Dismantling the Empire_ America's Last Best Hope - Chalmers Johnson [71]
The F-16 made its first flight in December 1976, and a total of 4,400 have been built. They have been sold, or given away, all over the world. Planning for the F-22 began in 1986, when the Cold War was still alive (even if on life support), and the Air Force was trumpeting its fears that the other superpower, the USSR, was planning a new, ultrafast, highly maneuverable fighter.
By the time the prototype F-22 had its rollout on May 11, 1997, the Cold War was nearly a decade in its grave, and it was perfectly apparent that the Soviet aircraft it was intended to match would never be built. Lockheed Martin, the F-22’s prime contractor, naturally argued that we needed it anyway and made plans to sell some 438 airplanes for a total tab of $70 billion. By mid-2008, only 183 F-22s were on order, 122 of which had been delivered. The numbers had been reduced due to cost overruns. The Air Force still wanted to buy an additional 198 planes, but Secretary Gates and his leading assistants balked. No wonder. According to arms experts Bill Hartung and Christopher Preble, at more than $350 million each, the F-22 is “the most expensive fighter plane ever built.”
The F-22 has several strikingly expensive characteristics, which actually limit its usefulness. It is allegedly a stealth fighter—that is, an airplane with a shape that reduces its visibility on radar—but there is no such thing as an airplane completely invisible to all radar. In any case, once it turns on its own fire-control radar, which it must do in combat, it becomes fully visible to an enemy.
The F-22 is able to maneuver at very high altitudes, but this is of limited value since there are no other airplanes in service anywhere that can engage in combat at such heights. It can cruise at twice the speed of sound in level flight without the use of its afterburners (which consume fuel at an accelerated rate), but there are no potential adversaries for which these capabilities are relevant. The plane is obviously blindingly irrelevant to “fourth-generation wars” such as that with the Taliban in Afghanistan—the sorts of conflicts for which American strategists inside the Pentagon and out believe the United States should be preparing.
Actually, the United States ought not to be engaged in fourth-generation wars at all, whatever planes are in its fleet. Outside powers normally find such wars unwinnable. Unfortunately, President Obama’s approach to the Bush administration’s Afghan war remains deeply flawed and will only entrap us in another quagmire, whatever planes we put in the skies over that country.
Nonetheless, as he entered office, the F-22 was still being promoted as the plane to buy, almost entirely through front-loading and political engineering. Some apologists for the Air Force also claimed that we needed the F-22 to face the F-16. Their argument went this way: We have sold so many F-16s to allies and Third World customers that if we ever had to fight one of them, that country might prevail using our own equipment against us. Some foreign air forces like Israel’s are fully equipped with F-16s, and their pilots actually receive more training and monthly practice hours than ours do.
This, however, seems a trivial reason for funding more F-22s. We should instead simply not get involved in wars with former allies we have armed, although this is why Congress prohibited Lockheed from selling the F-22 abroad. Some Pentagon critics contend that the Air Force and prime contractors lobby for arms sales abroad because they artificially generate a demand for new weapons at home that are “better” than the ones we’ve sold elsewhere.
Thanks to political engineering, the F-22 has parts suppliers in forty-four states, and some 25,000 people have well-paying jobs building it. Lockheed Martin