Table Of ContentThe Air Force gets cake, eats it, too
Three tactical
fighters in
budget belie
‘transformation’
The F-22 Raptor, one of
three fighters the Air Force
currently is purchasing. Click
"Play" below the image to
learn more.
By Steve Johnson
Part 1 of a 3 part series
MSNBC
Jan. 30 — The Sept. 11 attacks and the ensuing
Afghan war sent a powerful message to
America’s military brass: The well-oiled
machine that kept the Soviet Union at bay did
nothing to deter the terrorists who struck the
U.S. homeland. Yet the vast majority of this
year’s $348 billion defense budget will fund
weapons designed in the 1980s and early 1990s
to fight the Red Army. Despite rhetoric about
“transforming the military,” many officers,
defense officials and analysts say the military
has failed to put its money where its mouth is.
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THE $45 BILLION defense budget increase this
year - up 11.4 percent over 2002 - was the largest
jump in two decades. The budget the president is
expected to present next week for fiscal 2004 will be
about $400 billion - and that is expected to climb to
$500 billion by 2010.
After Sept. 11, many expected the Army, Navy,
Air Force and Marine Corps to rethink expensive
weapons systems already in the pipeline in favor of
lighter, quicker and stealthier arms designed for a
new kind of warfare.
Experts say this simply has not happened. “The
secretary of defense has paid off the services,” said
Christopher Hellman, a senior analyst at the Center
for Defense Information. “There would have been
tension within the Air Force had there been money
for either the F-22 or unmanned aerial vehicles. But
now there is enough money in the budget to buy
both.”
• Spending priorities
belie 'transformation'
• Congress: 'Vampire'
programs
Coming up:
• Contractors: More for
TOUGH CHOICES
When Dwight Eisenhower left office in 1961, the
hero of D-Day warned of a “military-industrial
complex” that threatened to gain control of U.S.
defense policy and use it to perpetuate its own
agenda.
More than 40 years later, the complex
Eisenhower spoke of is widely referred to inside
military circles as the “iron triangle,” the confluence
of military commanders, defense contractors and
members of Congress who are loathe to see anything
interrupt the fundamental direction of the nation’s
defense program. Defense spending is the largest
single “discretionary” item in America’s annual
less
budget aside from Social Security, and it is set to
grow enormously in the next few years.
Over the next three days, MSNBC.com will look
at how each tip of this “triangle” influences defense
choices — decisions that will mean a heavy taxpayer
commitment for two decades or more.
It is the Air Force, in particular, that is being
held up by critics as a prime example of the
military’s failure to make difficult choices that would
free up funds for anti-terrorism and other domestic
programs.
Critics, including some inside the Air Force
itself, point to the planned purchase of three tactical
warplanes — the F/A-18, the F/A-22 and the Joint
Strike Fighter — as a case of generals spending too
much money on cutting-edge warplanes at the
expense of less glamorous, more relevant needs.
• Deployed to the gulf
• Iraq: Building toward war
• Elite and special forces
• OPS: Behind the lines
• Weapons: new vs. old
• National missile defense
• The new battlefield
Under the current budget plan, the Bush
administration is funding 300 state-of-the-art F/A-22
fighters, as many as 3,000 Joint Strike Fighters, plus
500 F/A-18 E/Fs. Over the next few decades, that
adds up to more than $300 billion — more than the
federal government spends annually on all other
federal programs combined, except Social Security.
Air Force Secretary James Roche and other
advocates of the F-22 argue the expenditures are
vital.
“The F-22’s combination of stealth, super-cruise,
maneuverability and integrated avionics, coupled
with improved supportability, represents an
exponential leap in war-fighting capabilities and
allows for the full realization of operational concepts
that are vital to the 21st Century Air Force,” Roche
said in a speech last year.
Others say it is unfair to expect the military to do
an about face on decades of doctrine less that two
years after Sept. 11.
“The idea that you can take an institution like the
military, which has a $390 billion budget, and do
‘high G’ maneuvers on procurement policy simply
isn’t reasonable,” says Bill Martel, an Air Force
Advisory Board member who also works on new
weapons with the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency. “It takes time to develop
‘transformed’ systems. They take years to show up in
the budget.”
Few dispute that the F/A-22 is an improvement
on what the Air Force is currently flying. But that is
beside the point, critics say.
Secretary of the Air Force
James G. Roche, a former
executive of Northrop-
“We cannot afford a full
buy of all three tactical
Grumman.
fighters, given the resources
we’re going to have over the next 10 years,” Rep.
Curt Weldon, R-Pa., told Aerotech News and Review
this summer.
Weldon, who heads the defense procurement
subcommittee in the House, says: “They’ve got to
make some tough choices, they’ve got to cut
programs, they’ve got to realign.”
WHERE’S THE THREAT?
Behind Congressional worries about the impact
of the three-plane strategy on a shrinking budget are
questions about what these new aircraft add to U.S.
military capabilities. The next generation Soviet
aircraft the F-22 was designed to fight, for instance,
died on the drawing board along with the Soviet
Union. Russia designs top-notch fighters, but it lacks
the resources to build them in sufficient numbers to
rival the U.S. arsenal. Even as exports to potential
U.S. foes, the Russian aircraft lack the sophisticated
battlefield management systems that the United
States uses to integrate its warplanes into a gigantic,
all-present military machine that includes naval,
ground and air assets.
Some critics argue that, in a world where
governors and mayors are telling the federal
government they don’t have enough money to lay out
reasonable terrorist response plans for American
cities, it makes more sense to upgrade existing planes
like the F-15 by adding advanced electronics.
Michael O’Hanlon, a senior analyst with the
Brookings Institution, points to Afghanistan, where
U.S. special forces on horseback called in air strikes
from 50-year-old B-52s. But the man on horseback
was using a laptop computer and a laser pointer, and
the aging B-52 was dropping “smart” bombs,
O’Hanlon notes. “Most of the areas where
technology is advancing rapidly are in the smaller
sorts of things that go into a big weapon. You can
take some existing weapons platforms and improve
them without spending the money for an F-22,” he
said.
BETTER WEAPONS, FEWER PLANES?
Two of those smaller improvements —
electronics that allow a pilot to pick out a target and
“smart” weapons that destroy it — now make it
possible for one pilot to do work previously requiring
many more aircraft.
“Now there is real-time targeting in cockpits,”
said Sam Gardiner, a former faculty member at the
Air War College. “If you look at the numbers from
World War II up to the first Gulf War, when an
aircraft went out to kill tanks, it came back and on
average killed .5 tanks. Today, the Air Force will
come back with five, seven, 10 kills.”
Carrier-based aviation now is “10 times as potent
with precision-guided weapons,” said former Rear
Adm. Stephen Baker, who was operations officer for
the Theodore Roosevelt battle group during the 1990-
91 war.
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So if each aircraft has ten times the killing power
it previously had, critics ask, why does the Pentagon
not reduce its request for new planes exponentially as
well?
Air Force officials say that’s because the United
States has foes around the world, which spreads out
the U.S. air fleet. “When you’re fighting an
adversary, what matters is being over those guys at 2
a.m. and then back at 2 p.m.,” said Col. Kurt Ditmer,
who’s in charge of planning the Air Force’s future
combat capability needs. “You can’t have pulled your
forces out of Korea and left yourself vulnerable
there.”
WHO NEEDS PILOTS?
An even greater challenge for traditional air
power advocates is the unmanned combat air vehicle,
or UCAV, such as the Predator. Critics are quick to
point out that it was not America’s aviators who first
fired Hellfire missiles from the remote-controlled
aircraft in Afghanistan — but rather the CIA, which
has no large cadre of pilots clamoring for the most
advanced airplane.
“It’s a lot sexier to say you fly an F-22 than
saying you operate the joy stick of a Predator,” says a
senior U.S. defense official who once flew from
Navy carriers. “UCAVs cost pilots jobs, and it’s the
pilots who run the Air Force. You do the math.”
Gardiner says that in the military “there is a
willingness to embrace technology, but not
necessarily the impact of technology.”
The Air Force’s Ditmer disagrees. Unmanned
attack aircraft are still not reliable or cost-effective,
he says. It is the F/A-22 and Joint Strike Fighter that
are truly transformational, because their stealth and
speed render enemy defenses helpless. “Because an
unmanned vehicle has no man, it has been called
transformational,” he said. “But from our
perspective, if it stops an enemy from going to war,
that is transformational.”
Counters CDI’s Hellman: “The military is not
really committed to transformation. They say a lot of
positive things about it and they’re willing to go so
far as long as it doesn’t make inroads into their
traditional missions in the world. The problem is:
That war is not out there anymore.”
Ultimately, Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld’s ability to change those attitudes may
determine his legacy — as either the defense chief
who forced the military to face new realities, or the
Pentagon leader who left America unprepared to face
the military challenges of the 21st Century.
The higher cost of aircraft
The predicted and actual budgets for U.S. warplanes
Plane
ORIGINAL
BUDGET
# of
planes
Cost/plane
FINAL
BUDGET
Total
planes
built
Cost/plane
Cost in
2002
dollars
F-15
$7.4 billion
729
$10 million
$29.9 billion
1074
$27.9 million (in
1990 dollars)
$37.1 million
F-16
$6.0 billion
650
$9.3 million
$38.4 billion
2201
$17.5 million (in
1994 dollars)
$20.59 million
F-18
$46.8 billion
548
$85.4 million
$48.8 billion
548
$89.1 million
F-22
$99.1 billion
648
$153 million
$69.7 billion
341
$204.5 million
F-35
$226.5 billion
2,866
$79 million
(current
estimate)
TBD
TBD
TBD
TBD
Source: U.S. Department of Defense
