House Lawmakers Fight for the F-22

Looks like wbinmd and ockraz desperately need a cold shower from someone who's actually worked in DOD, with real combat aircraft, at a real airbase - the Naval Air Warfare Center in Patuxent River, Maryland - and spoken with several graduates of the US Naval Test Pilot School located there, including one who went on to become (and may well still be) the Chief Test Pilot of the F-35/JSF program. As for wbinmd and ockraz's arguments in favor of the F-22, I've seen them all before and they not only don't add up - they're not even relevant.

Sitting on my bookshelf at home is a copy of a large glossy promo brochure printed back in the '70s to gin up public and Congressional support for a plane that was just as controversial in its day, from a defense program that history shows was saved only because the Iranians bought a bunch of 'em just before the fall of the Shah. The brochure is entitled "The F-14 Tomcat Owner's Manual," and it's chock full of charts and diagrams with circles and arrows, making exactly the same kind of claims and analysis that wbinmd presents, AND NONE OF IT MATTERED. Because in spite of its brief glory against the vastly outgunned Libyans, and getting the Hollywood propaganda treatment in "Top Gun," sustained combat operations in Iraq during both the 1991 and 2003 campaigns proved beyond doubt that the F-14 was a HANGAR QUEEN, totally incapable of matching the operational tempo of squadrons flying F-15s, F-16s, F/A18s, and even the 1950s-vintage A-6. Why? Because all of the beeping, chirping, buzzing, and squawking gizmos the Tomcat uses to track, target, and engage all those potential Soviet adversaries at once, plus the structural compromises that cramming all that stuff into the plane inevitably demand, resulted in dozens of hours of maintenance downtime for every hour actually flying in harm's way. And this is the exact reason why the F-14 was rather abruptly and unceremoniously retired in the aftermath of "Mission, Accomplished."

But there's more - a couple of dirty little secrets within the Pentagon of which F-22 apologists are either blissfully unaware or deliberately ignorant. First, although most informed observers know that the reported "cost" of a military aircraft vastly overstates the actual price of the parts and labor required to construct it, the sad truth is that it also tends to overstate the parts, labor, research, and development costs of the pieces that'll ever get used. To put it another way, the price tag that everybody's arguing about includes billions for weapons/communication/targeting systems that our combat pilots/RIOs/NFOs/WSOs will end up simply turning off in the interest of their own sanity. Task overload has been a recurring problem in advanced military aircraft since the Vietnam years, so it makes absolutely no sense to continue investing vast sums equipping planes with gee-whiz technology that counters some theoretical future threat when the distracting alarms and dead weight generated by all those expensive doo-dads - which always make such great press release material - can only be harmful to real-world combat effectiveness in the wars we're actually fighting here and now.

The second dirty secret is the fact that surprisingly little military hardware nowadays passes meaningful combat survival testing prior to the procurement decision. Under the logic of Pentagon contracting this actually makes a twisted kind of sense - few Program Officers want to invest a big chunk of their career shepherding a multibillion-dollar project through the bureaucracy only to find that their baby can be brought down by a kid with a Kalashnikov. And as the complexity and cost of projects like the F-22 continue to escalate, the likelihood of such testing declines even further and the interest of the taxpayer, not to mention the warrior in the field, gets lost in the game. Several years ago, Air & Space/Smithsonian magazine did a feature article that reinforced this very point while describing the struggles of a group inside the Pentagon that was pushing for mandatory destructive live-fire testing of all systems. One of the case studies, the US Marine Corps' AV-8B Harrier Jet, caught my eye as it had been an active flight test project during my years at Patuxent. The hovering British plane gained fame with its successes in combat against Argentina in the 1982 Falklands War, which led to the Marines acquiring an American version made under license from Hawker. Several years later this group did, against great resistance, manage to get an AV-8B subjected to their proposed testing regimen, and the article summarized the results perfectly in the reaction of one of the aircraft's original Program Managers - that if the Harrier's vulnerability to opposing fire had been known, the Marine Corps never would've bought it.

Finally, military history repeatedly shows that technological superiority ain't all it's cracked up to be. Rugged and reliable weapons, deployed in quantity and used intelligently, beat sophistication every time. The most famous examples are from World War II, starting with General Chennault and the American Volunteer Group (better known as the "Flying Tigers") successfully employing the "obsolete" P-40 against the Japanese in China. Nazi tanks outclassed their Allied counterparts in almost every way, yet the Germans still feared General Patton (and lost the war, too, btw, despite also deploying fighter jets, swept wings, and ballistic missiles way before anybody else). And of course there's Vietnam, where all the technology and bomb tonnage in the world couldn't affect the outcome - interested readers should consult the late Col. David Hackworth's memoir, "About Face," for the best discussion of Pentagon procurement priorities, and the REAL reasons for America's failure in Vietnam, that I've ever seen. Unfortunately for wbinmd and ockraz's arguments, the fundamental laws of Economics apply to combat as well, and it ain't just the peaceniks thinkin' 'bout cheaper alternatives, baby. Witness General Chuck Yeager's long advocacy of Northrop's F-20 Tigershark fighter. Witness the German General Heinz Guderian's discussion in his memoir, "Panzer Leader," of how his forces were handicapped by atrocious procurement decisions, including some made years before the war. Witness General (and later President) Eisenhower, who not only warned of the Military/Industrial Complex, but also said that the problem with Defense spending was hollowing out from within what you're trying to protect from without. And witness Colonel Hackworth (rumored to be the inspiration for the "napalm in the morning" guy in "Apocalypse Now"), who was one of the few voices during the '91 Gulf War to ignore the rah-rah over the Patriot Missile and publicly question the wisdom of spending millions of dollars per shot trying to knock down $250,000 Scuds whose guidance system was so primitive their targeting was essentially random. Certainly the Chinese, who manufacture mass quantities of everything for everybody these days, must've watched that situation with keen interest. Returning to the issue at hand, there's no doubt in my mind that Hackworth would put the F-22 solidly within his vividly descriptive category of "wonder junk."

I rest my case.