Obama Vows a Veto In Dispute Over F-22s - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#13094423
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/13/AR2009071303098.html

President Obama vowed yesterday to veto a pending $680 billion military spending bill for next year if lawmakers set aside funding for more F-22 warplanes than the Defense Department says it needs.

Obama's intervention in the long-simmering debate over the wisdom of ending the F-22 program increased pressure on Senate lawmakers to respect his military priorities. It also sharpened his grievance with House and Senate Democrats who have defied the White House and supported keeping the F-22 production line open. Many such lawmakers, including Massachusetts Sens. Edward M. Kennedy and John F. Kerry, have F-22 contractors in their home states.

"We do not need these planes," Obama said in letters to the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), and the committee's senior Republican, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), both of whom oppose the additional F-22s and spoke against them on the Senate floor yesterday. "I will veto any bill that supports acquisition of F-22s beyond the 187 already funded by Congress."

Obama noted in his letters that, under his proposal, production of F-22s would be terminated at roughly the same level proposed by the Defense Department during the Bush administration in 2004. To override the proposal would "waste valuable resources that should be more usefully employed to provide our troops with the weapons that they actually do need," he said.

The president's veto threat reflects his desire to win congressional backing for virtually all of the large revisions in Pentagon spending put forward by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in April, including terminating a half-dozen Cold War-era weapons programs to help pay for arms and equipment that military commanders say they need in Iraq and Afghanistan and for future counterinsurgency efforts.
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"I think we've done pretty well" winning support for most of the changes, Gates told reporters last month, with the exception of the proposed $1.75 billion for more F-22s and $439 million for an alternative engine for the F-35 that the Pentagon has long considered wasteful.

Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, released their own letter to lawmakers yesterday, emphasizing that without the additional F-22s proposed by the plane's supporters, the military would still be able to field an estimated 2,500 modern fighters by 2020. China, they said, would have a little more than half that tally, and none as sophisticated. They warned that spending more for the F-22s, as the Senate Armed Services Committee approved in June by a two-vote margin, will come at the expense of more critical Air Force and departmental priorities.

Lockheed Martin, the plane's manufacturer, has been lobbying aggressively to keep the production line open. Yesterday, it circulated an unsigned document on Capitol Hill saying that the plane has "performed extremely well" and that its maintenance problems are abating. The paper was a response to a report in The Washington Post last week disclosing that the Defense Department had calculated the hourly flying cost for an F-22 at $49,808 and that tests last year showed that the mean time between critical failures during an F-22 flight was 1.7 hours.

Lockheed's document confirmed that "structural retrofit repairs" are still being made to F-22s and said the plane's canopy has been redesigned because of problems in maintaining its transparency. But it said that the new canopies will meet requirements and that maintenance downtime is diminishing. Responding to criticism that the plane has never flown over Afghanistan and Iraq, the company said, "The best weapon may be the one that isn't used but instead deters a conflict before it begins."

A separate document circulated by the Air Force in response to the report confirmed that Defense Department tests showed that 30 hours of maintenance were needed for every hour of F-22 flying time and said the F-22 fleet's "mission capable rate" -- a measure of its readiness to meet military requirements -- improved from 62 percent to 68 percent between 2004 and 2008.

A spokeswoman for the Office of the Secretary of Defense said last week that this rate measures only the readiness of planes that are not in depots for repair and noted that the F-22 program and the Air Force traditionally focus on a separate measure of the fleet's availability for missions. That availability, she said, was improving but stood at 55.9 percent for the past five months.
User avatar
By Oxymoron
#13094434
I could care less, what he does with the useless F-22 he should ponder investing in the S-500.
User avatar
By Oxymoron
#13094833
harmonious agreement in this irrefutable fact


Indeed not, I think we both agree that the S-5000.6 is the greatest invention since the wheel.
User avatar
By Dave
#13095040
Igor, the US actually has developed some very good SAM technology due the SDI program, and the SM-3 and SM-6 are superb SAMs. Unfortunately, development is thus far exclusively naval and we have not adapted them to land-based, mobile launchers as with the excellent Russian S-300 series.

The F-22 is most certainly not useless, as the F-15 fleet is aging and has lost its edge against generation 4+ fighters now beginning to proliferate around the world. The latest Su-35 variants with Irbis E radar will beat most F-15 variants every time. That said, now is perhaps not the best time to be procuring generation 5 fighters.

SAMs, while important and effective, are not the death star some here think they are as the PK of missiles is surprisingly low against maneuvering targets, and SAMs can also be suppressed in many ways.
User avatar
By Igor Antunov
#13095516
Agreed dave, but this discussion is about the F-22 and it's affordability at this present time vs existing tried and true aircraft and alternatives in the US arsenal. Don't mind Oxy he can't take anything seriously anymore.
User avatar
By Dave
#13096026
The F-22 has much lower maintenance costs than the F-15, and the per aircraft cost is $122m, not much greater than the unit cost of the most modern F-15 variants recently purchased by RoK and Singapore. The current F-15 fleet is aging, and not very well as the longeron disaster of last year shows. If anything they should cancel the F-35 program, that thing is a fucking piece of shit...and the per aircraft cost is now approaching F-22 levels!
By Piano Red
#13096371
A title fight between the White House and the Senate Appropriations Committee?

My money is for the Senate.

Lockheed has huge contracts for the F-22 program in 44 states. There's no way Obama veto would survive.

Igor Antunov
Well, he would do well to buy some superior Russian missile technology.


Don't hold your breath.
User avatar
By Dave
#13096463
I'm not sure how the troubles with the Bulova program necessarily constitute an indictment of the S-300/400 family, which is obviously what our anti-American friend was referring to.
User avatar
By Typhoon
#13096512
The F-22 has much lower maintenance costs than the F-15,


That was the advertised slogan with new technology and greater automation of the maintainance process, however we have had a lot of news over the years about problems of build quality and maintainance of the radar absorbant materials of the aircraft. This cropped up recently and highlights the issues seen with some worrying statistics...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 03020.html

A sensible decision is being made by the administration with regards to the F-22, when defenders base opinion on local jobs you wonder if they have the best interest of the airforce at heart?
By Piano Red
#13096820
Dave
I'm not sure how the troubles with the Bulova program necessarily constitute an indictment of the S-300/400 family, which is obviously what our anti-American friend was referring to.


He said Russian missile tech in general. He didn't say which kind. :D

Typhoon
That was the advertised slogan with new technology and greater automation of the maintainance process, however we have had a lot of news over the years about problems of build quality and maintainance of the radar absorbant materials of the aircraft. This cropped up recently and highlights the issues seen with some worrying statistics...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 03020.html

A sensible decision is being made by the administration with regards to the F-22, when defenders base opinion on local jobs you wonder if they have the best interest of the airforce at heart?


It must kill you to know that at the end of the day....more F-22s are inevitably going to be built.
User avatar
By Igor Antunov
#13096890
He said Russian missile tech in general. He didn't say which kind.


Overall. The bulava is handled by just one of many Russian development firms. And I'm about as anti-American as piano red.

It must kill you to know that at the end of the day....more F-22s are inevitably going to be built.


This is my hope in fact, a costly lesson is more effective and will ensure the US doesn't try this stupidity again in the future when the Chinese lenders shut their doors and you are wielding a laughably high maintenance air force, compromising the rest of your military.
User avatar
By Dave
#13096931
Igor Antunov wrote:Overall. The bulava is handled by just one of many Russian development firms. And I'm about as anti-American as piano red.

Nonsense. You're emotionally and reflexively anti-American. You talk about how Bush should be tried for war crimes on the one hand while speaking warmly of Russia's history of expansionism on the other hand.

Igor Antunov wrote:This is my hope in fact, a costly lesson is more effective and will ensure the US doesn't try this stupidity again in the future when the Chinese lenders shut their doors and you are wielding a laughably high maintenance air force, compromising the rest of your military.

The F-22 is easier to maintain than the F-15.
User avatar
By Thunderhawk
#13097902
Image

New technology costs a great deal of effort (money..) for the trail blazing.

I find it iteresting that the US military is putting the effort into supporting new generations of technology and is being bashed for it, yet at the same time corporations within the USA and the US government in general are being bashed for not investing in new (often "green") technologies.

Its a Military vs Civilian issue rather then luddite vs technophile, but I still get a chuckle out of it..
User avatar
By Igor Antunov
#13097903
Nonsense. You're emotionally and reflexively anti-American. You talk about how Bush should be tried for war crimes on the one hand while speaking warmly of Russia's history of expansionism on the other hand.


I'm anti US military industrial complex. That's where it ends. As for bush he is clearly a war criminal along with his entourage. Surely you don't support war criminals?
User avatar
By Typhoon
#13097938
New technology costs a great deal of effort (money..) for the trail blazing.

Personally I would'nt consider the airforces F-22 new, some components of the system are worthy of attention but in general the F-22 is sitting on the black line, the navy's UCAS is new.

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