The Pentagon Kluge That Refuses to Die
Led by the Lockheed Corporation's mega-porker, Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), a majority of the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) tried last summer to revive the Air Force's dying F-22 program. The "Raptor" fighter was perhaps the lowest of the hanging fruit that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates' announced in April should no longer over-burden the Pentagon budget. After a long, brutish and nasty fight, Gates and President Obama ultimately prevailed in a 58-40 vote on July 21 that ostensibly ended further F-22 production.
Game over. Right?
Anyone who thinks so does not appreciate the staying power of Congress' porkers.
It is not that the F-22 devotees feel honor bound to bravely press on for their cause and to challenge Gates and Obama to another public fight. That is not how they operate. Having met serious opposition, they now lurk in the shadows looking for an opportunity to sneak something by - just as they do with most congressional pork: pretending their earmarks are just what the troops at war need and concealing the obscene way they pay for their pork (by raiding money for support for the troops at war).
Truly, the F-22 boosters would be foolish to try to press for another public debate; they have no case. Not a single F-22 has ever flown in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and none ever will. Not only are they irrelevant to the wars there, but their gigantic logistic tail (far beyond any other fighter aircraft in history) would impede, not enhance, operations.
Worse, if there ever were an al Qaeda or Taliban air force to shoot down, the F-22 would be a horrible idea. It is a huge disappointment in terms of aerodynamic performance, and it relies on a form of electronics-based aerial warfare that has failed time and time again in previous air wars. Moreover, this highly problematic "beyond visual range" air engagement has vulnerabilities that our Air Force mostly believes it can ignore as a real threat in training exercises.
And then, there's the cost. While the airplane's advocates keep on chanting that it "only" costs $143 million per plane, the seven aircraft Saxby Chambliss tried to buy were costed by Lockheed at $1.7 billion; that's almost $250 million each. If you count the full cost of all development and testing, the total unit cost is more like $350 million, according to the latest available DOD data.
The effect of all this has been a disaster: at historically high levels of spending, our combat Air Force is smaller than at any point since World War II; the aircraft are, on average, older than ever before, and our pilots get less in-air combat training than they did during the low readiness Clinton years.
It is no wonder the F-22 advocates are not looking for a rematch with Gates and Obama.
If it were substantive arguments that really mattered, the F-22 -- and a whole lot more -- never would have gotten out of the Pentagon's incubator for bad but expensive ideas.
It's credit back home for bringing in the bacon and grubbing for contributions from manufacturers that move many on Capitol Hill. Thus, they prefer to press on -- but only indirectly.
The new gambit is foreign sales. Perhaps Japan can be convinced that the $355 million flying contraption is something they need. Australia, just now bringing to a close a four decade long nightmare with an earlier fiasco bought from the US at great cost (the F-111), might also - inexplicably - be interested.
This week Congress is sending to President Obama its new 2010 defense policy ("authorization") bill. It contains a provision to permit previously prohibited foreign sales of the F-22, if its highly classified (but also dubious) technology can be modified to be exportable. The bill also requires that F-22 tooling and facilities be indefinitely preserved to make future production possible.
We can now expect manufacturer (and congressional) delegations to wing across the Pacific to lobby Japan. If they succeed, the F-22 production line - now scheduled to close in 2011 - will remain open. Expect then a renewed lobbying effort to sell more to the US Air Force.
Somewhat cloaked in all this are some elements the F-22 pushers do not seek to disseminate: US taxpayers are to pay for modifications of the aircraft to make it available for these foreign sales, and primary among those modifications is very likely to be a new design for the aircraft's so-called radar invisible ("stealthy") skin. A whistle-blower lawsuit has revealed that the multi-layer skin is highly problematic for manufacture and maintenance and may be making the aircraft even more detectable to radars - some of which can already detect the F-22 quite readily.
It is sad that the Pentagon's aviation bureaucracy gives the taxpayers such a costly disappointment for our Air Force. The F-22 solves none of our problems; in fact, it makes them all worse. And yet, some want to perpetuate that deterioration in our own forces and spread it to our allies.
Follow Winslow T. Wheeler on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Winslow T. Whee
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No! we Need the airplane, the USA spend ALMOST as much money as the rest of the world combined,
the USA Must Be #1!
The F-22's technical faults aside, the next air war (if there is one...and I think there will be one....Tai
Besides, even the Air Force realizes unmanned vehicles will control the air. (Which is why we've given our computer industry to China.)
The next generation missiles will use visual sensors in addition to radar and infra-red.
Yet we became dependent on missiles during 'Nam, which led to the creation of Top Gun and Red Flag to teach us how to dogfight again.
The real problem with the F-22 was the legalese in the contract, which made it a set price regardless of how many copies were purchased. In reality the things cost $70 million apiece.
These guys tell us that health insurance is too costly, we can't afford it. But we can afford useless war machines that serve no useful purpose. They want to keep the government out of health care, but don't you even dare to suggest that we get government out of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Do I detect a faint aroma of hypocrisy here?
Not so faint, I would say!
The pump don't work 'cause the vandals took the handle-- The procurement system for all its hilarious overruns and corruption is one of the places in the workings of our government that incumbents can point to when they seek to woo voters in their perpetual re-election campaigns, otherwise known as their careers. 'Look! I brought all this money back to the district!' The fact that the money is wasted on superfluous weaponry or bases that no longer have any strategic or tactical or training value means nothing to them, or evidently to the voters. Former Pentagon brass, now in shiny civvy suits, court their former employees for contracts, often with the tacit understanding that big contracts now mean good jobs for the co-operators tomorrow. The extra money hidden amongst the overruns and redesigns and cost recalculations often turn up in the coffers of incumbents who have nothing but yes to say to military spending increases. And so it goes. Money madness has ruined our democracy. We would do ourselves a big favor if we would move past being shocked, shocked that there is gambling at Rick's.
Amen.
With our defense budget currently exceeding the annual expenditures of all other nations combined, and with Air Force propaganda constantly sugar coating performance of their latest toy, its time to stop indiscriminantly awarding the military's voracious appetites for ultra-expensive contraptions which they no longer require.,
"its time to stop indiscriminantly awarding the military's voracious appetites for ultra-expensive contraptions which they no longer require.," . . . if they ever did.
Question: many are aware that America has the highest military budget in the world, more than all others combined, I've read. But is it not also the largest item in our budget? And the irony is that not a very large percentage of these funds go towards making the life of the ordinary serviceperson more bearable, much less, safer!
It amazes me that we share this planet with people who think this is an OK way of being for humanity.
That attitude is known as Fighting The Last War, and it's dangerous and more expensive because it results in purpose-building equipment to deal with specific threats rather than multirole flexibility that anticipates a variety of threats. Al-Qaeda may not have an air force, but China does, and I doubt a prop-driven Predator drone can hold its own against a jet-driven manned MiG.
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