The Senate has voted to kill the F-22, stopping acquisition of the stealthy, air-dominating fighter at 187 planes. With the White House having threatened to veto the defense authorization bill if it contained any more funding for the jet, President Obama did a virtual jig around the Rose Garden today, declaring: “I reject the notion that we have to waste billions of taxpayer dollars on outdated and unnecessary defense products to keep this nation secure.”
First, it’s the height of hypocrisy for this president to talk about wasting billions. The money to keep the F-22 production line going was $1.75 billion—a mere hiccup in the Obama world of $800 billion stimulus packages. Second, “outdated’? Says who? The plane is the most advanced, technologically superior plane ever built and would remain so for 20 years at a minimum. Third, “unnecessary”? Well, not according to every airpower study done in the last decade.
The F-35, the Joint Strike Fighter, is no replacement. It is not as stealthy, not as fast, has shorter range, and was designed to be a fighter-bomber, not a jet to clear the skies. Indeed, the logic behind building an “inferior” F-35 was precisely that there would be enough F-22s to clear the skies for it to operate in. And 187, in any major war scenario, turns out to be too few. Of course, maybe that’s the point: President Obama thinks there is no prospect of a major war occurring in the next two decades. What he doesn’t seem to get is that it’s precisely because the United States had such air dominance that such a war has not happened.