LA Times Suggests Budget Woes Threaten F-22, -35
Aero-Analysis by Aero-News Senior Correspondent Kevin R.C.
'Hognose' O'Brien
The high price tags of
new Air Force fighters and the continuing evolution of the war on
terrorists have combined to threaten the costly jets with the
chopping block. That story, which originated with Mark Mazetti of
the LA Times, was echoed by smaller papers across California --
some citing the LA Times, some their own reporting.
"Military planners are debating options to scale back the Air
Force's F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and the stealth F/A-22 fighter,"
Mazzetti wrote. The high unit costs of these programs -- $345
million each for the F-22 -- make them a bull's-eye for budget
cutters. But the high unit costs are themselves a function of
inexorably shrinking purchase quantities.
It's a vicious circle: the fewer units of any given aircraft are
made, the more the components that are unique to that aircraft will
cost and the greater the amount of overhead that each component and
each aircraft is burdened with. The more the components cost, the
more the cost of the aircraft goes up. The more the cost of the
aircraft goes up, the more pressure to cut purchase quantities,
ostensibly to keep costs down. Rinse and repeat.
The LA Times is considered to have good sources in DOD, mostly
among functionaries hostile to the current administration. But many
newspapers have more and better sources than the California paper
-- especially the two hometown newspapers.
That this story was broken by the LA Times and not, for
instance, by the Washington Post's Thomas Ricks or the Washington
Times's Bill Gertz, indicates that it the LA Times story may be a
pre-emptive strike by California defense contractors, who are
counting on these programs for billions of dollars, and thousands
of jobs.
This is also suggested by the way the story started across
California in several papers and then spread East -- exactly the
opposite of what you'd expect from a Washington-based story.
Those defense contractors are expected to fight hard for that
money, and the Air Force is going to be fighting hard for both
projects. The front-line planes in the Air Force today were mostly
designed in the 1960s and built in the 1970s and 1980s.
As far as the part of Mazetti's report that is report, and not
speculation, it's almost certainly true: military officials have
looked at budget-cutting plans that include axing one or both of
the new, costly fighter programs. Officials have certainly also
looked at other big-ticket items, including the Army's complex
transformation process, new naval systems, and the V-22 Osprey for
the Marines and Air Force.
If military officials weren't making such plans, they wouldn't
be doing their jobs responsibly. So the existence of plans for a
military without such advanced systems as the V-22, F-22, and F-35
shouldn't shock anybody. But one thing remains clear: each of these
systems is going to be in the crosshairs of budget cutters, and its
supporters need to be en garde.
Which may just be what this story is all about.