Later On

The way Congress continues to support the F-22 is shameful. Their price tags are showing, as it were. The NY Times has an editorial that slams their actions:

An unlikely alliance of senators — led by Saxby Chambliss of Georgia and including Edward Kennedy and John Kerry of Massachusetts and Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut — is backing an indefensible defense budget boondoggle: the wasting of $1.75 billion on seven additional F-22 fighter jets that the Pentagon says it neither wants nor needs.

The plane, the most expensive jet fighter ever built, was designed for cold war aerial combat. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has repeatedly argued that the Pentagon needs to phase out such high-cost, outdated programs so it can buy the kinds of weapons that American troops desperately need to complete their mission in Iraq and defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

The F-22 has not been used in either war. Buying more would only make it harder for the Air Force to shift money into aircraft like unmanned intelligence drones and the more adaptable, cheaper-to-fly F-35 fighter, which is set to begin production in 2012.

The F-22’s main contractor, Lockheed Martin, and its multiple subcontracting suppliers, have spread its 25,000 jobs across 44 states. And a majority of the members of the Armed Services Committee proved unable to resist that lure. Senator Chambliss, whose state is home to Lockheed Martin’s primary manufacturing plant for the F-22, sponsored the committee amendment adding the seven planes, which was approved by a 13-to-11 vote. Senator Kerry, who is not on the committee, has since said that he also supports the purchase.

President Obama is right to stand up for the nation’s military priorities and sound fiscal discipline in threatening to veto next year’s military spending bill if the extra F-22s remain. He has the full support of the Armed Services Committee chairman, Carl Levin, and its ranking Republican, John McCain, who plan to offer an amendment to remove the seven F-22s.

Providing for America’s real defense needs is expensive enough without making the military budget double as a make-work jobs program. Capping the F-22 program at 187, as the Pentagon wants, would keep production lines intact for years to come, well beyond the immediate need for stimulus-related job creation.

The full Senate will have a chance to put the nation’s security needs ahead of a bogus job program when the Levin-McCain amendment comes up for a vote in the next few days. If not, Mr. Obama should use his veto pen.