The F-22 Vote and the Future of Pentagon Spending
Last week's decision by the Senate to eliminate $1.75 billion in proposed pork barrel funding for the F-22 is a step in the right direction. It is rare that the military-industrial complex loses one of these battles. But there are conflicting views as to whether this is a unique event or the beginning of a more rational approach to Pentagon budgeting. My own view is that we can build on this victory if enough people get off the sidelines and fight for better budget priorities. A positive result is by no means guaranteed, but we may not get another opportunity like this for a long while, so we need to capitalize on it.
Fred Kaplan, a long-time defense budget expert and well-respected analyst of military affairs, was one of the first out of the gate, posting a piece within hours of the F-22 vote in which he noted its historic nature and suggested, that it might -- just might -- be a sign of better things to come.
Kaplan's bottom line is as follows: "Maybe it takes a Republican defense secretary to usher in a new era of defense politics. Are we in fact on the verge of such an era? There are many reasons to be skeptical (the annals of history among them), but what happened today might be a harbinger of something genuinely new."
Writing as part of a National Security experts roundtable on the web site of the National Journal, Winslow Wheeler of the Center for Defense Information is highly critical of many aspects of the Congressional approach to the military budget --and of what mainstream pundits like Loren Thompson make of the F-22 vote. But like Kaplan, he exhibits qualified optimism:
'As for real reform, the 58-40 vote in the Senate shows that with huge effort some progress can be made. Among the 58 who voted against more F-22s are some potential leaders in Congress against the bad ideas in the defense budget that make us weaker at increasing cost. Based on what I am hearing from some of them, there is a real chance we will see more such actions. The longest journey starts with the first step."
What very few analysts have mentioned is the important role played by arms control and good government NGOs in influencing the F-22 decision. A network of organizations did important work in educating swing Senators and getting out the anti-F-22 message in the print media and the blogosphere. Key players included Women's Action for New Directions, Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, Peace Action, True Majority, the Project on Government Oversight, Taxpayers for Common Sense, VoteVets.org, progressivecongress.org, the Center for Defense Information, Common Cause, the Institute for Policy Studies, the Center for International Policy, the Center for Arms Control and Non-prolilferation, and others (disclosure: my project, the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation, was also involved in this effort). Even with the President and the Secretary of Defense on the right side, it took what President Eisenhower described as "an alert and knowledgeable citizenry" to put the anti-F-22 effort over the top. These groups -- hopefully joined by others -- will be key to building on the F-22 victory.
You're counting chickens before the eggs hatch. Do you really think the MIC would go down that easy? I'll bet they have a fall back position to regroup and come back for another attack. Perhaps not the F-22, but the F-35 is still in the development stages and a lot of the technology from one can easily be transferred to the other, for a nominal price. This thing ain't dead yet.
July 28, 2009 12:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
Meanwhile, on planet earth, the Senate has merely voted to build only 46 more of these wothless fighter planes, not 53 more, to add to the 141 that have been built but have never been used in combat -- they can't go low and slow enough to be used in the current type of wars that the US is engaged in. The F-22 has a few other drawbacks, like its unit cost variously estimated at $150 - $350 million and its high maintenance cost of $44,000 per hour of flight.
The money "saved" on not building the additional F-22s will be spent on accelerating production of the F-35 fighter plane, which is similarly mission-less, and the Pentagon promises that doing so would offset the job losses from not building the seven f-22s.
It's already been recognized that the future US air force will consist of robotic planes. "We're at a real time of transition here in terms of the future of aviation, and the whole issue of what's going to be manned and what's going to be unmanned," Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Senate hearing. Robotic bombers are being designed.
Therefore the new air force anthem:
Off they go into the wild blue yonder
Climbing high into the sun;
Here they come zooming to meet our thunder,
At'em bots, giv'er the gun!
Down they dive spouting their flames from under,
Off with one hell-uv-a roar!
They live in fame or go down in flame,
Nothing'll stop the US Robotic Air Force!
Is this F-22 decision a harbinger of something genuinely new? I don't think so. The real harbinger, which Pentagon procurement hasn't yet caught up with, is robotics. All the rest is a tempest in a teapot, albeit a very expensive one.
July 28, 2009 12:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
The last time liberals cut the military budget (in the 1970s), we ended up with a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a renewed attempt by the USSR to seek military superiority over the U.S., and allies wondering if the U.S. was losing its will.
We conservatives reversed all those trends, and the USSR collapsed forthwith.
Mr. Hartung keeps fighting the last war. (Well, actually, he keeps opposing the last war.) The job of the Pentagon is to maintain preparedness against future threats.
Russia is busily exporting fourth and fifth generation fighters to all our adversaries. If we were ever forced to go to war to stop Iran (after it test-fires its first nuclear bomb), we want to make sure we can finish that job quickly. Ditto if North Korea threatens Japan or China threatens either Japan or South Korea or Taiwan.
The basic mindset of liberals is to weaken America's military so that a future President is forced to surrender rather than fight. We conservatives are determined not to let that happen.
July 28, 2009 12:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
You may want to check some facts. The US spends about 10 times on defense as China, and about 3 times more than the rest of the world combined. I'd like systems we need and systems that work and maybe spend more money on infrastructure and schools. I thought conservatives were a frugal, isolationist lot, not war mongers. Are you sure you're a conservative or more likely a neocon.
As to Afghanistan, that lead to a big time defeat for the USSR, and we didn't have to have any of our military killed or maimed to do it. Or was that a bad thing in the view of conservatives. Of course the law of unknown consequences lead to the establishment of Al-Qaeda and our current boondoggle in Afghanistan, but hey, their only lowly military and the military can do everything; right.
July 28, 2009 12:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
sinz52,
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan -- that was a real threat to American security -- not. What did threaten US security was the US reaction to the invasion which spawned the Taliban.
As for Russia, you obviously haven't kept up with the news.
"The reality is, the Russians are where they are," Biden said, in comments published Saturday. "They have a shrinking population base, they have a withering economy, they have a banking sector and structure that is not likely to be able to withstand the next 15 years, they're in a situation where the world is changing before them and they're clinging to something in the past that is not sustainable."
Regarding Iran, that isn't about the4 false stories regarding nukes, it's about US/Israel hegemony in the ME. Iran doesn't threaten the US.
July 28, 2009 2:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
No. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was never a threat to American Security. Check out some of Brzezinski's writings on the event. The US, through the CIA and other agencies, actually helped manipulate the Soviets into the stronger response that became the invasion.
The invasion began w/the Afghan government, which had long had military ties w/Moscow (including all Afghan officers being trained in the USSR) requesting the USSR send in tank and rifle battalions to help them against fundamentalist factions fomenting unrest.
Brzezinski and others in the Carter administration set the CIA loose to stir the pot and deke the Soviets into a full-on invasion. One of the very telling statements he made was in a 1998 interview: "We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would... That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Soviets into the Afghan trap ... The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the Soviet Union its Vietnam War."
The invasion also drew off a large number of Red Army resources that otherwise would have been sitting in/near Eastern Europe.
The invasion was not a threat to our national security and national interests, it was a tool of them. They stuck their foot into an ongoing civil war - one that in many respects did not end until the rise of the Taliban.
July 30, 2009 5:19 AM | Reply | Permalink
You single out arms control and international policy thinktanks, but where's the credit to Sen. McCain, Sen. Levin & the bipartisan ground of 56 others who voted against more F-22s.
The 40 who voted to continue the F-22 included Dems from CA, WA, and others including Chris Dodd, who thoroughly embarrassed himself on the Senate floor.
Some of the posters here are confused though. This wasn't a vote against the F-22, but a vote against too many, unnecessary F-22s. If many Republicans and conservatives make the mistake that more is always better, than liberals are guilty of the opposite.
Reflexively supporting or opposing all defense projects is dumb. The F-35, is not the next battle, it is the future of our defense. It will will the F-22's air superiority role almost as good, at a much lower cost, while also providing a ground attack airframe a joint platform to be used by the Navy and Marines. Just because there's no USSR out there right now, and China is neither friend nor enemy doesn't mean we shouldn't be prepared. Better to be ready to fight and not need to, then to fight and not be ready.
One poster quoted ADM Mullen about robotics & UAVs. He's right, except those technologies are not matured yet. Cutting off the ultra-expensive F-22 will provide savings that can be used for F-35s as a midterm solution and research for unmanned fighters in the long-term.
July 28, 2009 1:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
Garry Owen:
Hogwash and poppycock.
news report:
Last week, the 174th Air Force Fighter Wing flew its last manned combat sortie over Iraq in F-16s, which have now been mothballed in favor of MQ-9 Reapers. This makes it the first combat-specific wing to ditch conventional aircraft entirely and toward a force of all unmanned robo-drones piloted from the ground. Welcome to the Skynet era, everyone!
That was almost a year ago.
more recently (this week):
For as long as Col. Paul Johnson has been in the cockpit, the fighter pilot has been an icon of American military might. Now, after nearly a quarter century in uniform, he's witnessing the beginning of the end of that era. Increasingly, the U.S Air Force is turning to unmanned aircraft to perform work once done exclusively by aviators like Johnson, the wing commander of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.
At the highest levels of the Pentagon, plans are under way to reduce the role of warplanes, and rely more heavily on remotely piloted craft. "This is massive," said Johnson, an A-10 pilot with more than 2,000 hours in the skies, describing the potential changes ahead.
"It's a head-exploding topic," he said. But "for us to sit on the sidelines and ignore this new technology would be irresponsible."
July 28, 2009 2:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
Perhaps I should have better expressed what I meant.
UAVs right now do an excellent job of conducting intelligence, surveillance & reconnaissance (ISR) and precision strike.
But they can not fill in for the air-to-air mission, for transport, supply or for sustained close air support or heavy bombing.
They have limited armaments and payload, limited maneuverability, and they cannot yet perform those missions that Apaches, Blackhawks, Chinooks, B-52s, or any air superiority aircraft would do.
One day they will serve as a cheaper, less risky and more effective substitute for all manned aircraft. But we are not there yet.
July 28, 2009 3:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
* Of course they can do air-to-air and maneuver (the subject of this diary) even better than piloted planes where the G-forces are limited to what the pilots can endure.
* transport -- charter commercial planes, which is what they do now to augment C-5s and C-17s. These planes are relatively inexpensive.
* close air support is now being done with UAVs, and as I wrote bombers will soon come.
The problem is that UAVs cut off, not only flight pay for pilots and the thrill of flying, but the high-end gravy train to Lockheed-Martin and all the other corporate leaches.
July 28, 2009 3:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
see post below
July 28, 2009 4:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
Actually, the biggest problems for UCAVs in an air-to-air role is reaction time. The lack of FTL communications means that the drone has to relay all the information around it, not simply the camera-eye of what's in front of it, back to the pilot (who has to give the shoot/don't shoot) sitting in the control trailer, and then the signal's gotta get back to the UCAV.
Geostationary sattelites (the preferred kind for long-term operation in-theatre) have an orbit that's about .25 light-seconds out. That means the UCAV->Sat->Pilot->Sat->UCAV loop is a full second beforedecision-making time is factored in.
Ask any combat pilot what taking an extra full second to make decisions results in.
July 30, 2009 5:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
Go look up AQM-34 at Edwards AFB, California. You'll see a picture of a AQM-34 drone stationed on a DC-130 with sidewinder missiles. I was assigned to the 6514 Test Squadron at Hill AFB, Utah and we tested them with AGM-45 air-to-ground missiles fired at ground targets. The AGM and BQM series drones were equiped with jet engines, not props, and this was all accomplished in the 1970's. You should have seen to look I got from a USAF UAV pilot when I told him this back in 2003.
July 28, 2009 10:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm not attacking unmanned flight, I'm just saying it hasn't fully matured for all missions. Hopefully, it will eventually take over for all manned flight.
I know that during the invasion of Iraq in '03 they mounted Stingers on a UAV and attempted to engage one of the few Iraqi fighters that flew. It was unsuccessful.
Just because they were experimenting so long ago in the 70s doesn't mean it's matured to the point of effectiveness.
July 29, 2009 9:07 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm sorry but you're wrong.
They do not do air-to-air. Besides check the specs on any UAV, they don't have the speed or maneuverability. I don't know much about physics but I don't think the G-force is even an issue since there is no UAV out there that performs like a figher jet.
Air transport--no argument that there are cheaper options than C-5s and C-17s, but cargo operations and moving troops to the battlefield (like Blackhawks) are only conducted by manned aircraft. There is no unmanned vehicle out there capable of transporting personnel or heavy cargoes.
Close air support is limited to the payloads of the Reaper, Predator & Sky Warrior, in other words, Hellfires, JDAMs and probably a few other types. They fire from far away, they don't engage the enemy close up and make split-second targeting decisions as an Apache pilot does.
I don't disagree with your last paragraph, but the platforms to provide anything other than ISR and standoff or precision strike do not exist right now. Though they will one day.
July 28, 2009 3:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
Okay, they don't do air-to-air right now, but that's due more to organizational inertia than to any lack of technology.
"The one topic no one wants to touch at the moment is air-to-air. This appears to be the last job left for pilots of combat aircraft. The geeks believe they have this one licked, and are giving the pilot generals the, "bring it on" look. The generals are not keen to test their manned aircraft against a UAV [of course], but this will change the minute another country, like China or Russia, demonstrates that they are seriously moving in that direction."
Close air support is limited? No.
from a description of the battle of Wanat, Afghanistan, July 13, 2008:
"Coalition soldiers managed to repulse the attacking militants. AH-64 attack helicopters and a Predator unmanned aircraft drone equipped with Hellfire missiles responded to support the base with close air support about 30-minutes after the battle began."
Using JDAMs with GPS guidance there is no problem firing from far away. Also, they have recently demonstrated that UAVs can be controlled by Apaches -- the best of both worlds. There's your "split-second targeting decisions as an Apache pilot does."
Finally, the U.S. Department of Defense has decided to make the next generation heavy bomber an unmanned aircraft.
July 28, 2009 6:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
re my term: "organizational inertia"
Any Air Force general who desires lucrative employment in the aerospace industry upon leaving the military, and there are more than a few, would not torpedo his employment opportunities by promoting a UAV vs. fighter demonstration which might show that a $200m aircraft can be bested by relatively cheap UAV. There are billions of dollars in contracts at stake, after all, and the MIC has always prevailed in these matters as President Eisenhower warned that it would.
July 28, 2009 7:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think there's more agreement between you and I then you realize.
Totally agreed about organizational inertia and service parochialism (the Air Force fighter jocks). If you remember last year Secretary Gates said that getting the Air Force to provide intelligence assets, especially in the form of UAVs, was "like pulling teeth." He subsequently fired the Air Force Secretary and Chief over this, the F-22 dispute and other issues. This next generation bomber decision you speak of is his.
Yes, the Raptors and Reapers use Hellfire and JDAMs for CAS, but otherwise, their armaments, payload and maneuverability are still inferior to the Apache and Blackhawk. Remember Apaches also carry in excess of 30 Hydra pod rockets and a 30mm cannon; Blackhawks have side door gunners. Blackhawks and Chinooks also carry anywhere from a squad to platoon of soldiers. No UAV can currently provide any of those capabilities.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves here. With time unmanned vehicles will eventually replace all manned aircraft. But not yet.
July 29, 2009 9:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
Let's also remember that this diary regarding aircraft procurement by the Air Force and their congressional friends, and that Apache and Blackhawk are not Air Force assets.
July 29, 2009 9:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
"Apaches also carry in excess of 30 Hydra pod rockets and a 30mm cannon; Blackhawks have side door gunners. Blackhawks and Chinooks also carry anywhere from a squad to platoon of soldiers. No UAV can currently provide any of those capabilities."
The only reason current UAV's do not have these capabilities is that they weren't designed to have them.
"their armaments, payload and maneuverability are still inferior to the Apache and Blackhawk".
Again, this is only because UAV's weren't designed for more maneuverability or to have more payload.
The inherent limitations of having an on-board pilot and the life support necessary for that pilot require design adaptations which limit performance, maneuverability, and payload.
As far as we know, the current UAV's tested as fighters and bombers have all been modified from existing designs which have all the limitations of manned fighters and bombers. An airframe specifically designed for air-combat-maneuvering or close ground support would necessarily be more effective than the current tests show. Specifically, there would be no need for a cockpit, no need for life support for that pilot, no need for a design which allows the pilot to see all around the aircraft, and no need for limitations on G-forces which would allow for much shorter turning radiuses.
.
July 30, 2009 10:30 AM | Reply | Permalink