THE F-22 DEBATE

April 4, 1997
		The Air Force says it needs the F-22, a new air superiority fighter, for the dogfights of the next century. But critics, including some in Congress, ask if the multi-million dollar F-22, first designed to go against the Soviet Union's best aircraft, is a plane in want of a mission. Charles Krause reports.

July 27, 1999: Experts discuss the price and need for the F-22. July 1, 1999: An interview with Gen. Wesley Clark on securing Kosovo peace. June 16, 1999: Four military leaders discuss military lessons learned in Kosovo. June 11, 1999: A Newsmaker interview with President Clinton. April 8, 1999: A discussion on whether the military should no longer be all-volunteer. Feb. 2, 1999: President Clinton proposes to increase defense spending. Jan. 4, 1999: Is the U.S. military ready for a war? Complete NewsHour coverage of the Military.   The Defense Department's Joint Strike Fighter Lockheed Martin The Pentagon The U.S. Air Force	CHARLES KRAUSE: The quadrennial defense review is the top to bottom evaluation of the U.S. military needs and strategy that's currently underway at the Pentagon. Among the many questions under review: Should the U.S. continue to arm to fight two regional wars at the same time? What kind of planes, ships, and tanks will be necessary to maintain U.S. global superiority into the 21st century? And how much will it all cost? Among the many trade-offs the Pentagon will have to consider is the F-22, an expensive next-generation jet fighter the Air Force is fighting to keep from being cut. According to the Air Force the new F-22 will be the most sophisticated fighter plane in history, so flexible and so fast it will guarantee U.S. air superiority well into the next century. Unlike current jet fighters the F-22 is expected to fly at twice the speed of sound, and if all goes according to plan, it will penetrate enemy defenses with impunity. Air Force Chief of Staff General Ronald Fogleman. GEN. RONALD FOGLEMAN, Air Force Chief of Staff: What we are doing with the F-22 is we are effectively skipping a generation and trying to move forward into an era in which we have a revolutionary breakthrough, something that's going to serve this nation not only for the first quarter but probably the first half of the 21st century. CHARLES KRAUSE: The first of nine F-22 test planes is about to roll off the production line at this Lockheed-Martin plant northwest of Atlanta. Current plans call for the Air Force to buy 438 F-22's between now and the year 2013. The price tag: At least $70 billion. Depending on who's doing the counting, each plane will cost somewhere between $70 million and $160 million, at least twice as much as the F-15, the fighter the F-22 is replacing. Expensive, yes, but Tom Burbage, a former test pilot who heads the F-22 program at Lockheed, says that only the F-22 will give U.S. forces the same global reach and air dominance in the future that they enjoy today.
	Air fighting dominance
	TOM BURBAGE, F-22 Program Manager: They're not looking for the fair fight. You have to think about who -- you know, your children, your grandchildren -- will be flying the airplane. You don't want to necessarily get them into an engagement where they're just equal or maybe even not even equal. He wants them to have the kind of dominance we're talking about. CHARLES KRAUSE: Sticker shock has forced the Air Force and the F-22's manufacturers, Lockheed and Boeing, to pull out all the stops to build political support for the plane. To show off the F-22's combat agility at supersonic speeds government officials and other visitors to the Lockheed-Martin plant in Georgia are urged to try the concept demonstrator. Sitting in the cockpit of this million dollar F-22 video game the pilot--in this case our producer, Carol Blakeslee--flew a mission that showed off the F-22's capabilities. Lockheed and the Air Force are especially proud of the plane's stealth, meaning its ability to roam through hostile air space largely invisible to enemy radar. SPOKESMAN: Now you've identified four bandits and two friendlies, so put the bandits in the shoot list. I'd like you to turn yourself into a conventional fighter aircraft now and see what happens. CHARLES KRAUSE: At the flick of a switch the demonstrator changes from an F-22 to a non-stealthy F-15. Enemy radar quickly lock on to the conventional plane which has far more trouble than the F-22 evading a shower of surface-to-air and air-to-air missiles. SPOKESMAN: Go back to being a stealthy. CHARLES KRAUSE: With the F-22's stealth technology turned back on things calm down. The F-22's state of the art radar and computers have the ability to shoot smart missiles at enemies over the horizon. SPOKESMAN: There's a second guy you shot out, and you're going to take him out right now. CHARLES KRAUSE: The demonstrator makes it all seem easy, easy as it was, for example, to knock out Iraq's air force during the Gulf War, but the demonstrator is rigged to ensure that the F-22 always wins. In real life, however, the F-22 has become a target because its Star Wars technology has proved to be unpredictably expensive. Earlier this year the Air Force reported that projected cost overruns on the F-22 could go as high as $15 billion over the life of the program. Lockheed believes it can contain the costs, but the F-22 has a growing number of critics in Congress and in the nation's think tanks who say it is simply too expensive and too sophisticated for what the Air Force really needs. Democrat Dale Bumpers of Arkansas sits on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee in the U.S. Senate.
	Military spending costs
	SEN. DALE BUMPERS, (D) Arkansas: And that plane is a wonderful plane. I'm not arguing about what the capabilities are likely to be. I'm talking about the cost and what we get for it. The question is always, number one, how much is enough? In the United States we spend twice as much on defense as the eight most likely enemies we're ever likely to face. And that includes China and Russia, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, the rogue nations. We spend twice as much as all of them combined. CHARLES KRAUSE: Lawrence Korb is former Assistant Secretary of Defense who's now an analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington. Korb says the F-22 is a Cold War relic originally designed in the 1980's to counter Soviet fighters then on the drawing boards. LAWRENCE KORB, Brookings Institution: I think the F-22 is a wonderful metaphor for what's wrong with the way we approach defense, the defense budget in these days. This weapons system was still in the research and development stage. It had not yet moved into production when the Cold War ended. Rather than saying, well, now we have a new era, let's go back to the drawing board and see where we want to go, there was pressure put on the Air Force by itself, by people outside the Air Force, to move into production. CHARLES KRAUSE: Korb says the Air Force, Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, and a host of subcontractors located across the country did not want to cancel the plane, so he says, they've been trying to invent a mission and a threat to justify the F-22's huge costs ever since the Cold War ended. But Lockheed's Tom Burbage says the F-22 is a key building block for the nation's future defense needs. TOM BURBAGE: This airplane has the technology combinations that make it the underpinning for most of the rest of the major weapon systems that the U.S. has in development right now. If you don't establish air dominance or air superiority over the theater conflict, you do not effectively employ most of the other weapon systems that are in development right now which is why the F-22 is such a critical piece of the overall national strategy. CHARLES KRAUSE: But critics say the Air Force and the F-22's manufacturers have made the plane a critical part of their strategy by exaggerating the potential threat the U.S. might face in the future. This Lockheed brochure, for example, shows almost 6,000 advanced warplanes deployed around the world, any number of which theoretically could be used against the United States. But what the brochure doesn't point out is that many of the planes are flown by U.S. allies and were manufactured in the United States, exported only after the Pentagon, itself, gave official approval. SEN. DALE BUMPERS: We're literally in an arms race with ourselves. Every weapon we build is ultimately sold abroad. I promise you, right now, Lockheed is planning on selling the F-22 abroad, and that is in the works. Why? To cut down the cost for copy. It's always the more we sell, the cheaper they are. CHARLES KRAUSE: The Air Force doesn't dispute that, but General Fogleman says there is also a threat from warplanes built by other countries. The new Russian SU-27, a French fighter called the Rafael, and a planned European fighter that's currently on the drawing boards. GEN. RONALD FOGLEMAN: The reality of the fact is whether the French are our allies, or the Europeans are our allies, these weapons are being proliferated around the world, and we are going to face them in the future. And so while I would--I would like perhaps to see the world different than it is today as a--as a member of the Joint Chiefs--I've got to plan against reality.
	The cost of war
	CHARLES KRAUSE: Whatever the threat and wherever it may come from there's also another reality the Air Force faces, and that's pressure on the Pentagon to stay within budget guidelines agreed to by Congress and the administration. Over the next 20 years the Defense Department plans to replace the current generation of combat aircraft with some 4400 new planes. Besides buying F-22's, the Pentagon also plans to order about a thousand advanced FA-18's for the Navy. It will also buy some 3,000 copies of a plane called the Joint Strike Fighter for the Navy, Air Force, and the Marine Corps. The Joint Strike Fighter is still on the drawing boards. This study by the Congressional Budget Office recently estimated the price tag for all three planes at $350 billion. Yet, at a time of balanced budget amendments and strains on Medicare and other programs the Pentagon has budgeted only $300 billion for the three fighters. That's at least $50 billion less than is likely to be required even without overruns and inflation. To keep within budget Korb and others argue that the Pentagon should buy more of the cheaper Joint Strike Fighters and only a few of the pricey F-22's. LAWRENCE KORB: Well, the F-22 is probably at least twice and maybe three times more expensive than the Joint Strike Fighter. And that to me is buying -- like buying meteor insurance. If you take a look at what's happening in the world, by the time the Joint Strike Fighter comes out, it'll already be better than anything else that's out there, so for the F-22 you're paying a terrific premium for something that's really not quite needed. CHARLES KRAUSE: But Air Force Chief General Fogleman says both planes are critical. He needs a new top-of-the-line advanced fighter, he says, to keep the costs of the Joint Strike Fighter down to a relatively inexpensive $30 million a copy. GEN. RONALD FOGLEMAN: To get an aircraft at that price you have to make some trade-offs in terms of capabilities, and those trade-offs were made on the assumption that something else would achieve air superiority. CHARLES KRAUSE: And that something else is the F-22 because General Fogleman says the Joint Strike Fighter will not guarantee air superiority. GEN. RONALD FOGLEMAN: And the reality of the situation is we are seeing parity in the fighter business and the air-to-air missile business and great advances made in the surface-to-air missile business. And if the United States of America is going to operate on the battlefields of the future and not take excessive casualties, we have got to be prepared across the full spectrum of conflict. And so the F-22 and the air dominance that it will give to our forces in the future is a critical part of that equation. CHARLES KRAUSE: Sen. Bumpers, who plans to offer an amendment to kill the F-22, says he understands why the Air Force is fighting for it. But he's concerned that General Fogleman's public statements do not bode well for the quadrennial defense review process. SEN. DALE BUMPERS: I've been sitting on Defense Appropriations now for many years, and I can tell you they come in with all those charts and movies and all those things, you know. They scare the life out of you, and you just feel like you are a traitor if you vote against whatever it is they're promoting that particular day. So I'm telling you that the quadrennial review team is going to come up with some suggestions, but they're not going to be dramatic and especially anything dramatic that will help ease the squeeze on the non-defense discretionary budget. Don't hold your breath. CHARLES KRAUSE: But General Fogleman says that he and other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff recognized that regardless of their own favorite weapon systems, they'll still have to make some hard choices before the quadrennial defense review is completed. GEN. RONALD FOGLEMAN: This is going to be a rigorous examination. I think all of us over here recognize that it needed to be because if we in the Department do not produce something that is credible as an outgrowth of this process, then we will essentially be defaulting to the Hill and the defense intellectuals in this town. CHARLES KRAUSE: The credibility of the defense review process and the fate of the F-22 have become intertwined. How it all plays out will become clear when the quadrennial defense review is released May 15th.

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