Posted on 01/01/2009 4:14:24 AM PST by pobeda1945
Sometime during his first couple of months in office, President-elect Barack Obama will have to confront one of his first big decisions about U.S. defense policy and budgets.
And it’s a thorny one.
Specifically, Obama and his as-yet-unnamed circle of top defense advisers will have to determine whether to continue spending roughly $4 billion a year to buy F-22 Raptor fighter jets built by Lockheed Martin.
They might decide, as the Bush administration has, that the F-22 is superfluous and that the money is needed for other priorities. On the other hand, the Air Force, according to defense analysts and consultants, wants to buy at least 60 more of the $180 million jets.
Jim McAleese, a consultant with close ties to the Air Force, told a Reuters conference in Washington last week that the service was putting "all its political capital" into buying more F-22s beyond the 183 on order.
(Excerpt) Read more at star-telegram.com ...
Comrade 0bama will cancel the F-22. It is the inherent nature of Marxists to weaken America to the advantage of our enemies, while pouring money into their Communistic agenda and of course, into their corrupt pockets.
Goodbye Raptor, it was nice while it lasted, which wasn’t long.
Obama needs the money to create the “domestic army” he wants to use against Americans.
Comrade Bush wants to cancel it, too.
Unlike Bush I think that Obama will agree to the additional buy. To cancel it now puts all those jobs - union jobs - at risk of being lost. Obama will play to his base.
I am betting on “plausible deniability” will keep Obama in the dark about our most secretive and technically advanced projects.Just like the episode in Independance Day the movie and the aliens hidden away from the Presidents.
No sense in giving a monkey a loaded gun.
I don’t understand why the Air Force uses high tech aircraft to drop bombs in environments that are free of air defense and enemy air craft. It would be like the Navy delivering cargo with destroyers, or the Army using Abrams tanks instead of commercial trucks.
Is one ex-Air Force pilot, aeronautical engineer, and acquisition officer who completely agrees with you.
The simple truth is the F-22 was, and is, killing the Air Force budget.
One of the reasons Gates sacked the Air Force Chief of Staff and Secretary is because of the terrible myopic tunnel vision they had regarding the F-22.
The nuke handling problems were "boob bait for the bubbas" and a good public excuse.
The F-22 is the most expensive fighter in history. Only the B-2 can be calculated to be more expensive, and that only comes about when you add in decades of US stealth research to the per unit cost.
Because of Air Force leadership "Gotta-Have-It-itis", they decided (during a time of war on two fronts), to sack 40,000 people.
Then, they backtracked when it backfired - and tried other budget shenanigans.
What will Obama do about the F-22?
The same thing he will do about everything else - what he is told to do. Obama would not know an F-22 from a Formula-1 car.
The man has no experience that qualified him for this position.
I think that it might be better to consider the F/A-22 to be an interim type. We’ve got two problems. First off they’re expensive. A hundred eighty million is what a destroyer or a frigate costs, and paying that much for what by the nature of it’s employment is a fungible asset is insane.
Secondly, they’re so expensive that we dare not hazard them in combat because soon they’ll be out of production and we can’t replace them. That’s about the same as not having airplanes in the first place. Losing any, will be a net loss to us no matter how many enemy aircraft they destroy.
So, I think that what we need to do is to keep the F-22 line open, but at the same time, we need to come up with what I guess we could call and Advanced Austere Air Superiority Fighter. Figure, a flyaway cost of fifty million or less.
Think about it. When I was a kid, McDonnell-Douglas produced around 2700 F-4 Phantom II variants at around four and a half million per copy, and Congress was threatening to close the F-14A production line because they cost thirteen point two million each, and it took a direct threat by Grumman to shut the line down themselves if Congress wasn’t willing to purchase Lot 13, which was the first production lot that they were going to make any money on. Idiots like Proxmire were outvoted and the Tomcat was the top line Navy fighter until it was withdrawn, prematurely IMHO, from service.
And even with inflation, we’re looking at the fifty to sixty million range as a comparative flyaway cost with the old Tomcat. We should be able to build an acceptable fighter that we can acquire in quantity for a like sum, when you adjust for inflation.
More importantly, we could have a plane that could deal with Neo-Soviet and Chinese Fifth Generation Fighter programs that has some small chance of being acquired in quantity— something that flat won’t happen with the F/A-22 Raptor.
And we can’t rely on the F-34 and it’s various variants because it’s really more of a modern equivalent of an A-4 Skyhawk, (although I do think that Ed Heineman could still have done it better— we really need a new “Scooter”) and it doesn’t change the fact that we need an air superiority fighter and we need one that we can acquire in quantity, risk in combat and tolerate losses which is inevitable in any form of air war.
Bottom line here is that the Air Force needs to start thinking like guys who are going to fight a real war, rather than guys who play for bragging rights.
I figger it will take His O-ness about 6 months to decide just exactly what an F-22 is....
The F-22 is so much superior to enemy aircraft that the Russians and Chinese are screaming “Unfair!” That should tell us all something.
If Russia and China are screaming unfair, then you're right, time to build that sucker.
Even a stopped clock is correct twice a day, here the jorge administration is correct.
If only oumoney could buy politicians of the exceptional quality of the F-22 Raptor!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.