The Continued Saga of the F-22

When Secretary of Defense Robert Gates rolled out his FY2010 budget, he made the call to halt F-22 Raptor production at 187 units. After all, the F-22 has not flown a single sortie in Iraq or Afghanistan, having been designed to go up against Soviet MiGs when it was conceived in the 1980's. But yesterday, Congress went against Gates' demands and put in $369 million for continued production of the jet.

There are two different issues to discuss with regard to the F-22. First is the way in which the military industrial complex is in full swing. Congressmen like Saxby Chambliss (D-GA) have been touting the F-22 as vital for our national security for quite some time, but in reality Chambliss' interests are much more self centered. The F-22 is primarily assembled at a Lockheed Martin plant in Marietta, and if funding was cut, then jobs might be lost. What Chambliss fails to address is that the cuts in F-22 are practically being offset by the increases in F-35 production, so these jobs won't exactly wither up and die instantly if production on the F-22 was ceased. This is not about national security for Chambliss, it's about jobs. But why should hundreds of millions of Americans continue to subsidize a plane that it doesn't even need? This brings us to our second point, effectiveness of the F-22 in modern warfare.

To put it bluntly, the F-22 has no effectiveness in modern warfare. Due to the runaway costs of the F-22, less money is available for the USAF to properly train new pilots. Any military aviation strategist will tell you it's more about the level of training the pilot has rather than what kind of equipment. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, the IDF was 82-0 in aerial combat exchanges against Syrian MiGs, and IDF officials said the results would have been the same if the pilots switched aircraft because of the superior training. The F-22's sluggish size and poor maneuverability mean that it would struggle against fourth generation aircraft. The F-15 and F-16 have performed far better in agility tests. In addition, the "stealth" of the F-22 hinders its combat performance; all weapons systems must be kept behind doors, which negates the F-22's ability to engage in instantaneous engagements.

Going back to what I said earlier, the fact that the F-22 has not had one single mission in either Iraq or Afghanistan is very worrisome when considering building more of these planes. What kinds of conflicts are we expecting to fight? As I've said before on this blog, the imagined confrontation with China or Russia simply isn't likely to happen for a very long time. In the absence of World War III, the kinds of conflicts the US is likely to get dragged into will probably be missions that are heavily dependent on counterinsurgency strategy. Ground forces will be dominant, with USAF and Naval aircraft more likely to be involved in close air support and bombing missions. Air to air combat will not play a dominant role, as our enemies either do not have air forces or have very weak air forces.

The F-22 needs to be completely scrapped; it's time to go back to the drawing board and design an aircraft that can be both cost-effective and combat-effective. The US has enormous aerial superiority, and can use this as an invitation to design better aircraft in the time being. The F-22 and the equally disastrous F-35 Joint Strike Fighter need to be eliminated if we ever want to get serious about fixing the problems at the Pentagon and making this country safe.