In a recent vote, the US Senate voted down the building of 7 more F-22A Raptors for the 2010 fiscal year. Anyone who is surprised by this hasn't paid attention to this nation's history of defense spending. In a nutshell, we come up with a great idea for defeating a certain threat, then we take so long to actually put the idea into production that the threat is gone before said idea becomes operational.

Lockheed Martin's magazine "Code One" ran a 2 part article in 1998 about the design history of the F-22. Even though the "official beginning of the ATF program" (program that begat the Raptor) began in 1981, the idea dates back to 1972. It took until 1986 before two major companies had been allocated funds for what was known as demonstration/validation; in other words, a competition. Both Northrup and Lockheed (no Grumman or Martin at this point in history) received close to $700 million each to build multiple flying prototypes. It took Lockheed a year simply to figure out what configuration would be the best compromise of speed, maneuverability, lethality, stealth, maintainability, etc. It took another year for them to refine the configuration (Config. # 632) to the point that it could do all the things required of it by the USAF.

The resultant YF-22 (remember Y-planes and X-planes?) was rolled out in August 1990 and flew one month later. By April of 1991, Secretary of the Air Force Donald Rice named Lockheed the winner of the ATF program. The contract called for 750 aircraft to be delivered starting in 2005, which was soon reduced to roughly 650, then to 339 and finally to 187 aircraft. During the 14 years between 1991 and 2005, the F-22 went through an exhaustive series of redesigns, tests, evaluations and upgrades to meet the changing threat picture. In all, 24 years elapsed since the official start of the program and the first deliveries to operational squadrons. That is an extraordinary amount of time for any weapon system to be in gestation. Compare this to the 6 month development time of the WWII superstar of the European theater, the North American P-51 Mustang.


P-51D and F-22; two extremes of development time.



I will be the first to admit my bias for the F-22. Anyone with a love of engineering, aviation, military power, etc cannot help but to be amazed by the jet. You don't just see this aircraft fly, you feel it. Pilots rave about its carefree handling and ability to knock out targets that have no idea they are being stalked. That being said, I can also admit that the program took way too long from a political standpoint. The quicker a product is put into operation, the harder it is for its investors (taxpayers) to have second thoughts about it. And with the breakup of the USSR, the lack of a clearly defined enemy has made the Raptor enemy number one for budget watchers. There are calls to reduce production and cut funding to the program but there are a few very basic problems with this mentality.

The jet is paid for!

Not all of them, but for the most part, the bulk of the money has been spent. Research and development funds are long since gone. As are the costs for building the tooling and infrastructure to mass produce the jet. The only way to reduce the unit cost is to spread it over a large number of airplanes. If for example, $10 million dollars was already spent and each copy of a particular aircraft would cost $250,000 to build, the cost to build 10 airplanes comes out to ($250,000 x 10) + $10,000,000 = $1,250,000/jet. However, if I build 200 of them, my cost drops to $300,000 per aircraft. Politicians seem to think as they have for years that by reducing the number of aircraft, tanks, ships, etc that they can save money. Taxpayers need to be aware of this so that they aren't lied to. The $1.75 billion allocated for the 7 new F-22s implies that the unit price is around $250 million each. It is unknown if these funds also include operating costs (what's even more interesting is that The Pentagon wants to build over 500 F-35s in the near future as a lower cost option that would create more jobs...just wait until that number gets slashed and the jet suddenly gets really expensive).

In closing, I have seen too many so called journalists who don't do enough research take aim at military programs that are not immediately sent overseas and used to blow up Taliban hideouts and call them useless:

1. "Its never fired a shot in anger."
That's a good thing, unless your idea of proving a weapons system is being in a constant state of intense global conflict. Thats what test and evaluations are for. Look how long systems like the F-14 were around before they fired a "shot in anger". Ohio class nuclear submarines have never fired their main weapons in anger and most people hope they never have to.

2. "It costs x-amount per hour to operate."
Fighter jets are expensive. There's no way around it. Anything with high performance will be expensive. Is it less expensive than earlier jets like the F-106 and F-15? Time will tell but chances are that when you have the ability to drink over 50,000lbs of fuel per hour PER ENGINE in full afterburner, you'll notice at the fill-up pump.

3. "It has y problem...for that much money it should be perfect."
Its a machine. All machines have flaws and glitches. People who think that the canopy locking incident is newsworthy were not around for the troubles of the F-111, F-105 or B-1B. All of those aircraft later matured into lethal, effective and important parts of the national arsenal. The early years are the years when all the bugs are worked out and the aircraft's strong points are really brought forth. It took 24 years for the F-22 to go operational. What will be the global situation 24 years from now in 2033?

4.  "It's never been used in Iraq or Afghanistan."
Those two theaters are the current conflict. We have no idea what is in the future, which leads us to...

5. "Its enemy no longer exists."
But new ones will exist. To get rid of a system because its old intended purpose is no longer around is the same type of wisdom that, while assembling furniture, would lead a person to throw out a tool because the page of the instructions they're on no longer calls for it. What about on other pages? In the future?

Don't throw out your tools yet, America.



Sources:
www.CNN.com
www.guardian.co.uk
Code One: April 1998 (Vol 13, No 2)
Code One: October 1998 (Vol 13 No 4)
http://www.codeonemagazine.com/