Here is something for you to much on. Maybe some of the other cynics here can help. The information in italics below was provided in a briefing and question and answer session by a Pentagon official (Aldridge) yesterday. Now, from reading the section on the F-22, tell me what will happen in the future. By the way, you are paying $205 million or so for each of these planes. They will replace the most advanced Air Force fighter on earth -- the F-15.
Q: Under the '04 budget, in the projections, what's the total number of F/A-22s envisioned for the Air Force? And do you think that will ultimately be the number?
Aldridge: As I've mentioned before, we have a plan called "buy to budget." As you may recall, last year when we agreed to proceed with the F-22, there was a big debate between the cost of the Air Force estimate of F-22 costs and the CAIG, the Cost Analysis Improvement Group's estimate -- that was my independent -- of about $7 billion.
We established a program by which we would use the Air Force estimate of cost, but we would only buy the number of airplanes the CAIG says you could buy at that cost, and that was the buy-to-budget. That number was roughly 295, but it permitted the Air Force, if they could in fact achieve cost savings, to buy more, up to the 339 that they would have liked to have had.
As this flight test program has proceeded, and the cost of the flight test activities have gone up, we have deliberately moved money from the procurement account to R&D to pay for that. Therefore, the number of aircraft has to drop. So the number now estimated to be procured at the estimate of the procurement cost is about 276. But the incentive is still there for the Air Force, as they go out into the future, to invest in cost-savings measures, and we will permit them to buy more aircraft within those cost limitations, if they can do that. But right now, it's around 276, which is affordable -- and again, I'm projecting out to the year 2010 now, which is not easy to do, but that's roughly the number.
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