$3 billion here, $3 billion there!

The blowtorch above is the Pratt & Whitney engine for the USAF's new F-35 multi-role fighter--and as of this week, its only engine. Budget-cutting Republicans joined Obama-supporting Democrats to kill a rival engine project from General Electric, saving an estimated $3 billion over the life of the project.

Speaking of budget cuts, National Public Radio, Public Broadcasting Corp, and their affiliated stations are engaged in a full-court press to defeat an attempt to cut their budget. (Note the annoying fact that to the extend that they are taxpayer-subsidized, it is the taxpayer who's paying for this lobbying effort.) Hey guys, they're crying--it's only half a cent a day per American! But if you can't cut the small stuff, how are you ever going to cut the big stuff? After all, $3 billion here and $3 billion there--pretty soon it adds up to real money. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Fighter planes no, engines yes

While the F-22 air-superiority fighter has been capped at a miserly 187 aircraft, Congress is busily added a requirement for a second engine for the F-35 program (see below). The aircraft's manufacturer doesn't want a second engine. The Department of Defense doesn't want a second engine. Only the pork-barrel queens in Congress want the danged thing, because it will funnel money into their home districts and help them get reelected. The immediate price tag for this bit of redundancy is $450,000,000, but of course that's only the up-front money. By the time it's delivered, it will cost closer to $3,000,000,000, as in three billion dollars. That's about $21 from each American taxpayer, for an engine nobody wants. Perhaps more to the point, it would buy the Air Force 18 more F-22s, an acquisition that might really come in handy some day, unlike a substitute engine from a different manufacturer. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

An air-superiority fighter for China?

These images appeared in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, showing what looks very much like a worthy rival to the F-22 air-superiority fighter, recently chopped back in favor of the smaller, cheaper F-35.

The United States hasn't had to fight a serious enemy air force since the Vietnam War, and the last time an American fighter pilot anywhere shot down an enemy aircraft was during the Yugoslav fracas of 1999. Worthy of note: that "kill," by Lt Col Michael Geczy, was made by an F-15, an air-superiority fighter like the F-22. When you need such a plane, nothing else will do. Smaller, cheaper warplanes are all very well, but they can't stand up to a muscular airplane killer, and that seems to be what China is attempting to build. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

The face of future air combat

Meet the Sukhoi PAK-FA, which an Australian aviation website terms “the new, younger, tougher kid on the block, and … likely to become the nemesis of the F-22” Raptor, which the U.S. has just capped at 187 aircraft, on the theory that there’s little need in today’s world for an air-superiority fighter. The money thus saved is to go into procurement of the F-35, a smaller, lighter, cheaper, multi-role warplane to be acquired by the USAF and the Navy and Marine air arms. The logic of this move is disputed by the Australians, who argue that the F-35 just can’t stand up against the PAK-FA. India plans to co-produce the Russian plane, and Israel is a likely buyer as well. Concludes the website:

The US would be left with the scraps, producing ineffective combat aircraft that could only be sold by forcing purchases onto the wary and resentful US Armed Services, who would know that they are now ‘second tier’ and likely to be slaughtered en-masse in a shooting war.

How to rescue the situation? Easy: just cancel the F-35 program (actually, there are three such programs, since the Air Force, Navy, and Marines each have different requirements for their “joint” fighter.) Blue skies! – Dan Ford

The case against the F-22

At $350 million per copy, the F-22 Raptor is the most expensive fighter ever built, and what's the point? Since I earlier posted a defense of the F-22, it's only fair I should look at the other side, and here it is in a nutshell:

'In summary, a vote for continuing F-22 production is a vote to decay our pilots' skills, to deny them a truly great fighter, to shrink the number of pilots and planes we can field, and to reward Congress' unending appetite for pork. Unquestionably, the new 2010 Defense Authorization bill should be vetoed if a single F-22 is added. Those members of Congress who place our nation's defenses first will support that veto.'

The writer is Winslow Wheeler, director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information in Washington--inheritors of the military reform movement inspired by John Boyd. Funnily enough, Boyd was the man behind the design of the F-15 Eagle, adopted during the Carter administration, and which will remain America's air-superiority fighter unless replaced by the F-22. Read Wheeler's essay here (scroll down for the full version). Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Col Gentile goes down for the count --

-- as Sec/Defense Robert Gates reveals his priorities for defense spending. Gone is the Air Force's F-22 air-superiority fighter, except for those already ordered or in the pipeline. (Can you imagine going to war with 187--count them: 187--front-line fighters? That's about one for every country whose security the US has explicitly or implicitly guaranteed.) Gone is the new presidential helicopter. Much reduced is our missile shield, and the Night of the Living Dead program to acquire a new aerial tanker goes back to the drawing board one more time.

Much of this is good news, especially the bit about the $18 billion presidential helicopter. What in the world was the Pentagon planning to do with the president--teleport him? If he travels 100,000 miles over the next eight years--the helicopter only gets him to and from Andrews Air Force base, remember, or at most to Camp David--that would be $180,000 a mile. Obama has called the program Pentagon programming 'gone amok', and that's certainly a phrase in which the words mean something, unlike a lot of his rhetoric. Scanting the missile shield, however, makes me uneasy in the aftermath of Dear Leader Kim's missile launch last Saturday. So does Obama's guileless romp into an arms-reduction treaty with the Soviet--oops, with Russia. Given that we have likewise forsworn any improvement in our existing inventory of nukes, the madmen in charge of Iran and North Korea must be dreamily contemplating the day when they'll have nuclear parity with the United States.

(For those who haven't been following the great Gian-John Debate, Col Gentile argues that it's folly to remodel our military on the assumption that we will never again fight a conventional army. The argument now seems to be settled)

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

the case for the F-22

At $350 million per copy, the F-22 Raptor is the most expensive fighter ever built, and what's the point? The F-22 is an air-superiority fighter--that is, it clears the sky of enemy fighters so that lesser breeds of pilot can do their work of delivering goods, surveiling the battlefield, and supporting the troops on the ground. But who will challenge the US Air Force in the 21st century? A lot of bad people, if we don't acquire the F-22 in sufficient quantity, argues Mark Bowden in an awfully good article in the March Atlantic. He recalls, for example, that the Indian Air Force did very well against the USAF in 2004:

“We came rolling in, like, ‘Beep-beep, superpower coming through,’” Colonel Fornof told me. “And we had our eyes opened. We learned a lot. By the third week, we were facing a threat that we weren’t prepared to face, because we had underestimated them. They had figured out how to take Russian-built equipment and improve upon it.”

It seems that the Indians had added electronic pods to their dirt-cheap Russian MiG-21s, enabling them to meet and sometimes beat the F-15 Eagle, adopted during the Carter administration and still the plane that America depends upon to maintain air superiority. If India can do it, why not North Korea? Why not Iran? 'If the cost of air supremacy is not paid in dollars, it may be paid in blood', Bowden concludes. Worth a read. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

Congress and the F-22

The U.S. Congress is battling the Pentagon over a $140 item--not a toilet seat this time, but money that Congress wants to go to the suppliers of the F-22 Raptor project in order to keep the Lockheed-Martin assembly line open. So says the Wall Street Journal this morning. And get this: it's Congress that wants to spend the money, and the Pentagon that's being thrifty. (Well, not thrifty exactly. Sec/Defense Robert Gates is a foe of next-waritis; he wants to conserve resources for the sort of combat we face in Iraq and Afghanistan.) And the Congressional blowout is bipartisan, which ought to cheer those who feel that American politics have become too divisive in recent years: the October 31 letter to Bob Gates was signed by Ike Sketon (D-Mo), Duncan Hunter (R-Ca), Neil Abercrombie (D-Hi), and Jim Saxton (R-NJ). It used to be that politics ended at the water's edge. Now it ends at the pork barrel. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford

boots on the ground or weapons in the sky?

Great story in the Wall Street Journal this morning (alas, not available online) by August Cole and Yochi Dreazen, bearing on the Great Nagl/Gentile Debate that I've regularly cited in this blog. In short: the budget crunch will come in 2009, when domestic priorities will squeeze the Pentagon and force it to choose between Gates's hope to increase Army and Marine Corps personnel, and the generals' unvarying desire to build newer, bigger, faster, and more sophisticated things.

If Gates stays on in an Obama or McCain administration, then the Army may well get the 65,000 additional troops (and the Marines an additional 27,000, which proportionately is a much greater boost). This might also be called the Nagl Solution.

Alternately, the battle might go to Rep John Murtha, who is a big believer in the F-22 Raptor and other major pieces of hardware--the Gentile Solution. It would be an amusing but hardly unprecedented outcome if a Democratic administration ends up fattening the coffers of Lockheed Martin instead of increasing job opportunities in the military. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford