May 1, 2001
The Madness of
the F-22 Fighter
Tiffany's on wings. That's how one senate
aide refers to the Pentagon and its contractor's latest dream
weapon: the F-22. "It's showy, unimaginably expensive, fragile
and utterly useless", the aide tells us. "But there's
no stopping it."
The F-22, known to its press
agents as the "Raptor", has been on the drawing board
since 1981, at which time the Air Force announced that it wanted
a generation of new tactical fighter planes to replace the F-15.
In 1986, Lockheed was picked to lead the development of this
plane, then known as the Advanced Tactical Fighter.
Across the next 15 years, billions of dollars have been poured
into the project with little to show for it. Indeed, the F-22
has enjoyed the longest coming out party of any plane in the
history of the Pentagon. And, according to Pentagon analysts,
it's still nowhere near ready to go into production. Indeed,
some argue that the plane, designed to attack an enemy that no
longer exists, is already obsolete, both technologically and
strategically.
But don't expect these trifling
details to stand in the way of the Pentagon, Air Force brass,
Lockheed and the F-22's two other prime contractors, Pratt/Whitney
and Boeing. These parties are now rushing to put the troubled
plane into what's called "initial low rate production"
at a date as close as March 30 of this year. Unless the Bush
administration intervenes, the Air Force will be saddled with
at least 10 of these technological relics and billions more will
flow into the coffers of the contractors.
Along with the V-22 Osprey,
the F-22 presents a case study for the Pentagon's procurement
pathology: call it the buy-before- you-fly syndrome. "One
of the oldest tricks is putting off testing until production
has begun," says Danielle Brian, director of the Project
on Government Oversight. "As a result, the contractor gets
paid twice: once to make a flawed system and once to fix it."
Even by historical standards
the escalation in the price-tag for the F-22 has been jaw-dropping.
Originally, the Air Force said it was going to purchase 880 planes
for around $40 billion. Within a few months, the price doubled
to $80 billion. In 1991, the Pentagon's Selected Acquisitions
Review looked at the F-22 and decided that fewer planes should
be built, scaling the order down to 680 planes for $64.2 billion.
Then the 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review cut the number of planes
even further: 339 aircraft for the same price. The $35 million
fighter has now turned into a $190 million plane, four times
the cost of an F-15.
But that's not all. When the
GAO looked at the mounting cost overruns, they estimated that
the $64.2 billion cap would only enable the Pentagon to buy 254
planes, 630 hundred fewer than originally advertised. Rep. John
Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat, is even more circumspect.
He predicts that only 150 fighters will be bought. In other words,
the planes could cost as much as $350 million apiece.
None of this troubles Lockheed,
as long as the entire $64.2 billion is spent. Indeed, the fewer
"limited edition" F-22s Lockheed unloads on the Pentagon,
the more "copies" it will sell to Israel, Germany,
Chile and Indonesia.
But what has all that money bought? Not much when compared to
the F-15 and F-16. Even the Pentagon's top testing officer disagrees
with the performance status of the F-22. In a December 20, 2000,
memo to the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology
and Logistics, Phillip Coyle, director of Operational Testing
and Evaluation for the Pentagon, concluded that the problems
with the F-22 were so overwhelming that a decision on putting
the plane into production should be delayed indefinitely.
Coyle's memo discloses a litany
of problems with the plane, ranging from testing delays, cost
overruns, mechanical failures, and serious problems with the
avionics system. Coyle warned that the plane couldn't begin operational
testing by August 2002 without encountering "unacceptable
risks".
The F-22 hasn't proved all
that safe to fly either. In one of its first test flights, the
F-22 began to wobble uncontrollably as it attempted to land,
finally smacking into the runway without landing gear, then skidding
for 8,000 feet before it caught fire and partially burned. The
third test flight was cancelled because the hydraulic gearing
didn't work. In March of last year, the Air Force was forced
to suspend test flights for six weeks after a review found problems
with the plane's brakes, landing gear, environmental control
systems, avionics software, missile launch detector, plus cracks
in the cockpit canopy.
The Air Force touts the F-22's
supposed stealth capabilities as a point of superiority compared
with the aging but durable F-15. But the F-22 hasn't proved to
be all that invisible, after all. From one discreet angle, the
F-22 slips past radar screens. But from other apertures and latitudes,
the plane, in the words of a Senate staffer, "lights up
like the Budweiser blimp".
Because it's a fighter intended
for aerial combat with other fighter planes, the F-22 will be
restricted largely to daytime flights. But the plane is so large-partially
because the designers put the missiles inside the fighter in
order to lower its profile to enemy radar systems-that it will
be easily detectable to the naked eye. It's five times the size
of the F-16.
"The only way to make
the F-22 stealthy is to tear the eyes out of enemy pilots' heads,"
says retired Air Force Col. Everest Riccioni. Riccioni is one
of the so-called "fighter mafia", along with the late
Col. John Boyd and CounterPuncher Pierre Sprey (now the director
of Mapleshade Records), who helped to design the F-16, probably
the best fighter plane ever produced. The colonel is now one
of the F-22's most savage critics.
One intractable problem involves the F-22's complex and unwieldy
avionics system, being developed by Boeing.
"The avionics for the
F-22 was obsolete before the plane even went into production",
a Pentagon analyst tells CounterPunch. That's because the computer
systems that act as the plane's brain are powered by five-volt
silicon chips. These went out of date in 1992 when Intel introduced
the 3.3 volt Pentium chip. Now most computers run on the even
faster Pentium III, a 1-volt microchip. "Imagine if this
plane ever joins the fleet and is running on computer systems
that are already 10 years out of date and will be 30 years out
of date in the future," a senate staffer said. "It
will be like trying to run a spreadsheet with an abacus."
Just to keep the planes maintained
the Pentagon will have pay Boeing and Lockheed to keep open old
plants to make the archaic parts for the F-22. The Pentagon has
already set aside a billion dollars to address the problem of
obsolete parts, a problem that will only get more bothersome
over the lifetime of the plane. "It'll be like the Pentagon's
version of the blacksmith shop at colonial Williamsburg,"
the senate staffer tells us.
Even in the unlikely event
that the F-22's technical and mechanical problems can ultimately
be resolved, the plane still won't meet the Air Force's stated
goal of rejuvenating an aging fleet of fighter planes. In fact,
it will only exacerbate the problem. Under the F-22 program,
the Air Force will find itself with fewer fighter planes with
an older average age. This problem didn't just sneak up on the
Air Force overnight. It was predicted as far back as 1991 in
an independent report by Pentagon analyst Franklin Spinney.
In 1999 Republican congressman
Jerry Lewis of California led a successful effort to cut off
funding for the opulent fighter jet. The measure passed by an
overwhelming margin: 334-45. But Lewis and his colleagues underestimated
the Pentagon's power. In a budgetary sleight of hand, the $2.9
billion annual appropriation was simply reallocated by the House/Senate
conference committee from procurement accounts to that gold mine
of the defense contractors: research and development.
A year later Rep. Peter Defazio, the Democrat from Oregon, went
back on the attack. In July 2000, Defazio denounced the F-22's
cost as obscene and offered an amendment to the defense appropriations
bill which would have knocked down funding for the F-22 by $932
million. This blasphemy roused into action Rep. Randy "Duke"
Cunningham, a California Republican and a fighter pilot in the
Vietnam War.
Cunningham rushed to the floor
of the House to defend the honor of the Air Force and its contractors.
"Our liberal and socialist friends would tell us the Cold
War is over and there is no threat," Cunningham blustered.
"Our kids are going to die, and its amendments like this
that have stopped our military from surviving and put us in a
situation where we have got 21 ships along a pier that cannot
be deployed because they are down for maintenance." When
Defazio denounced Cunningham's tirade as "bizarre",
Cunningham screamed that he had visited the Democratic Socialists
of America website and discovered a link to the website of the
Progressive Caucus, headed by Defazio.
The funding of a big ticket
defense system usually hinges on where it's being built. For
optimum appropriations, the factories must be located in congressional
districts with political clout. The F-22 fits this bill nicely:
the engine is being built by Connecticut-based Pratt Whitney,
the troubled avionics system is being developed by Boeing in
Seattle and the whole bag of tricks is being put together by
at Lockheed's plant in Marietta, Georgia. This brings together
a powerful cocktail of political powerbrokers, including Democrats
Joe Lieberman, Christopher Dodd, Norm Dicks , and Zell Miller.
The plane also had a friend
in Bill Clinton. As part of his final budget, Clinton included
$2.5 billion for the production and purchase of 10 F-22s in 2001.
It was the centerpiece of his $60 billion procurement plan. Lockheed
was represented on the Hill by Peter Knight, Al Gore's closest
friend and finance chair of the Clinton/Gore 1996 reelection
campaign. During Clintontime Lockheed poured more than $2.1 million
into DNC accounts.
There was some early hope that
Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld might rein in the program, especially
if it frees up money for any even bigger spending spree: the
new Star Wars scheme. Cheney has a history of bucking Pentagon
brass. In 1991, as secretary of defense, hre pulled the plug
on the Navy's A-12 attack plane, a $57 billion boondoogle.
But similar boldness with the
F-22 seems unlikely. When the F-22 was under attack from a coalition
of Republicans and Democrats, including Lewis and Defazio, on
the Hill, Cheney and Rumsfeld both came to its rescue, signing
a letter touting it as a vital component of the new military.
Of course, these days Cheney and Rumsfeld keep talking about
the modernization of US military hardware, a code-word for billions
in expenditures for R&D programs and new high-tech systems-hence
Bush's $310 billion defense budget.
A GAO report in 1994 concluded
that it would be cheaper and perhaps even more effective from
a military point of view to stick with the F-15. "Instead
of confronting thousands of modern Soviet fighters, the US air
forces are expected to confront potential adversary air forces
that include few fighters that have the capability to the challenge
the F-15-the US frontline fighter. Our analysis shows that the
F-15 exceeds the most advanced threat system expected to exist.
We assumed no improvements will be made to the F-15 but the capability
of the 'most advanced threat' assumes certain modifications.
Further, our analysis indicates that the current inventory of
F-15s can be economically maintained in a structurally sound
condition until 2015 or later."
So what's behind the F-22?
The project's driven in large measure by what some Pentagon analysts
call "the cult of stealth". In the mid-80s the Air
Force, struggling to stay relevant, realized that "stealth"
was a great marketing tool. The public was fascinated by those
black, oddly configured, "invisible" airplanes and
so were members of congress. It didn't matter if the stealth
bomber was just as visible to most Russian radar system as the
B-52 and cost 50 times as much to produce.
"The F-22 is not going
to be a fighter-versus-fighter airplane," says Riccioni.
"And if you want that capability, you can get it if you
don't design for stealth. And if you don't design for stealth,
you can make it affordable. And if it's affordable, you can get
the numbers you want." Riccioni's right, of course, except
for the fact that the Air Force doesn't even need a new fleet
of planes because there's no existing fighter threat, hasn't
been one since the Korean War, and there's none in the foreseeable
future.
Some high-ranking Republicans
are beginning to shake their heads at the Pentagon's incessant
begging for ever-larger budgets and more expensive weapon systems,
like the F-22, even in the face of epidemic cost over-runs.
"The Pentagon does not
know how much it spends", says Senator Charles Grassley,
the Iowa Republican who now heads the Senate Armed Services committee.
"It does not know if it gets what it orders in goods and
services. And the Pentagon, additionally, does not have a handle
on its inventory. If the Pentagon does not know what it owns
and spends, then how does the Pentagon know if it needs more
money? Ramping up the Pentagon budget when the books are a mess
is highly questionable at best. To some it might seem crazy."
CP
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