Word: 22s
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...strange predicament for the modest jet that was supposed to be the cheap end of the military's high-low warplane mix of F-22s and F-35s. The Pentagon launched the F-35 Lightning II program a month after 9/11. Over the past eight years, the price-per-plane has doubled - from $69 million to as much as $135 million - even as none of the 2,443 on-order planes have been delivered. The program's cost has soared from $197 billion to as much as $329 billion. Plans to profit from prospective sales of more than...
...purchase of more F-22s (beyond the 187 already acquired) was opposed by Obama, Gates, the Air Force leadership and the Senate's top military experts. That forced the F-22's backers to rely on less influential supporters - and reasons - to buy more planes: arguments from second-tier officers, imaginary threats and the most potent argument of all these days: 25,000 well-paying jobs. "This is a critically important program to maintain superiority - not parity, but superiority - which has always been our goal in protecting our national-security interests," argued Democratic Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut, whose state...
...Senate ignored such pleas to approve an amendment by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and Senator John McCain of Arizona, its ranking Republican, to strike the $1.75 billion their committee had added (over Levin and McCain's objections) for seven more F-22s. Both Pentagon and congressional aides say the vote effectively ends the program...
...Backers of the F-22 debated the issue as if Congress were considering whether to buy any of the planes, but it had actually already spent $65 billion for 187 of them. Supporters maintained that more F-22s are needed so that each of the 10 Air Expeditionary Forces that project U.S. airpower in different corners of the world could have its own 24-plane squadron. But critics said the Air Force should get used to dispatching such costly warplanes only as needed - as it does with bombers and spy planes. "We're not saying...
...22s have flown over Afghanistan or Iraq, because the plane was designed for long-range air-to-air duels with futuristic fighters that perhaps China eventually might field. "At least [the F-22s] are safe from cyberattack," wrote former Navy Secretary John Lehman over the weekend in the Wall Street Journal. "No one in China knows how to program the '83 vintage IBM software that runs them." And it's hard to talk up the Chinese threat. Pentagon officials say that by 2020, the U.S. military will be flying more than 1,000 so-called fifth-generation fighters...