Here’s the latest news on the current longest lasting weapons system project which isn’t nicknamed “Star Wars” and trust me, it isn’t good news:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A U.S. Air Force F-22 fighter, designed to be the world’s top air-superiority aircraft, crashed Wednesday near Edwards Air Force Base, California, while on a test mission, an Air Force official said.
The Lockheed Martin Corp -built F-22 went down about 10 a.m. Central Time about 35 miles northeast of Edwards, where it had been based, said Maj. Michelle Coghill, a spokeswoman for the Air Combat Command.
This program started in the early 1990’s as the next generation air superiority fighter to take on the by then non-existent Soviet threat to NATO based on studies done by the Air Force in the 1970’s and 1980’s about the necessity to stay ahead of Soviet air defense technology. The initial contracts were awarded to Lockheed’s successor in 1991.
Originally the USAF was to purchase 750 of these super-duper stealthy advanced fighters, but that number steadily declined to the 183 planes for which orders have currently been placed. As of 2005 production costs were “capped” at $37.3 BILLION in 2005. And here we are in 2009, still testing the mission capability of this advanced fighter jet that we clearly haven’t needed in the wars we have been fighting, after having pissed away $65 BILLION on this wonder plane.
So the question which I will restate for you in a slightly modified fashion why are we continuing to fund the damn thing when by all accounts it isn’t combat ready after nearly 18 years? It couldn’t be because its a welfare program for the military industrial complex, could it?
[The] anonymous “Protect American Jobs / Save the F-22 Raptor” ads on Drudge — and every other political website to the right of LOLcats — make my free market blood boil. Someone is spending a lot of money to gin up a petition to save history’s most expensive fighter plane. […]
Here’s some of the ad:
Act Now!
Production of the world’s most advanced fighter aircraft, the F-22 Raptor, is in jeopardy. Your help is needed to urge the Obama Administration to save more than 95,000 American jobs and more than $12 billion in national economic activity.
There’s no source given for either of these numbers. But according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 647,000 people work in industries where at least a fifth of the products are related to defense production, which would mean that roughly one out of seven Americans who work in the defense industry works on the Raptor. This is unlikely.
Last month, in a letter to Obama from 44 Senators arguing for more Raptor money, the number of jobs was only 25,000. I guess they’ve been hiring. Maybe they’re working on the website. […]
It’s built with super-secret stealth technology. The F-22 is invisible to radar, except when it switches on its radar to aim its weapons, opens its bomb bay to fire them, or turns.
[T]here’s a perfectly good reason the Raptor has never been to Iraq …The reason we’ve never used the Raptor in Iraq is it doesn’t work in places where there are wars.
According to Aviation Week & Space Technology, there’s just too much radio interference. To quote the man in charge of Air Combat Command, Gen. Ronald E. Keys:
“We didn’t anticipate there was going to be this level of jamming. Every patrol is out there with personal jammers. We’ve got lots of airplanes that are also jamming. At the same time, we’ve got people trying to listen [to insurgent conversations], a lot of it on the same or overlapping frequencies.”
The jammers he’s talking about are the ones the troops use to disable roadside IEDs. So the F-22, at $351 million a pop, is an excellent plane; it just doesn’t work over a battlefield where one side is using booby traps activated by TV remotes and electronic garage door openers.
So Iraq is out. And anyplace else with TVs, radios and cars.
Also according to Aviation Week:
(A) possible vulnerability in the stealth fighter’s legendary electronic surveillance system–located in the leading edges of the wings and vertical tails–became apparent during operations by the first operational squadron flying in the Chesapeake Bay area. The strong radars on nearby Navy ships were overwhelming the delicate sensors.
So it also doesn’t work around warships.
So, as mad as we all are about the “Banksters” as Atrios has nicknamed them, reserve a little anger for that segment of our economy which has mastered the art of wasting government tax dollars: our Defense Contractors. And write your Senator and tell him or her we really don’t need to build warplanes that we can’t use in any war were currently engaged in (nor do we need) merely to save a few thousand jobs, the lobbying fees of K-Street firms, and the executive bonuses of a few Senior Lockheed Executives. Aside from a really cool name which evokes meat eating dinosaurs and birds of prey, the F-22 doesn’t seem to have been worth all the time and money we’ve spent on developing it. There has to be better ways to spend the money allocated to purchasing these junk warplanes. Like developing green energy efficient technologies, for example. Right?
