"The New Republic" is doing a review of the weapon systems coming on line, with an eye for getting rid of some of them. The Defense Budget went up 100 Billion the last two years, and more is in sight. Cutting these purchases is a big deal.
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Today's is the F22 Raptor fighter.
Originally designed to replace the F15 Eagle "air superiority" fighter, the F22 began life on auspicious terms--the Air Force held a 1991 "flyoff" at which two competing designs, both privately built for low cost, performed spectacularly well. Everything since then has been downhill for the Raptor program. It's now twelve years later and the F22 is still not in service. Planned numbers have declined from about 700 to about 300--the United States built about tens of thousands of fighters during World War II--while unit prices have gone through the roof.
In 1991, the F22 was projected to cost about $60 million each, in today's dollars. Unit price for 23 Raptors in the current fiscal-year budget ballooned to $201 million. That's three times the inflation-adjusted price of the last few F15s purchased; more, for this single-seat aircraft, than the going market price of an entire Boeing 747. You can read the saga of F22 price escalation woes here.
In terms of performance, the F22 would surely be the best tactical aircraft ever. It is the first airplane able to "supercruise"--sustain supersonic speed for long periods, rather than just a couple minutes. The F22 is highly maneuverable, and advanced stealth features make its "radar cross section" about the size of a child's marble. Raptors are stuffed with gizmos that no plane now possesses, especially passive sensors that will allow those aboard F22s to see other planes without giving away their own positions. There are a few glitches in the program--"Mean Time Between Failures," the standard measure of weapons-system reliability, was for the F22 recently redefined as "Mean Time Between Instability Events." Gulp. Overall, Air Force pilots would dearly, dearly love to move from F15s into F22s.
But as the price of the Raptor has escalated beyond sticker shock, its mission has almost vanished. The F22 was designed to take on the top interceptors of the old Soviet Union. Neither Russia nor any other nation on Earth is currently even attempting to build a fighter that existing United States fighters don't already totally outclass. Between existing United States air superiority and new air-to-air missiles being added to existing U.S. fighters, billions for a super-interceptor seems a luxury.
As the need for a new super-fighter declined through the 1990s, the Air Force changed the designation of the Raptor from the F22 to the FA22--meaning fighter/attack. A new role of dropping precision-guided weapons was added. But that mission, too, is vanishing before the Raptor is even fielded. From Vietnam through the Kosovo air war, most precision-guided munitions had to be delivered by fighters flying close to their targets. Since the development of the GPS-guided bombs that dominated this year's attack on Iraq, the need for small attack aircraft has declined sharply. By far the largest bombing punch of the Iraq assault--about 15,000 of the 30,000 munitions used, according to the Pentagon document "Operation Iraq Freedom By the Numbers"--was satellite-guided weapons dropped from high altitude by lumbering heavy bombers.
Ever-higher percentages of smart bombs are expected to fall from high-altitude heavy bombers in future conflicts, or be delivered by a new generation of low-cost cruise missiles under development, or be delivered by relatively low-cost unmanned drones aircraft under development. When bombers already in the inventory can carry 16 of the big satellite-guided smart bombs per flight, and an F22 can carry one, the need to spend $200 million each on the Raptor seems to have disappeared.
The F35 Joint Strike Fighter, which just got out of prototype and is also awaiting production funding, is a 10-years-fresher design than the F22; would be nearly as good at interceptor missions and better at ground attack missions; and it's looking like the F35 will cost an average of around $45 million each, one-quarter that of an F22. To top it off the F35 contract was won by Lockheed Martin, the same company fitfully trying to build the F22, so canceling the Raptor will not shrink the defense industrial base--Lockheed Martin will still get a huge new fighter project. Checkmate; this ought to end the Raptor program, and the Air Force ought to move on to F35. Purists will lament the demise of the hottest, best-looking military aircraft ever to take wing. But when a much newer design can do 99 percent what the F22 does for 25 percent of the cost, only pork barrel politics will keep the Raptor alive.
Can Donald Rumsfeld cancel the F22? This looks like the first real test of his vaunted "transformation" of the military. So far Rumsfeld has stopped just one program, the Army's Crusader super-howitzer, and the first motive here seemed to be Rumsfeld hates the Army. But Rumsfeld, a former fighter jock himself, loves the Air Force. If he gives in to the Air Force on F22 after canceling the Army's Crusader--a much less expensive program than F22, and one that would have brought the United States military a needed new capability--Rumsfeld will be exposed as a sham reformer.
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