The news from the war zone is that the Air Force’s F-22 fighter was shot out of the sky over Capitol Hill last week by the House of Representatives. Given the peculiar nature of congressional warfare, a fighter that crashed and burned last week may fly again if the House-Senate conference committee chooses to reverse the law of political gravity.
Even though the outcome is still uncertain, it was an historic moment for the House, a body that almost never says “no” to a new weapon. Even though the Cold War has been over for a decade, the federal government still spends 50 cents of every dollar on the military. This year, that figure equals $266 billion. That’s billion with a “b” as in “bomb” or “bombast.” And it’s almost three billion dollars more than the Pentagon generals asked for. Go figure.
But let’s look at the F-22. It’s newer, it’s faster, it’s more powerful than the F-15, the current workhorse of Air Force squadrons. It was originally developed to compete with Soviet fighters, but for those of you who may have missed it, there is no more Soviet Union and thus no Soviet fighters. There is Russia, but Russian pilots have 25-year-old planes and cannot fly them, because they lack gas and spare parts.
So far, the Pentagon has spent over $20 billion on the F-22 and it has completed five percent of its flight tests. Those flight tests have turned up problems with the F-22’s wings, brakes, fuselage, fuel lines and engine. The on-board computers have yet to be tested. Oh, and three more things, the manufacturer is having trouble attaching the wings to the body and there’s trouble with the navigation and weapons systems.
We’re not even sure how much they cost. According to the New York Times, the F-22 will cost $70 million per plane. According to the acting Air Force secretary, they will cost $84 million each. That is, of course, not counting the cost of fixing the long list of items I just mentioned.
If Congress still can’t make up its mind, perhaps we should look at our recently-concluded war, which was fought exclusively from the air. The heroes of that war were not the newest, fastest, most expensive planes, but two veterans of the Vietnam era – the B-52 and the A-10. The biggest problem of the war was that our planes were often kept on the ground by bad weather. Even though they cost hundreds of millions of dollars each, stealth fighters don’t like to go out in the rain. They have a reputation for melting. We used to have a plane that performed well in bad weather, the A-6, but we don’t have any of them any more. They were cancelled in favor of something newer, faster and more expensive. Our only plane that was shot down in the war was a stealth fighter, one of the new, fast, expensive ones.
A perennial critique of the military is that it spends all its time fighting the last war. That’s still true. The Cold War is over. The golden age of fighter jocks, jousting in the air, is over.
The argument you will hear in the next week – attended by much wailing and rending of garments, is that we owe it to our brave servicemen and women to put them in the most overpriced cockpits we can buy. Anything less, we will be told, is an unacceptable risk. In fact, if we put any pilot in any new cockpit at all, it will constitute an unacceptable risk. We have the technical capacity to build the next generation of warplanes without pilots at all. We can fly them by remote control.
If we decide to start fighting the next war instead of the last war, maybe we can reduce the chance that there’ll be a next war.
The F Word
The news from the war zone is that the Air Force’s F-22 fighter was shot out of the sky over Capitol Hill last week by the House of Representatives. Given the peculiar nature of congressional warfare, a fighter that crashed and burned last week may fly again if the House-Senate conference committee chooses to reverse the law of political gravity.
Even though the outcome is still uncertain, it was an historic moment for the House, a body that almost never says “no” to a new weapon. Even though the Cold War has been over for a decade, the federal government still spends 50 cents of every dollar on the military. This year, that figure equals $266 billion. That’s billion with a “b” as in “bomb” or “bombast.” And it’s almost three billion dollars more than the Pentagon generals asked for. Go figure.
But let’s look at the F-22. It’s newer, it’s faster, it’s more powerful than the F-15, the current workhorse of Air Force squadrons. It was originally developed to compete with Soviet fighters, but for those of you who may have missed it, there is no more Soviet Union and thus no Soviet fighters. There is Russia, but Russian pilots have 25-year-old planes and cannot fly them, because they lack gas and spare parts.
So far, the Pentagon has spent over $20 billion on the F-22 and it has completed five percent of its flight tests. Those flight tests have turned up problems with the F-22’s wings, brakes, fuselage, fuel lines and engine. The on-board computers have yet to be tested. Oh, and three more things, the manufacturer is having trouble attaching the wings to the body and there’s trouble with the navigation and weapons systems.
We’re not even sure how much they cost. According to the New York Times, the F-22 will cost $70 million per plane. According to the acting Air Force secretary, they will cost $84 million each. That is, of course, not counting the cost of fixing the long list of items I just mentioned.
If Congress still can’t make up its mind, perhaps we should look at our recently-concluded war, which was fought exclusively from the air. The heroes of that war were not the newest, fastest, most expensive planes, but two veterans of the Vietnam era – the B-52 and the A-10. The biggest problem of the war was that our planes were often kept on the ground by bad weather. Even though they cost hundreds of millions of dollars each, stealth fighters don’t like to go out in the rain. They have a reputation for melting. We used to have a plane that performed well in bad weather, the A-6, but we don’t have any of them any more. They were cancelled in favor of something newer, faster and more expensive. Our only plane that was shot down in the war was a stealth fighter, one of the new, fast, expensive ones.
A perennial critique of the military is that it spends all its time fighting the last war. That’s still true. The Cold War is over. The golden age of fighter jocks, jousting in the air, is over.
The argument you will hear in the next week – attended by much wailing and rending of garments, is that we owe it to our brave servicemen and women to put them in the most overpriced cockpits we can buy. Anything less, we will be told, is an unacceptable risk. In fact, if we put any pilot in any new cockpit at all, it will constitute an unacceptable risk. We have the technical capacity to build the next generation of warplanes without pilots at all. We can fly them by remote control.
If we decide to start fighting the next war instead of the last war, maybe we can reduce the chance that there’ll be a next war.