Last week's resignations of Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Michael Moseley were linked publicly to the service's mishandling of nuclear weapons, from unwittingly sending nuclear-armed cruise missiles across the country to shipping nuclear weapons parts to Taiwan by mistake. But as Noah Schactman first noted in a piece on Wired.com, there was much more beneath the surface. The real bones of contention included fights over control of unmanned aerial vehicles, issues over the relevance of the Air Force's flagship F-22 combat aircraft to current wars, and an unauthorized $81 million Air Force ad campaign touting their centrality to said conflicts; in short, bureaucratic turf wars and budgetary politics.

As my project at the New America Foundation has documented in a new issue brief, the big monetary winners since the beginning of the Iraq war have been the Army, which has seen its contracting double since 2003, and vehicle and petroleum suppliers like BAE Systems and Exxon Mobil, which supply the bread and butter systems and materials needed in Iraq and Afghanistan. In this context, buying F-22s at $300 million per copy seems irrelevant at best, fraudulent at worst.

With military spending already at record post-World War II levels, something will have to give in the Pentagon budget, and for the moment the likely targets include not only the F-22 but next-generation high tech systems like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the Army's Future Combat System. But with a new president and a new Congress taking office in seven months time, expect an orgy of lobbying by Lockheed Martin (prime contractor for the F-22 and the F-35) and Boeing (secondary contractor on the F-35 and prime contractor on the Future Combat System) to save as much of the proposed funding of their projects as possible. They will be joined not only by the Air Force's substantial "legislative liaison" office on Capitol Hill, but by members of the delegations from Georgia, Texas, Washington state and other states with major Lockheed Martin or Boeing factories.

Along with continuing efforts to get the U.S. out of Iraq as soon as possible, progressives could use this upcoming political fight to educate the public on the ongoing dangers of letting the arms lobby distort our budget priorities. Killing off the F-22 would be a significant first step towards reining in unnecessary Pentagon weapons programs, of which there are many.