April 1, 2009
WASHINGTON – In the coming days, President Obama must decide whether to approve the request of Air Force chief of staff General Norton Schwartz for more F-22 Raptors. The request is in addition to the 183 F-22s – each costing some $138 million, or $361 million, if you include overall program costs – that Congress approved in 2006.
Lockheed Martin, which builds the F-22, as well as Boeing and Pratt & Whitney, frequently take out full page ads in The Hill and other publications read by lawmakers and their staff imploring Congress to continue to fund the program, For National Security. For Economic Stability. For the over 300 million Americans it keeps safe – and the more than 95,000 Americans who are employed directly and indirectly.
Not all members of the Defense establishment agree, however, that additional F-22s are needed to keep American safe. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, for one, has expressed concern that procuring more F-22s would come at the expense of the more affordable F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
From an economic standpoint, Gates’ position is important because the production of the F-35, which may be sold overseas, has the potential to generate sorely needed revenue. The F-22, meanwhile, has been banned for sale to foreign governments by House Appropriations Chairman David Obey (D-WI).
Considerable debate exists within the Defense establishment concerning the utility of investing tens of billions of dollars in next generation aircraft at a time when more robust counterinsurgency capabilities are needed to tamp down growing unrest in Afghanistan, Iraq and, possibly, Pakistan. Secretary Gates is adamant that the killing of Afghan and Pakistani civilians by errant bombs and missile attacks hinders our ability to win hearts and minds there.
Indeed, a central lesson from the early years of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is that counterinsurgency is less about killing insurgents and more about devising political solutions to local problems while being shot at. Solving problems at the community level and building long-term, genuine partnerships with the local population is the best way to diminish insurgents’ influence. F-22s Raptors do not help to build these partnerships.
If President-elect Obama is serious about placing a renewed emphasis on nation building, as his statements concerning Afghanistan and Pakistan attest, he needs to work with Congress to ensure that already strained Defense budgets are not saddled with unnecessary appropriations for next generation fighter jets that do not help our effort there.
The F-22 Raptor program alone has cost American taxpayers $62 billion, almost twice the entire 2008 State Department budget of $35 billion, which is less than 8% of the $481 billion Defense Department budget (less than 6% if we include $162 billion in supplemental war funding). If we are serious about defeating insurgencies in South Asia, we need to shift resources away from nice-to-have next generation defense programs and instead fund the additional nation building responsibilities that we assumed when President Obama dispatched more than 17,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan.
While it is understandable that some members of Congress, whose constituents include employees of Lockheed and other companies that build the F-22, advocate additional funding for the program, sound fiscal judgment and the need to win the wars in South Asia and Iraq make a strong case – if not for additional State Department funding - at least for postponing procurement of additional F-22s.
To preserve jobs, funds earmarked for the F-22 could still be allocated to Lockheed, but only to produce systems that will make us safer, like Lockheed’s Maritime Integrated Domain Awareness System (MIDAS). By allocating more money to MIDAS, President Obama would take an important step toward securing our nation’s ports and lessening the chance that terrorists will detonate a nuclear weapon in the port of Oakland, Long Beach or New Jersey.
President Obama talks tough about the importance of writing reality-based budgets and making sure that we have the money to cover expenditures. If that is not the case, he says, we need to make some hard budget choices. This is one of the easy ones. President Obama should say “No” to procuring additional F-22s.
Justin McMahan, a former Director at the EastWest Institute, is enrolled in Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and MBA joint degree program.
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