Sunday, February 22, 2009
KADENA AIR BASE, Japan (AP) — When Lt. Col. Lance Pilch climbs into his F-22 fighter jet, he is confident that he’s about to fly the most advanced, fastest and stealthiest thing in the air. He boasts that to even compare his fighter to the workhorses of the Air Force, the battleworn F-15s and F-16s, is unfair.
“People often forget, the F-16 and F-15 are 30-plus-year-old aircraft,” he said, as several of the dull gray fighters in his 12-plane squadron buzzed overhead on their way to training over the Pacific. “You don’t drive a 30-year-old car. You trade it in after six or seven years.”
But you don’t necessarily buy a Ferrari.
At $140 million a pop, the F-22 is the most expensive fighter ever built. And even before seeing combat, it might fall prey to President Barack Obama’s pen.
In one of the new president’s first major decisions on U.S. defense spending, future funding for the radar-evading stealth fighter will soon be on the block, affecting nearly 100,000 jobs spread across virtually every state in the U.S. and impacting military planning for decades to come.
Opponents say the more than $65 billion F-22 program is sucking money away from other, more immediate needs and might be better spent on a different plane altogether. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which is under development, is seen by some as more versatile, more realistic and, more importantly, cheaper, at about $80 million per plane.
Doubters in the Defense Department, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates, have been hesitant to build more than the 183 F-22s the U.S. is now committed to. That is a huge cut from the fleet of 750 originally planned in the late 1980s, when the plane was being developed as a counterbalance to advanced fighters produced or planned by the Soviet Union.
“Spending more on outrageously overpriced weapons and unproven notions of hypothetical warfare will only make our massive problems worse,” said Winslow Wheeler of the Center for Defense Information. “Instead, we need to demand wholesale changes — first in the bloated girth of our defense budget, and second, but more importantly, in the thinking behind how it all goes together.”
Obama must decide by March 1 whether to spend $523 million on more of the planes. That would still fall far short of the 381 F-22s the Air Force had until recently said it wanted to build. In a further compromise, the Air Force said this week that it was willing to go lower.
2008, The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.