What the Death of the F-22 Really Means

The near-extinct F-22 fighter.(Department of Defense)

It’s no accident that the military’s budget has reached $515.4 billion (that makes it 21 percent of the gross domestic product of the United States), because military spending amendments are usually met with little to no opposition. But this July, the Senate voted to cut $1.75 billion for the F-22 fighter. It may seem like a small thing—less than 0.3 percent of the total military budget—but by killing the F-22 program, it gave hope that seemingly impossible-to-kill wasteful or unnecessary military projects are actually beatable.

Fred Kaplan, who writes the War Stories column for Slate, called the Senate vote to kill the program "a substantial step" for President Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates and other military budget hawks, who had pledged to streamline the military and cut wasteful spending. "The vote might also mark the beginning of a new phase in defense politics, a scaling-back of the influence that defense contractors have over budgets and policies," Kaplan wrote.

This is not to say that the F-22 is a useless fighter. It’s not. It’s just not a suitable aircraft for the types of unconventional warfare the United States and its Western allies are engaged in today. Though that fact has been obvious to many military experts for some time now, Congress continued to fund the production of the F-22 since the 1980s. There are 187 F-22s currently in use by the military today—that’s more F-22s than some countries have commercial jets. The program’s survival is a testament to how strong the military industrial complex’s stranglehold has been over the U.S. military.

Gates, a Bush administration appointee, explained his opposition to the F-22 program at the Economic Club of Chicago in July. "It simply will not do to base our strategy solely on continuing to design and buy—as we have for the last 60 years—only the most technologically advanced versions of weapons to keep up with or stay ahead of another superpower adversary—especially one that imploded nearly a generation ago," Gates said.

But even with Gates’ support, ending the program took significant effort. In a Washington Post recap of the F-22 budget cut, they reported that, "For years, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has argued strenuously against the F-22s as Cold War relics, too inefficient and expensive to warrant building any more than the 187 already in the fleet. He cut the Air Force’s F-22 funding request of $400 billion, for 20 more, to zero."

The “20 to zero” part is key. The real trick to reforming defense spending is ending them completely. But the program didn’t get an immediate cutoff. Gates had to concede construction of four additional F-22 fighters in fiscal year 2010 before ending the program the following year, which will bring the total of F-22s in use to 187.

But despite setbacks, William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation, thinks canceling the F-22 program is a good sign. "I think for one thing it shows that the military industrial complex can be beaten," Hartung says. "I also think in Congress it sort of shows that you can do this. Not everyone has to buy the arguments of the industry."

One of the primary arguments in favor of the F-22 program was that it provided jobs for Americans. Lockheed Martin, the primary defense contractor behind the F-22, values the jobs argument so much that the last page of its brochure reads, "The F-22 industrial base is a national asset of thousands of highly skilled workers and suppliers in 44 states who manufacture parts and subsystems for the Raptor." A Lockheed Martin representative declined to comment for this story.

The Senate vote shows that the jobs argument has been effective—even some senators who opposed authorizing the war in Iraq voted to keep the program. Political partisanship did not appear to be a significant factor; rather, senators whose states had high Lockheed Martin employment were more likely to vote against eliminating the F-22s.

Plant distribution and state-by-state voting on the F-22.

For instance, both Democratic California senators and both Republican Georgia senators voted against the amendment—and Lockheed Martin has more than three dozen parts plants between Georgia and California alone.

While the job creation argument may have effectively at garnered Senate votes, experts note that defense spending is far from the best way to create jobs. "If you’re going to talk about jobs from government spending, defense is the least efficient way to do it," says Larry Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who specializes in defense. "The job thing became more salient this year because of the stimulus package." According to Korb, by using the jobs argument to keep the F-22 alive, Lockheed Martin and other defense lobbyists weakened such arguments for future defense bills.

A good analogy for looking at effective stimulus might be by comparing defense spending to public transit spending. The difference between using defense programs as stimulus and, say, using public transit as stimulus is that defense have an extraneous effect—it doesn’t get any additional people jobs in the process. Transportation, on the other hand, can get riders to places where they might spend money or find work.

Another reason military budget hawks won on the F-22 is because it can be replaced by the F-35, a similar, single engine aircraft that’s more up-to-date and cheaper, but slower and able to carry a wider array of weapons. This means that the jobs for the F-22 can be replaced by the development of the F-35 as well. David Axe, a defense journalist who writes for Wired‘s Danger Room blog, says that in addition to the fact that the F-35 is more fitting for what the U.S. military needs today, those same manufacturers that helped build the F-22s can switch over to building the F-35. "Here’s the thing with aerospace workers: they don’t just build one airplane," Axe explains. "It’s like a car factory—they build the same trucks in the one factory but they build different models of the same truck."

But the defeat of the F-22 program doesn’t necessarily result in a slam dunk for future cuts to the military budget. There are no other major programs currently on the horizon that might compare to the F-22’s situation, and if it is any indication of what is to come, the battle might not be as easily won next time.

For now, it’s hard to see exactly how the lessons of the F-22 battle will translate into future budgetary battles. Perhaps future program terminations will always come with a "construction tax," either in building a newer model, like the F-35, or in making a few more of whatever is on the chopping block, like the four extra F-22s. The fight to make the American military more efficient is far from over, but at least the F-22 has shown there’s hope that it can be done.

Daniel Strauss is a staff writer for Campus Progress and a senior at the University of Michigan.

Related Stories

• Gender-Neutral Housing Comes to Princeton
• Campaign Communications Director, Repower America
• Toke Up Marijuana Laws
• Send a Health Care E-Card
• The Battle for Pittsburgh