Obama Issues F-22 Veto Warning

UPI ^ | July 14, 2009

[Strategy]

WASHINGTON -- U.S. President Barack Obama has warned Senate leaders he will veto a defense spending bill if it funds more F-22 fighter jets than the Pentagon has requested.

In letters to the top Democrat and Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Obama said he would veto the $680 spending bill for next year "if it supports acquisition of F-22s beyond the 187 already funded by Congress."

[JohnLongIsland]

Who said Putin never smiles (or laugh like a hyena in this case)?

[johniegrad]

This is a veto that could be overridden. I am assuming also that you meant to post $680 Billion.

[mason-dixon]

VETO OBAMA Mason Dixon

[Yardstick]

I guess those defense workers on the F-22 assembly line don’t deserve a slice of the stimulus pie. For some reason those jobs aren’t “shovel ready” enough (unlike, say, building windmills for a non-existent green industry).

Profligate spending everywhere else, but when it comes to defense — hey, we gotta tighten that belt!

[edpc]

I don’t see the big deal since the US is going to purchase over 2000 F-35 JSFs from the same contractor.

[Proud_USA_Republican]

Next up. Obama demands that to keep the F-22 line open, we must sell them to Iran, North Korea, and the Taliban.

[listenhillary]

Where have we used the F22? Anywhere?

[Son House]

Wouldn’t it be Justice to see the Democrat Congress have to impeach and remove Øbama for failing to keep his oath to protect America?

[BobL]

Do it. I dare you Obama. I cannot think of anything more fun than watching Democrats debate national security.

[SkyPilot]

Most people don't know half the story of the F-22. I can't even tell the whole thing here.

Basically, Secretary Gates wants the program canceled, and has for a long time. He basically fired The Air Force Chief (General Moseley) and the Secretary of the Air Force over this one issue. The nuclear issue was "boob bait for the bubbahs" in the public.

The F-22 is expensive. Really expensive. Expensive Expensive. So expensive that General Moseley started cutting every Air Force program to the bone and then started kicking out 40,000 Airman who were already in the Air Force out the door. His rationale was he would "transfer" that "savings" to pay for the F-22. It didn't go over too well in a service that is already being deployed hand in glove with the Army in "in lieu of" or now called "joint sourcing taskings" in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Air Force "fighter mafia" wanted the F-22 at all costs because they wanted it. If the next war is against China or Russia, you bet we want it. But each budget is a series of priorities. Americans want more billions for themselves and transfer payments in one way or the other. Expensive jets (unless it is their job) doesn't really get them excited.

Certain members of Congress want the F-22 of course. It has not made a significant impact in any conflict yet, but so didn't the F-117 until the Gulf War.

Well, here we have Obama, and when he first bragged he was cutting a "Billion" from a "bloated" budget - 70% of that was by scrapping the F-22.

He doesn't care about Defense and he this would make him open to criticism that his claim of cutting "wasteful" spending was smoke and mirrors.

The bottom line is that the F-22 is just a budget killer. When we are spending 2.3% of our GDP on Defense, we cannot afford it.

Maybe someday, if our nation is really in a total war, we will kick ourselves in the groin.

[stevie_d_64]

I wouldn’t mind getting into a groin kicking contest with Gates, or even Obama at this point, as long as I get to go first...

Then I’ll quit when they recover, and declare them the winner...

That way I at least get my kick in first...I’ll feel better...And won’t be so sore...

[Red in Blue PA]

Obama is not a person who is about strength.

[Redleg Duke]

I don’t see him vetoing anything. That would require a vote other than “Present” and he is incapable of that!

[mbynack]

The F-22 out performs the F-35 in every category for Air to Air. It out-maneuvers the F-35 due to increase thrust and vectored thrust. It has a better radar, allowing it to detect enemy aircraft at greater distances and to distinguish friend from foe at greater distances. It climbs faster, accelerates faster and has two engines - so when you loose one it can still fly. The F-22 can carry twice the combat load of air to air missiles. It can employ those missiles at twice the altitude of the F-35. That means that the range of air-to-air and surface attack missiles are nearly double that of the same missile fired from the F-35.

The main reason the unit cost of the F-22 is so much higher than the estimated cost of the F-35 is economy of scale. They're only looking at buying about 183 F-22s as compared to 1763 F-35s. Stopping and starting the production lines will also drive the cost of the F-22 up significantly.

The reason the Air Force wants the F-22 is Air Superiority. If we can't control the air space over the battlefield, the enemy is free to use it. That means any other US aircraft that flies in that airspace is vulnerable to attack. It also means that the enemy is free to attack our ground troops at will. Air Superiority is a cornerstone to our military strategy and it's important that we spend the money to get the best.

[M. Espinola]

The anti-American Obama agenda in action.

[listenhillary]

I’ve heard that the cost will be 200 million each with about that much added on top to keep them flying. 70 hours of maintenance per hour of flight time.

Are we putting gold plated bidets in the back of these? Are these numbers close?

[mbynack]

I understand that they're having some issues with reliability that they're working on. All new aircraft have a significant ratio of maintenance to flying time. Most of the systems are brand new and all of the technicians are in training. It's like buying the first car of a new model. Eventually they get the bugs worked out and the product reliability increases. On top of that, most of the technology used in the F-22 is brand new. It's a quantum leap over existing aircraft.

The last cost I saw on the F-22, based on a purchase of 183 airplanes was 142.7 million per aircraft. If they slow down or shut down the production lines and then reopen them, the cost goes up significantly. Almost all of the trained production crews will be laid off and go find different jobs. The suppliers will lay people off or re-purpose their supply lines. The production facility could be mothballed or re-purposed. Then, when Uncle Sam decides to purchase more, everything has to start over from scratch.

[GBA]

The F-22 is expensive. Not having it, since our F-15s and F-16s are gradually facing end of service life retirement, will be more expensive.

The assumption seems to be that we are spending a lot of money for an airplane.

Actually, we are spending a lot of money employing a very large number of Americans at all employment levels in a wide variety of industries and for all of that spending we gain R&D, technical and manufacturing knowledge and have the current ultimate air superiority fighter which we will then depend upon for the next several decades. Sounds like money well spent to me.

Or we can spend many, many times more money buying a couple of car companies to bail out their unions and then even more money to finance the remaking of Amerika. I wonder if that "Provide for the national defense" idea will be in the new constitution of obamaland.

[Squantos]

So if the UAW doesn’t build it its done according to OhBooBoo ?

[Squantos]

Big “V” is there for a reason.......

[PIF]

“funds more F-22 fighter jets than the Pentagon has requested.”

Add: Basically Gates et al forced the Air Force to back down from their original request for 350 to 187.

187 is bearly a proof of concept number - too few for any real deployment, given that some will be down for repairs, maitenence etc. at any given time.

While racking up over one trillion in spending this fiscal year, the Mil is cut to 2.3% of spending. While transfering billions to entiltilment programs, our military must make do with less and less.

Eventually there will come a time in the budget process when the Mil budget is zero’d out, since entitilments will consume all of the spending. That time will some soon, perhaps in the next few years.

[listenhillary]

I just looked up the cost of a Boeing 777. 200 to 300 million dollars each.

I just wish I felt that I was getting the best bang for my buck when we make military procurements. Instead of the political back scratching, contract padding crap we have now.

Can it be kept simple and deadly when we decide on a weapon system?

[PhilDragoo]

Gates coauthored with Zbigniew Brzezinski the 2004 Council on Foreign Relations paper "Iran: Time for a New Approach" calling for negotiations with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Gates sees the obvious budgetary prudence in merely negotiating with nations whose rulers work for the chaos to release the Twelfth Imam from the well near Qum, rather than simply owning the real estate over their palaces (Kremlin, etc.) and dictating terms.

Besides which ali Hussein wishes the anti-Marxist anti-Islamist bulwark destroyed; it's in his contract.

In adult voice: The poseur who has put us a trillion in the red is now lecturing us on budgetary excess. Such is the magical thinking of the malignant narcissist.

[GBA]

What is missing from all of these calculations is a sense of fear. We, the People, simply do not fear any other country, nor, as few Americans have any first hand knowledge, do we fear the real costs of war or the experience of war, especially losing. Regardless, war will never happen here, right?

An overwhelming number of Americans have only known a lifetime of American superiority and the apathy that comes with "guaranteed" peace and comfort.

9/11 was good for a shock, but then we shock and awed our way back to complacency. Truth be told, most Americans were back to 9/10 level complacency by 9/12.

Why would any non-military American think there is any need whatsoever for an F-22 or that there ever will be? History never repeats itself, right?

[AFreeBird]

Seems to me that the Pentagon wanted more than the 187 order on the books.

[mbynack]

Some countries use that strategy. The Chinese and Former Soviet Union built a lot of medium cost tanks and airplanes. They designed them to be flown or operated by people without a lot of skills and training and planned for a high attrition rate.

The reason that an Air to Air Fighter costs so much more than a passenger jet is because of its mission.

A passenger jet will never see more than 3 Gs, while an Air to Air jet will get pushed to 7 or 8 Gs repeatedly over a period of a training mission and a hundred times in one month.

The external design of a passenger jet is designed to be fuel efficient and cost effective, while the military jet is designed to be stealthy, low drag, and able to withstand extreme temperatures and stress. The additional engineering and material costs drive the overall cost up significantly.

The military jet requires special shielding for avionics to prevent it from being detected. It has expensive radar and missile detection systems to give it a better chance of surviving in a Surface to Air environment. The fuel systems are protected to keep them from exploding if punctured. The engines operate at higher temperatures and have a lot higher thrust/weight ratio than a passenger jet. This requires expensive materials and a lot of engineering.

The Military jet has a very powerful radar to allow it to detect and identify enemy aircraft at long ranges. The radars use gold wave-guides for efficiency and require a large power source to operate. They require special shielding to keep from interfering with other aircraft avionics and to keep from cooking the pilot with microwaves.

Every component and subsystem in the military jet has to be built to withstand the high G loads and rapid pressure changes. Simple systems, like Airframe Mounted Auxiliary Drives (to produce electricity and hydraulic pressure) have to be engineered to withstand 9-10 Gs. That drives the cost up.

All of the electronics produce heat - so they need to be cooled and the aircraft design has to include provisions for keeping systems far enough apart so that they don't interfere or cook each other, but still fitting them into the smallest package possible.

[Kenny Bunk]

I want the F 22.

BUT, but, but, Moseley was dead wrong to handle it the way he did. He busted out many competent officers and long-term noncoms who were not ready to retire. Using modern politically correct personnel techniques, he of course boiled out many very competent people, leaving behind a larger than normal Affirmative Action @$$(*)e contingent.

He stopped much lower-cost airframe modernization programs that were absolutely necessary to keep us flying while the F 22 was on the production line.

Moseley deserved to go. The F22 didn't. Not to mention years of foreign sales that would have come with it, making it in the long run a much more economical deal.

[mbynack]

We, the People, simply do not fear any other country, nor, as few Americans have any first hand knowledge, do we fear the real costs of war or the experience of war, especially losing. Regardless, war will never happen here, right?

I think you hit it on the head. The Russians have experienced the huge losses of a war fought on their own land and are determined not to have it happen again.

Anyone who studied WWII realizes that we were really close to loosing the whole Pacific War during the battle of Midway. It was just a matter of luck that we managed to wipe out the Japanese carriers and not the other way around.

The US disarmed after WWII and we entered Korea without trained troops or equipment and suffered huge casualties because of it. As long as China, Russia, Iran, and Korea are building up their military and are a potential threat, we have to be prepared. You can't wait for tensions to build and then try to design and build airplanes, develop tactics and doctrine and train pilots and maintainers to counter it.

On the other hand, we really do need the federal government to build a Peanut Museum in Alabama, Hippy Museum in New York, and bike trails in San Fransisco. We need 6000 Bureaucrats in Washington to manage the US education system so we can maintain our mediocre standings in educational achievement. /Sarcasm

[listenhillary]

My point for mentioning the Boeing 777 cost was to point out that the F22 was way cheaper. Still hard to imagine how they could spend this much money on a fighter.

[PSYCHO-FREEP]

You sound a lot like most Liberals, using all of their talking points.

To begin with, since World War 2, a B-17 had a crew if 10 men, the B-29 had 11. Both types of bombers could only carry 8,000-11,000 pounds of bombs on short missions, and 4500-6,000 pounds on long missions. Enemy fighters ripped them to pieces easily because they were slow and vulnerable. With every Bomber shot down, we lost nearly a dozen lives per bomber.

Just one F-15 has 1 pilot (E model 2) can carry 16,000 pounds of bombs, 12,000 rounds of gun ammunition, turn on a dime and defend itself with devastating firepower, shoot long range missiles and take out an enemy from 10 miles away.

In other words, your comparison is lame to say the least. The added cost of the technology in the f-22 and f-35 goes beyond monetary frugality, because just one of these deadly machines will equal a whole squadron of what the rest of the whole World has in their air forces.

That is how we win wars, by having the best equipment that the enemy does not. And to say that losing a war and our country because we decided that it was just too expensive to protect ourselves is downright moronic.

[mbynack]

Moseley deserved to go. The F22 didn't. Not to mention years of foreign sales that would have come with it, making it in the long run a much more economical deal.

I retired in '96 and we were in the initial stages of bringing the F-22 to Tyndall AFB. I worked with Boeing for a couple of years, but I've been working with the Navy since '98. I haven't really kept up with the manning and issues in the AF since '98.

I know that they went through a huge drawdown in 92 and tried to get me to get out when I was within 8 months of retirement eligibility. They offered one time payments of several thousand dollars in lieu of retirement as an incentive to get mid-tier NCOs to get out. The guys that took those offers were usually the guys that were the most qualified and could easily find jobs on the outside. A lot of the guys like me that stayed in were in the "Crippled, Lame and Lazy" category. Some of the best and brightest pilots that I knew took early-outs to fly for the airlines. They made four times as much money, worked fewer hours, and didn't have to worry about being deployed for six months a year.

I was in during the Carter years when they sacrificed spare parts and hardware to keep force levels up. We were manned at 60% and couldn't get spare parts. We had commercial equipment "awaiting parts" for three years because we didn't have the money to buy them. The result of that was the Iranian Hostage Rescue mission where we couldn't even keep enough equipment operational for a very limited mission.

You can't win a war unless you have the equipment, the personnel, the spare parts, and the training. If you compromise any of those, the rest are useless.

[GBA]

Why does an Indy car or a Ferrari or Lamborghini or any other extreme high performance street or race car cost so much more than a Chevy Suburban?

[Andonius_99]

01101100011011110111011001100101001000000111010001101000011001010010000001110100011000010110011101101100011010010110111001100101001011100010111000101110

[PSYCHO-FREEP]

11111111111111101111111111111! (1000101)

[listenhillary]

At what cost? We’ve spent the earnings of the not yet born Americans. I trillion dollar deficit for this years budget alone. To keep spending like there is no tomorrow is madness. It’s a new world. We can be brought to our knees with 3 or 4 EMP blasts over the right places. Two or three men with suitcases could cause tens of millions of deaths.

It’s a new world. Just having the biggest and baddest machines around won’t stop the next 9/11.

If you will notice, I mentioned that a boeing 777 is about twice as expensive as a F22.

I’m all for the military having the best that we can buy, but I want rational people looking over their shoulders and making sure what we are getting is indeed the best and we are not being reamed.

[Spartacus7502]

A weapons system that is deployed in numbers sufficient to meet two theater conflict guidelines, and has never been used, is a great place to hold the budget line.

These same arguments appeared for the B-2, B-1, and F-14 at the end of there initial production runs.

Where does the fiscal conservatism begin?????

[GBA]

As you point out, there are many potential threats in our brave new world. However, that doesn't mean the old threats we've traditionally dealt with and prepared and trained for no long exist.

A suitcase nuke threat scenario doesn't mean that we no longer need an air force; it is just another threat. Our current aircraft are getting old fast. We've been using them in combat in Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere and of course, constant training. (Reality check: we use our combat aircraft.)

Our aircraft are built to take the stress, but nothing lasts forever, not even the 40-50+ year old B-52s and especially not 30 year old F-15s and F-16. They not only wear out, but eventually, they won't be as good as the aircraft they would fight against. That's our current reality.

The F-22 will likely be in service for the next 30 years, just as the F-15 has been and will undoubtedly see combat just as the F15 has seen. How valuable are the pilots (pretend it's your kid, sibling, parent or spouse) who fly them and how important is their mission?

Another consideration: which airplane do our potential adversaries fear the most? My guess? It is the F-22. As such, it is twofer: both a deterrent and it forces potential adversaries to spend resources to find a way to defeat it.

Do the biggest and baddest machines stop the next 9/11? Haven't had another one since and using our military is part of the reason why. Perhaps having the biggest, baddest machines has been stopping something far worse.

I believe there would be a lot more mischief against us and our allies if we didn't have the most potent and deadly armed forces and a willingness to use them if necessary. That's the rational and a sufficient number of F-22s to last for the next few decades is part of that rational. Money well spent.

Remember who who is being paid to build them. Care to estimate how many Americans at all levels are a part of building an F-22 and all its various systems? Beats the heck out of just sending out welfare checks when you really think about all we get for the money spent on the F-22 program.

[Gilbo_3]

yeah, we piss 20 Billion down the uaw rathole, but cant manage to spend millions for an air superiority fighter...or even 'up-armored' hummers while AT WAR...

I wonder how much more our warriors will stand from the KINC [kenyan in chief]...

[devolve]

.

Correct or Edit if I am wrong :

F-22 on the Military Channel

In computer simulations just one (1) F-22 destroyed thirty (30) F-35s

We will not go up against Cuba or Venezula or Kenya or New Black Panthers from Chicago in the next serious military air war

It will be Russia &/or Red China

.

[Steve Van Doorn]

The spending we have done in the last few months could have bought 60,000 F22’s at 200 million each.

[jaydubya2]

We have them deployed in Guam and Okinawa, but I’m not aware of them being used in combat yet.

[SkyPilot]

I can't find any real flaws of what you said. I think you have a better grasp of this than do most retired Generals and Chiefs. Perhaps it is because too many of those are getting paid to say otherwise.

Take care - and thanks for your service.

Sky

[mbynack]

That was one of the best written and logical rebuttals that I’ve seen on this subject.