The debate about the F-22.
Bentley Rayburn at NRO:
Meanwhile, Obama is cutting our military’s budget to the bone and marrow. Funding for land-based missile defense, the F-22 Raptor, and the Air Force’s refueling tankers will be reduced, eliminated, or delayed — even though these programs are vital to our national defense.
As a career Air Force officer, I agree with Defense Secretary Robert Gates that we must focus on winning the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. But we also need to be preparing for — and deterring — future conflicts. At a time when Iran is actively pursuing nuclear weapons and North Korea is firing missiles over Japan, it makes no sense to cut $1.4 billion from missile defense. The U.S. has made major strides in missile-defense technology and has spent enormous diplomatic capital to encourage Poland and the Czech Republic to let us base missile-defense installations in those countries. Cutting this program at this time sends the wrong signal to our friends and adversaries alike.
Benjamin H. Friedman at Cato:
The logic behind keeping the line open is simple. Politically, defense production lines are hungry mouths to feed, a concentrated set of interests that compel their representatives to favor continued procurement or export licenses. Advocates of defense programs understand that political demand will dissipate when the line closes. So when their program is in political trouble, they punt, and ask for just enough money to keep it open, trying to live to play another day.
We should stop buying the F-22. But I worry that doves consume their political energy arguing about the merits of particular defense programs, while mostly ignoring the bloated defense budget and the excessive commitments it underwrites. The F-22 is just a symptom of the larger malady. With all sorts of new spending commitments and a recession, this is a relatively good time to make the case against our hegemonic military posture and its extraordinary cost, fiscal and otherwise. That’s a way to kill the F-22, and more.
James Joyner links to David Axe at Defense Tech. Both pieces are from 2006. James Joyner also provides us with a link to Andrew Exum, from February:
Those of you who still read the paper copy of the Washington Post in the morning could not have helped but notice the full-page color advertisement for the F-22 in today’s front section. The really interesting thing about the advertisement was that it made the case for the F-22 based upon two things:
1. National Security
2. American JobsAnd this, folks, is why the F-22 is never ever going away. Because at this stage, it’s defenders have all but abandoned the increasingly laughable idea that manned aircraft is the way of the future and have begun to call the F-22 what it actually is: a massive federal jobs program.
Lockheed instead will focus on accelerating deliveries of the F-35 Lightning II fighter, which Gates chose as priority over the F-22. They want to push the schedule so that they can make up the difference in revenue quickly, as the lack of sales would likely force layoffs rather than transfers to the new program. They scheduled F-35 deliveries originally to begin in 2010 and to meet operational levels in 2012, but with the extra labor and narrower focus, perhaps Lockheed can move those dates up a bit.
The withdrawal will likely close a minor debate point from President Obama’s critics, who looked at the scale of government stimulus spending in other sectors and wondered why the F-22 wouldn’t make a good subject for job preservation. The entire production chain employed 95,000 people by its advocates’ estimates, and the price of delivering the remaining Raptors would have been dwarfed by the rest of Porkulus. With Lockheed conceding the point, the question is now moot.
Moving forward to today, Hilzoy’s last post:
Think about this, though. Here we have a plane that suffers from huge problems, is incredibly expensive, and meets only seven of its 22 “key requirements”. It was designed for the Cold War, which is over. An Air Force Major is quoted in the article as saying that “it is one of the easiest planes to fly, from the pilot’s perspective”, but I’d imagine that ease might be outweighed by being imprisoned inside it, or having the boom give way and suffering “catastrophic loss of the aircraft”, or any of the other “critical failures” that occur once every 1.7 hours of flying time.
And yet, at a time when we need to save money, somehow Senators from some of the many, many states in which Lockheed-Martin’s suppliers are located cannot be persuaded to cancel it.
We need jobs. But there are many, many more efficient ways to produce them, and many investments that we genuinely need to make. This is not one of them.
Three posts from Michael Goldfarb in TWS, here, here, here. Goldfarb:
Yesterday John McCain took to the floor of the Senate to make the administration’s case on cutting F-22. He asked Carl Levin when there would be a vote on the amendment stripping F-22 funding from the defense authorization. Levin replied that the Senate would vote by noon today. A source on the Hill now tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD that such a vote is unlikely. This source added that whenever the vote does come down, “it will likely be a close vote.”
Indeed, one thing that’s been consistent throughout this process has been quiet support for F-22, in contrast to the vocal opposition from Obama, Gates, and McCain. Most people thought that F-22 was DOA as soon as Gates released the administration’s defense budget. But it turns out that support for the program in Congress is pretty broad. As one Democratic member of the House Armed Services Committee told Tom Donnelly and Gary Schmitt for their piece in this week’s issue, “It’s not a Democrat or Republican thing at all, but rather a Congress versus the executive in terms of who’s in charge.”
Matt Duss at Think Progress:
Meanwhile, Mike Goldfarb observes that “one thing that’s been consistent throughout this process has been quiet support for F-22, in contrast to the vocal opposition from Obama, Gates, and McCain. Most people thought that F-22 was DOA as soon as Gates released the administration’s defense budget. But it turns out that support for the program in Congress is pretty broad.”
I don’t know if I’d call Lockheed and Boeing spending $6.5 million and $2.4 million, respectively, on lobbying in the first three months of 2009 “quiet support.” But yes, it is rather impressive what kind of support can be gotten for an item that the military doesn’t want by spreading its production out into 48 different states, donating vast sums of money to various political action committees, and sending armies of lobbyists onto the Hill. It’s almost as if politicians were interested in getting re-elected or something.
Bill Gertz in the Washington Times
Christian at Defense Tech
Max Boot in Commentary:
As I’ve said before, I’m ambivalent. On the one hand, I am sympathetic to the case made by Secretary of Defense Bob Gates — and endorsed by the Air Force leadership — that we don’t need more F-22s given that we are planning to purchase large numbers of F-35s that will give us the next-generation fighter capability that we need. The F-22 is a more capable aircraft but the F-35 is still better than what any other air force in the world has.
On the other hand, the case for shutting down a production line and throwing 25,000 workers out of a job is a hard one to make while we are still mired in a recession and spending hundreds of billions of dollars to create jobs elsewhere. Buying more F-22s is a more useful way to stimulate the economy than a lot of domestic boondoggles.
So where do I come out on this? If Congress were willing to add $1.75 billion to the defense budget for more F-22s, I would be in favor of the proposal. But as things stand now, the supporters of the F-22 aren’t planning to add enough funds to the budget to buy the planes they want. The funding will have to come out of other defense programs, many of which are of much greater relevance to the threats we face today than the futuristic F-22, which don’t have a role in Afghanistan or Iraq. Therefore, I’m siding with opponents of the F-22 at least for the time being.
John Cole quotes Eisenhower.
UPDATE: Robert Farley
UPDATE #2: Senate stripped the funding.
Two posts from Michael Crowley at TNR, here and here.
UPDATE #3: Fred Kaplan in Slate
UPDATE #4: Michael Goldfarb in TWS
Gordon Adams in HuffPo
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July 17, 2009 at 7:49 pm
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