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July 22, 2009
No More F-22 Raptors
President Obama, aided by Senator John McCain, won their battle to halt production of the F-22 Raptor at 187 aircraft in a 58 - 40 vote in the Senate. 141 have been built so far. According to Wikipedia, the Pentagon originally requested 750, scaled that down to 442 in 1994, went down again to 339 in 1997, and in 2003 dropped it again to 223. We are told that the Pentagon opposed production of 187 aircraft, which will be used by opponents. Knowing people who have worked on this program, I don't believe for a second that's really true. A president can always find careerist officers who will promote whatever policy he chooses to implement.
You can tell I think it was a bad decision.
I did an fairly lengthy post on the F-22 back in April, and since there's no need to reinvent the wheel I'm not going to repeat myself. Interested parties can go to that post for the full argument in favor of building more Raptors. Suffice it to say for now that we have put all our eggs in the F-35 Lightning II basket, which is an airplane not yet in production, and until then we'll have to rely the fleet of 1970's vintage F-15s, F-16s, and F-18s.
Whatever you want to think about the F-22, let's not have any sillyness about "garguantian" defense budgets. As I have shown, Obama's budgets will cut military spending to pre - 9/11 levels, and that at below 4% of GDP, US defense spending is at a post-World War II low (excepting the late 1990s, when under Clinton it fell to 3%).
Othewise, this email posted at TWS says it best:
Clearly the White House and Gates were able to strong-arm wondering Dems, like Kerry in particular. I would say prospects in conference not good; House provision was weaker and so are the House politicians involved.At a little higher level, this is what happens when defense budgeting is a zero-sum game. Even any Army end-strength increase is going to have to come out of some other hide (don't expect that allegedly walled-off FCS money to be around very long).
This is also a very good day for the ChiComs: less for them to worry about, not only from us but from the Japanese (this pretty much kills export of F-22). And it is a big step in confirming the long-term decline of US defenses that the Obama budget/program represents. Even if much/most of his domestic program doesn't make it, he's begun locking in yet another decade of defense neglect.
There will soon be a crisis of American airpower: old F-15 and F-16s, aging F-18s and not enough of them to fill carrier decks, too few F-22s (that you're going to be very reluctant to use) and late arriving (and limited) F-35s (and what's the likelihood that F-35 goes forward according to plan?), plus a dinky and old bomber fleet. I haven't worked out the numbers, but if you look forward 7-10 years, the picture has got to be very ugly.
But then again, since there are going to be no tankers, it doesn't matter that there are no fighters.
They're high-fiving it in China, North Korea, Russia, Iran, Venezuela....
Posted by Tom at July 22, 2009 8:00 AM
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Comments
I will go back to read the post in April which I missed but one thing that struck me about this aircraft is that required a great deal of maintenance for every hour of flight. I will inquire of my former USAFA friends who were fighter jocks.
TLGK
Posted by: The Loop Garoo Kid at July 31, 2009 10:52 PM
Thanks, LLGK, I'd be interested to know their comments. A few additional thoughts of my own.
A few years ago my brother worked as a civilian for the Air Force. One thing he used to say was that the F-22 was center all things Air Force. As it was the only plane on the planning charts, they felt they had to get it in order to have a future.
This raises another point; the incredibly shrinking number of types of aircraft in our inventory. I don't know how closely you follow these things, but 40 years ago we were producing a dozen or more types fighters and bombers at once. Each service had many types of fighters, attack, and bomber aircraft. As time has gone on, the types have dwindled.
The situation is especially bad with the Navy. A carrier deck 30 years ago featured the F-14, F-18, A-6, A-7, and not too much earlier also an F-8 for reconnaissance, and a few A-3 or A-5s as "heavy" strategic bombers.
Now all you see are F-18s, the original Hornet and the Super Hornet (E/F), in the combat role. And the F-35 Lightning II is due to replace the original Hornet in the air superiority role, something that is badly needed.
The point is we're putting all of our eggs in fewer and fewer baskets, so if an aircraft doesn't work out we're still stuck with it. Back in the 1950s and 60s many models only lasted a relatively few short years because they didn't work out (B-58 Hustler, F7 Cutlass).
Because we produce fewer types the new ones must be multi-mission. In the past each type above was highly specialized. The advantage of multi-role is efficiency, the risk is that although it may perform each role tolerably it doesn't do any exceptionally well.
Re F-22 maintenance:
Let's remember that all new models suffer teething trouble. I've read a bit about the history of the development of new aircraft, and even ones that we later see as successful had terrible troubles at first and were criticized at the time. We foolishly didn't put a gun on the initial F-4 Phantoms, and the engines left a smoke trail ("hey, here I am!"). The first batch of P-51 Mustangs had the lousy Allison engines and performed poorly. The B-1b Lancer had trouble with it's electronic countermeasures systems.
Sometimes the problems are solved, sometimes not and the aircraft becomes a dog (see the F7 Cutlass above). By only producing one or two types of aircraft today we risk getting a dog and not being able to do anything about it.
Posted by: Tom the Redhunter at August 1, 2009 9:59 AM
