Rare it is when members of Congress turn a deaf ear to the demands of their fat-cat lobbyist contributors and actually vote not to spend money on a huge pile of crap – but that’s what happened in the Senate this week as senators, prodded by President Barack Obama, voted 58-40 to kill Saxby Chambliss’ latest attempt to keep siphoning billions of taxpayer dollars to a pork-barrel project known as the F-22 Raptor.
The F-22 is a fighter jet that was developed for use in conventional wars against large nations like China or Russia. It uses stealth technology which presumably would allow it to carry out combat missions undetected by enemy radar. We can’t know that for sure because the F-22 has never flown a combat mission, even though it’s been in development and production for nearly 30 years.
It is also the most expensive jet ever ordered by the U.S. military: when you roll in all the costs of research and development that went into it, the F-22 costs taxpayers about $350 million apiece (we’re on the hook to buy 187 of them).
Defense Secretary Robert Gates says he doesn’t want or need any more of these expensive heaps, contending that the money would be better spent fighting the kinds of non-conventional, asymmetric wars in which the military has been engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama agreed with him and threatened to veto any spending bill that included money for additional F-22s. Senators like John McCain, who’s both a combat vet and a conservative Republican, called the F-22 a prime example of pork-barrel spending for an unneeded weapons system.
Enter Chambliss, who did some fancy committee maneuvering on a defense authorization bill and succeeded in moving nearly $2 billion to build seven more F-22s – a fighter jet that defense officials don’t want and say is no longer vital to the nation’s defense.
His motives were obvious: the F-22 is built at the Lockheed Martin plant in Marietta, smack in the middle of a county that still has a lot of Republican voters. Chambliss and his junior partner, Johnny Isakson, saw all sorts of reasons for building this clunker that the secretary of defense – a Republican holdover from the Bush administration – wanted to wash his hands of.
“The F-22 is the most sophisticated fighter jet in the world with the latest stealth technology to reduce detection by radar, and this plane is vital to 21st century American military superiority,” Isakson said. “I’m extremely disappointed the Senate did not recognize how essential the continued production of this aircraft is to our national security.”
How would he know whether the jet is vital to military superiority? The F-22 has never flown a single combat mission over the current hot spots in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“It is regrettable that the administration needs to issue a veto threat for funding intended to meet a real national security requirement that has been consistently confirmed by our uniformed military leaders,” Chambliss said.
Again, how would he know? Chambliss has never served a day in the military. Remember, he skipped the Vietnam War because of a “bum knee.” From what part of his personal experience does he derive this certainty that the F-22 is “a real national security requirement” for the military?
One of the best analyses of the F-22’s flaws was recently reported by R. Jeffrey Smith of the Washington Post. Here are some interesting things to know about an aircraft that Chambliss wanted to spend another $2 billion of your money on:
It requires more than 30 hours of maintenance for every hour it spends in the skies, “pushing its hourly cost of flying to more than $44,000, a far higher figure than for the warplane it replaces, confidential Pentagon test results show.” The aircraft’s radar-absorbing metallic skin is the principal cause of its maintenance troubles, with unexpected shortcomings — such as vulnerability to rain and other abrasion. . . .
While most aircraft fleets become easier and less costly to repair as they mature, key maintenance trends for the F-22 have been negative in recent years, and on average from October last year to this May, just 55 percent of the deployed F-22 fleet has been available to fulfill missions guarding U.S. airspace, the Defense Department acknowledged this week. The F-22 has never been flown over Iraq or Afghanistan. . . .
Skeptics inside the Pentagon note that the planes, designed 30 years ago to combat a Cold War adversary, have cost an average of $350 million apiece and say they are not a priority in the age of small wars and terrorist threats. . . .
Pentagon officials such as Thomas Christie, the top weapons testing expert from 2001 to 2005 . . . says that because of the plane’s huge costs, the Air Force lacks money to modernize its other forces adequately and has “embarked on what we used to call unilateral disarmament.” . . .
Skin problems — often requiring re-gluing small surfaces that can take more than a day to dry — helped force more frequent and time-consuming repairs, according to the confidential data drawn from tests conducted by the Pentagon’s independent Office of Operational Test and Evaluation between 2004 and 2008.
Over the four-year period, the F-22’s average maintenance time per hour of flight grew from 20 hours to 34, with skin repairs accounting for more than half of that time — and more than half the hourly flying costs — last year, according to the test and evaluation office.
The Air Force says the F-22 cost $44,259 per flying hour in 2008; the Office of the Secretary of Defense said the figure was $49,808. The F-15, the F-22’s predecessor, has a fleet average cost of $30,818. . . .
The plane’s million-dollar radar-absorbing canopy has also caused problems, with a stuck hatch imprisoning a pilot for hours in 2006 and engineers unable to extend the canopy’s lifespan beyond about 18 months of flying time. It delaminates, “loses its strength and finish,” said an official privy to Air Force data.
In the interview, Ahern and Air Force Gen. C.D. Moore confirmed that canopy visibility has been declining more rapidly than expected, with brown spots and peeling forcing $120,000 refurbishments at 331 hours of flying time, on average, instead of the stipulated 800 hours. . . .
At the plane’s first operational flight test in September 2004, it fully met two of 22 key requirements and had a total of 351 deficiencies; in 2006, it fully met five; in 2008, when squadrons were deployed at six U.S. bases, it fully met seven.
This is what we’re paying $350 million for?
When the defense authorization bill came up for a Senate vote this week, Obama prevailed over Chambliss and the Senate killed the funding. If the House agrees with the Senate’s action, then maybe the Defense Department can commission some weapons systems that actually work.
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