Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

■"Air Superiority at $258 Million a Pop: A Fighter in Search of an Adversary (Other Than the Bottom Line)," by Tim Weiner, New York Times, 27 October 2004, p. C1.

Great article on F/A-22 (aka the Raptor). Is it a great plane? You bet. It's also the most expensive in history:

Designed at the height of the cold war to penetrate Soviet radars without being detected and to shoot down Soviet jets in the event of World War III, the Raptor has taken 23 years to move from the drawing board to the assembly line and into an Air Force fighter squadron.

It is being born into a world far different from the one in which it was conceived. American air power is unrivaled; the enemy looks far different than it did back in 1981.

The F/A-22 (F stands for fighter, A for attack) replaces the F-15 at five times the cost, so the question begs, How many F/A-22s should we buy if such a purchase continues to beggar our investment strategy with back-half or SysAdmin forces (almost all of which tend to be platform-cheap)? Fighting now with F-15s we get catastrophic victories. What will we be shooting for with the F/A-22s? Absolutely pyrrhic ones?

Don't get me wrong, I love new technology, and I want the F/A-22 in the arsenal. But I would make a strategic trade on this one: I would buy far fewer than planned, and plow those savings into replacement F-15s and the SysAdmin force. But contractors from 43 states are involved with F/A-22, and guess how much they want their voices to be heard.

But here's the good part of my compromise: by buying fewer jets, the price-per-plane does go up, so the profits remain high for the contractors even as they sell fewer. By buying the jet in this manner, we maintain the long-term supremacy of our Leviathan force (and the industrial base that supports it), but not in numbers that precipitously beggar the SysAdmin force we need to seed today (remember, it's the maintenance of this super-complex planes that costs plenty more too!).