It looks like the administration is pushing back hard in the face of Congressional efforts to maintain the F-22 production line despite a veto threat from the White House. Both House and Senate subcommittees put money back into the defense authorization for as many as 12 F-22s, seven of which would be purchased next year. Congress wants to keep the production line running, and if Congress is successful, expect a new fight to repeal the Obey Amendment that prevents the aircraft from being sold to allies like Japan, Australia, and Israel, who might buy hundreds more and pour billions of dollars into the U.S. defense industry if given the chance.
The legislative defeats dealt to the White House over the past month have set up a major confrontation on the floor of the Senate next week, where Senator McCain has promised to fight tooth and nail on behalf of the administration to have F-22 funds struck from the Senate bill. It may be the administration's last best chance to put down this defense spending rebellion. So what does the White House do? It goes on offense. A story in today's Washington Post grants a DoD staffer anonymity to toe the White House line:
"It is a disgrace that you can fly a plane [an average of] only 1.7 hours before it gets a critical failure" that jeopardizes success of the aircraft's mission, said a Defense Department critic of the plane who is not authorized to speak on the record. Other skeptics inside the Pentagon note that the planes, designed 30 years ago to combat a Cold War adversary, have cost an average of $350 million apiece and say they are not a priority in the age of small wars and terrorist threats....
Over the four-year period, the F-22's average maintenance time per hour of flight grew from 20 hours to 34, with skin repairs accounting for more than half of that time -- and more than half the hourly flying costs -- last year, according to the test and evaluation office.
The Air Force says the F-22 cost $44,259 per flying hour in 2008; the Office of the Secretary of Defense said the figure was $49,808. The F-15, the F-22's predecessor, has a fleet average cost of $30,818.
Supporters of the plane, like Lt. Gen. Harry M. Wyatt III, director of the Air National Guard, have gone out on a limb to defend the aircraft even at the risk of jeopardizing their own careers. Wyatt's letter to Senator Saxby Chambliss (whose state sees a large portion of F-22 dollars) is quoted in the piece, as is a letter from Air Combat Cmdr. John D.W. Corley, who tells Chambliss "execution of our current national military strategy at high risk in the near to mid-term." It's frustrating then that critics would be given license to take their shots anonymously.
So a couple of key points that supporters of the plane might like to keep in mind. First, it is true that stealth aircraft require a lot more hands on care, which makes the comparison to the F-15 more than a little silly. The F-15 is not a stealth plane, which is why it needs to be replaced, and it has already been settled that the advantage of stealth justifies the increase in costs -- whether it's for a more expensive F-22 or a more expensive F-35. However, maintenance costs for stealth aircraft have traditionally dropped over time, as they did for the B-2. F-22 is still a new plane, and the kinks are still being worked out. It should also be noted that F-15s aren't particularly cheap to keep in the air because F-15s are really old. The Air Force can't fly the F-15 forever.
Critics of F-22 will point to the administration's support for the F-35 as proof that this war on F-22 is not about cutting defense spending but making sure defense dollars go to the most cost effective solutions. But F-35 is also a stealth aircraft, and there's no reason to believe that the Air Force won't face similarly high maintenance costs for that plane (let alone production costs, which continue to spiral upward just as they did for F-22). And F-35 is likely to face readiness problems not unlike those faced by F-22, if not worse because of its multiple configurations including a very complex STOVL variant.
The F-35 is not operational, and all the numbers associated with it are certain to balloon going forward. The F-22, on the other hand, is a know quantity -- a dominant air to air fighter that gets cheaper with every airframe purchased and that will get easier to maintain as time goes by. Still, no stealth aircraft will be as cheap to fly or as easy to maintain as the F-15 was in its heyday. That means a larger portion of the F-22 fleet will be grounded for maintenance at any given time than was the case for its far more numerous predecessor. But that's not a reason to kill the program, that's a reason to buy more aircraft! If we want enough F-22s available to do the Lord's work, we're going to have to buy enough of them to account for the fact that only 60 percent may be available for service at any one time. That's just the price of maintaining air supremacy and deterring would-be competitors.
