Senate Votes Down Funds for F-22 Jets

By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 21, 2009; 12:53 PM

The Senate voted Tuesday to kill the nation’s premier fighter jet program, embracing by a 58-40 vote margin the argument of President Obama and his top military advisers that the F22 is no longer needed for the nation’s defense and a costly drag on the Pentagon’s budget in an era of small wars and growing counter-insurgency efforts.

The decision was a key policy victory for Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who has been campaigning against the plane since April as a centerpiece of his effort to “fundamentally reshape the priorities of America’s defense establishment and reform the way the Pentagon does business — in particular, the weapons we buy, and how we buy them,” as he put it in a Chicago speech last Thursday.

Gates had depicted the F22, which was conceived in the 1980’s, as a “silver bullet solution” to a high-technology aerial warfare threat that has not materialized. He said other warplanes will adequately defend the country for decades to come, and won support from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Air Force’s two senior leaders. But his view was strongly opposed by others in the Air Force and by military contractors and unions that have benefitted from the $65 billion program.

Although lawmakers debated over several days, as they have for many decades, whether the fighters are needed to counter a military threat from Russia or China, the nation’s current economic travails may have played a larger role than military strategy in the vote. Although the plane’s supporters worried that its cancellation would eliminate thousands of jobs at a time of economic hardship, its critics argued just as passionately that the plane deserved no additional funds at a time of pressing social needs.

The debate crossed party lines and was punctuated by a promise by Obama that he would veto any defense bill that included funds for more than four additional F22’s, which cost an average of $350 million a copy. The Senate Armed Services committee by a two vote margin had supported spending an additional $1.79 billion to buy at least 12 more planes than the administration sought, while the House of Representatives had supported spending $369 million for extra planes.

While the decision today formally leaves the two chambers at odds, lawmakers on both sides of the issue had predicted the Senate position will prevail when the defense bills are reconciled in a conference committee. If it does, the program would be halted at 187 planes, which is kess than half what the Air Force had once sought.
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The chief critics of the F22 were armed services committee chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and the top Republican, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) McCain, who has long attacked pork barrel spending for weapons that he says the military does not need, said the vote was a bellweather of congressional willingness to abandon “business as usual.”

The current weapons procurement system, he said in a floor speech Tuesday morning, “is out of control,” and went on to recall President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s warning of excessive influence in Washington by the military-industrial complex, suggesting a tweak to “military-industrial-congressional” complex.

The plane’s proponents were led by Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R.-Ga.) and included lawmakers from many of the more than 40 states where F22 components have been manufactured. Democrats such as Patty Murray (Wash.) and Chris Dodd (Conn.) argued passionately that killing the program would undermine the nation’s defense by idling highly trained engineers and mechanics.

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/21/AR2009072100135.html?hpid%3Dtopnews&sub=AR