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.

FMI: www.dod.mil