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F-22 Fail
The Senate has voted 58-40 to cut off funding for the F-22. There's still more to come on this, both in the Senate and in conference, but it's promising news. The case against the F-22 was pretty rock solid, and if the funding cutoff had failed it would have meant that, basically, it's impossible to cut anything in the Pentagon budget. Score one for common sense.
OMG!
We're all going to die!
No, it isn't.
Kevin Drum: "The case against the F-22 was pretty rock solid"
No, it isn't. While outrageously expensive, the F-22 is the world's best air superiority fighter - the job it (and its F-15 predecessor) were designed for. The F-35 poster child is still over $80M fly-away (and its lower cost has a lot to do with its higher production volume). Moreover, the F-35 isn't anywhere near as good at air superiority - a job it was never designed for. The F-22 and F-35 are actually complements to each other, much as the F-15 and F-16 are.
F-22 not necessary in Afghanistan and Iraq? There's an old but true line that generals always try to fight the last war. Obviously a big mistake, and an equally big mistake is to design/develop/procure only for the current war.
How many do we need
Even conceding all of alex's points above, we already have 183 of them, with 4 more still scheduled for delivery. How much air superiority do we need and against whom are these going to be deployed? The Russians? The Chinese?
waterproofing might be nice
The piece that ran in the Post a couple of weeks ago was nothing if not damning. A "vulnerability to rain"? Anyway, there seems to be precious little point in spending outrageously, even for "the world's best air superiority fighter," when we already have, well, air superiority over everyone else in the world.
Of course, the prohibitive cost of a superfluous fighter program isn't going to prevent many of the very same senators who supported it from criticizing anything & everything Obama proposes as too expensive.
"The world's best air
"The world's best air superiority fighter?" Uh, maybe. When it's actually flying. 30 hours maintanence per flight hour? 1.9 mean hours between failures? That, my friend, is crap.
The real problem is yet
The real problem is yet another program that is too big to fail. In this case we're all supposed to be scared that the F-22 has no replacement as well as be scared of the job losses.
I would love to see a billion or two dedicated to figuring out how to make jet fighters go from requirement to operation in 10 years, not 20, or better than that 5 years.
I suspect the answer is to live with more fighter production lines, and fewer buys of each model and live with fighters whose requirements really do get frozen, and then do with a ton less ISO 900X and CMMI nonsense that don't generate much of anything apart from costs relating to process overhead.
I think this is true not just in fighter production but really in any mil production and even in commercial consumer production.
Now if we can just put the
Now if we can just put the axe to the Goldmans like we did the Lockheeds, then maybe, just maybe, we can finally say that crony capitalism is on the way out. But I won't be holding my breath waiting for this to happen!
I admit I don't understand
I admit I don't understand the headline. Shouldn't this have been "F-22 Epic Fail?"
Say goodbye to thousands of
Say goodbye to thousands of more jobs, thanks to the F-22 cuts. No matter, Obama's stimulus provided over one million USD to an AFB to replace some doors. Jobs saved - eight.
We won't even mention the fact that the F-22 is already a sunk cost and the maintenance time will get better as the plane and its mechanics improve over time. I'd like to see one weapons system that didn't have problems at the start.
If Obama had been president during the beginning of the Space Age, the Mercury and Apollo programs would have been scrapped for road painting works.
Jobs
I'm trying to understand the logic here. You're against wasting one million dollars but for wasting 1.75 billion, 175 times as much?
The one million dollars you refer to went to replace hangar doors, not the kind of thing that you find on the shelves of your local Home Depot. Yes, the jobs to dollars spent ratio is high, but I'm assuming the work needed to be done anyway. The F-22 on the other hand is completely unnecessary. It's a weapon with no one to possibly deploy it against. Just because we've sunk unnecessary billions into it is no reason to continue to throw money blindly down a hole.
let's get it right.
Correction: MacGruber is advocating wasting 1,750x as much. Just thought I'd get the math right.
MacGruber also seems to completely misunderstand the concept of "sunk cost." Hint: it's not typically used as a reason to continue spending. The phrase "good money after bad" comes to mind.
Good riddance to this thing.
It's a start, but the big
It's a start, but the big wastes are the neocon war against Iraq, the politically correct war against male chauvinism in Afghanistan, both in lieu of going Al Qaeda, and being the policeman of the world.
"Rock-solid"? Don't make me
"Rock-solid"? Don't make me laugh. Those seven fighters would have kept the production line open, so that we could actually build not only more fighters in the future, but build parts for the fighters we've already bought.
As is, unless they decide to export the F-22, the production line will shut down, and parts will become increasingly difficult to get for the fighters we have. That means we get the joy of having a fighter fleet composed of 30-year-old F-15s and F-16s (and they are becoming increasingly dangerous - after an F-15 broke up in the air a year ago, they imposed a mandatory upper speed limit on them), a small number of F-22s (of which only a small fraction will be useable, because of the expensive parts and the need to cannibalize some of the fighters to keep the others in the air), and the F-35, which is still in Development Hell (and will probably end up just as costly as the F-22, if not more so). Cheers.
The F-15s and F-16s had similar issues and problems when they came out. Do you think they were a bad investment, looking at it from the present?
Exactly. In fact, once you get past the sunk costs, the F-22 is actually pretty well-priced for what it is: about $100-120 million per fighter, and that's just with the present-sized order. A larger order (such as the original 700-800, which would have been the sane policy) would have driven the unit costs down even more (probably to the point where it would be close in price to the so-called "bargain" that the F-35 is supposed to be).
Wrong. It's the foundation of American air superiority in the twenty-first century, just like the F-15s and F-16s were in the late twentieth century. It makes it so that other countries won't even bother contesting American air superiority in a potential arena, much like how the above two planes did.
Seeing as how air superiority is only going to get more important over time (particularly with all kinds of super-slow drones flying around that would otherwise be easy marks for state-of-the-art Surface-to-air defense systems), it's critical that the US have that ability.
Let me get this straight.
Brett,
So you are saying once we bought the first F22, we needed to keep buying them, forever and ever, so that the production line could stay open to keep supplying parts to the failing F22s we had?
Who signed us up for this in the first place? This kind of thinking is what McCain endorsed when he said we needed to stay in Iraq for 100 years because of our bad decision to go there in the first place.
What is it with conservatives anyway. They are always talking about returning the past and yet they sign us up for 'deals' that are easy to get into and nearly impossible to get out of.
And please be specific - are you talking about keeping air superiority against China? Because I can see no other threats rich enough to buy the next generation of fighter jet.
Tripp
So you are saying once we
I'm saying that even keeping the production line going for those planes would have been enough to keep it open period, so we could build more in the future if we needed to, and so we could build parts for the ones we already have.
As is, the current amount alone - 187 - won't make it profitable to keep the production line for parts open, so the planes will eventually go to waste (along with all of the sunk costs).
Every administration and government ever since air power became a major factor during World War II, and afterwards.
Anything from China in the Far East to any potential conflict where air superiority is crucial (that includes the next Gulf War I-style action). Having the plane ensures that we have a jump-start of having air superiority in any arena we commit ourselves to for the next 30 years.
It also saves us from having to buy a whole new set of planes every ten years or so, with all the development costs. In essence, we're buying the state-of-the-art fighter now so that it will be at parity thirty years from now - sort of like how we bought state-of-the-art F-15s and F-16s back in the 1970s so we didn't have to re-design, develop, and manufacture a whole new fleet of new planes every few years.
Defense Costs
For the first time since WWII, the US is confronting the reality that you can't build all the expensive weapon systems you can design or might want. They are already planning, according to Wikipedia, to buy 2,500 F-35s, which sound like pretty impressive planes; if they weren't, why would they buy 2,500 of them?. Doubtless, there are all sorts of other planes, ships, missles, etc. in some phase of design. How can the US afford all this stuff, when we face an aging population, health care inflation, energy issues, and economic competitiveness problems?
The US is the only country in the world which claims the right and duty to intervene militarily everywhere. Whether this is tight or wrong, it is simply unaffordable.
I have fond memories of 1959, but that year will never return.
They are already planning,
At least theoretically, they're supposed to be cheaper, more "all-around" fighters that can be used for a variety of missions and by different forces (including naval and air force aviation). Of course, since it's still in Development Hell, it is a safe bet that costs are going to go up for it, particularly since they're trying to fit a whole bunch of capabilities into it.
In terms of air superiority, though, it's an inferior fighter - it lacks the F-22's stealth set-up and its super-cruise capability.
It's not that much of a burden - the biggest costs are Personnel and Operations. If you really wanted to save money on the military, the way to do it would be to pull back from operations around the world, and gut the Army in terms of personnel.
In any case, if we weren't doing it, this burden would be passed on to other states. Just look at the various states under our wing - Japan and South Korea, for example, would both have significantly higher defense budgets if they weren't allied with the US.
Perhaps worldwide, but our allies certainly aren't averse to their own interventions. The French, for example, have been meddling in the politics of their former colonies in Africa since their independence to the present, and they're opening a base in Middle East.