 20 yrs of development, countless lives lost, and billions down the toilet, is finally operating in the middle east as a Giant Fat Easy to destroy target for our enemies to Hit with Rockets and waste our money and kill off more of our soldiers?

[mountclemens]

Thank you, Mr. Shaw. Excellent post.

Sadly, not many people are going to read your post. The masses remain ignorant and gullible, eating up the photo-ops and PR (public relations) stories.

Obama is quite obviously not the Change we thought we were supporting last year. He's one of them, now. He's a friend of the military-industrial complex. He's a bankster crony.

Yes. When we put it together, we see how he could beat Hillary Clinton. He was so well received by major media who are all big-corporate owned, especially NBC. GE, a major military industrialist, owns NBC. So, he got good media play. And he received massive amounts of campaign donations from his new corporate cronies in military-industrial companies, the banksters such as Goldman Sachs, and of course the bankster-crony insurers (AIG, for example).

It all makes horrible, criminal, sense.

Goldman Sachs (massive fraud) runs the whole financial bailout response by the government (Summers, Geithner, and many more in top posts, appointed by Obama). The banksters wrote the supposed credit-card reform. Boeing, the maker of the F-22, a huge player in the military industrial complex, is co-operating with this fake setback. Now the BigMed insurers have written the supposed health reform with the bait-and-switch "public option."

It all makes horrible, criminal, sense.

[listeningpost]

Couldn't we just pay industry NOT to build them? It would be much cheaper.

[TJCole]

Since Biden is in the Ukraine and Georgia right now starting a War with Russia and if the Ukraine joins NATO there will be War with Russia...so are you sure we won't wish we had 300 F-22's or more..!

[gulopartisan]

So we could use them on kamikaze missions? Or to cripple Russia's Air Force by selling them to Putin?

[Durango]

War with Russia?

That is so 1950's-60's.

This is the 21st Century. Time to get with it.

[Brian48220]

War with Russia? Really? Once every major city in the United States is reduced to a nuclear cinder, a few more pretty airplanes buzzing around isn't going to make much difference.