The Price of Air Superiority Comes at a Cost

Earlier this week, the Senate voted 58-40 to end funding for the controversial F-22 Raptor fighter program. If the law is eventually passed the program will end with 187 of the planes produced out of an anticipated 185 required. Many in Washington look at this as a victory against rampant spending on programs with no immediate gain but I tend to look at it in the sense that it's like a driver who looks at the road immediately in front of the car but not five feet beyond the front of the car. In those cases you usually end up having an accident somewhere along the line. Now I'm not saying that suddenly our national defense is left wanting like many conservatives would have you believe but I do feel that it could leave us feeling wanting if our opponents change.

Right now we are fighting two wars against terrorism; one in Afghanistan and one in Iraq. In both cases, the enemy we are fighting is small and man-sized therefore very difficult to hit when you're several thousand feet in the air travelling at a few hundred miles per hour. Therefore although air support is used on occasion, it isn't utilized in the traditional sense when one thinks of wars in the traditional sense. There have been no dogfights as such this go around and soon after the defeat of Iraq's military, there was no Air Force for our Raptors to fight. That being the case, of course everyone is going to look at the Raptors (which are far more expensive than was originally anticipated) will be put up on the chopping block.

I recall several years ago when I was still in college, reading about how many felt that the Raptor was no longer necessary since the enemy we are fighting is an insurgent and not an air force. And while I also saw the logic in cutting the program back, I don't believe in cutting it completely off and the reason is that this war on terrorism will eventually end and given that the world has become far more suspicious and untrusting place it's likely that more wars will happen. If that be the case, not all militaries we face will be insurgencies; some could very likely be full fledged nations similar to the Soviet Air Force of the Cold War. If that's what we are potentially going to face then doesn't it make sense to keep the program alive?

People state that the Air Force itself doesn't like the plan and neither does the Defense Department. In many cases that opinion is being driven by the fact that the price is high more than how effective the plane may be. The Raptor has performed flawlessly in training with 221 kills for 0 losses in simulated exercises at various places around the world. It's enough to justify keeping the plane around. Although it has not yet fought in combat, many Air Force and joint military exercises are realistic enough to show that the planes could perform beyond expectations if put to the test. But since we don't need it now, it makes sense to cut it doesn't it? Not really.

The F-22 may not have proven itself in combat as yet but it has been proven to work. It does most everything it was predicted to do and so we have a proven concept that will deployed in numbers that would pose a significant threat to anyone threatening our interests. Proponents of the cheaper F-35 Lightning II say that funding for more Raptors should be siphoned off into the Lightning II program since it is far more cheaper and will give us a more versatile plane. If that be the case then I would support it because my bottom line feeling is that continued air superiority is what will help keep our armed forces in the fight no matter what battlefield they step upon. What I don't want to see happen is that all aircraft programs start getting cut because the 'only' threat we have now is an insurgency or terrorist cell.

That opinion is very narrow minded and naive and could come back to bite us in a terrible way. And while I feel that the job market will indeed be affected by the decision to cut the program, I don't believe it will mean what many conservative or pro-military commentators are stating which is that suddenly the entire fleet of Raptors will be retired. During the first Gulf War, the United States fielded planes which had first flown in Vietnam (30 years earlier at that point). We continue to fly modernized versions of fighters first flown 30 years ago today. Cutting the production of the program doesn't mean that tomorrow the planes will suddenly be flown to a scrap yard and permanently retired but we can't overlook the fact that the existance of the F-22 will ensure that we will maintain air superiority for years to come.