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The Air Force gets cake, eats it, too Three tactical fighters in budget belie ‘transformation’ The F-22 Raptor, one of three fighters the Air Force currently is purchasing. Click "Play" below the image to learn more. By Steve Johnson Part 1 of a 3 part series MSNBC Jan. 30 — The Sept. 11 attacks and the ensuing Afghan war sent a powerful message to America’s military brass: The well-oiled machine that kept the Soviet Union at bay did nothing to deter the terrorists who struck the U.S. homeland. Yet the vast majority of this year’s $348 billion defense budget will fund weapons designed in the 1980s and early 1990s to fight the Red Army. Despite rhetoric about “transforming the military,” many officers, defense officials and analysts say the military has failed to put its money where its mouth is. • eDiets Diet Center • Shop at B&N.com • Auctions at uBid • Yellow Pages • lavalife.com Where singles click • MSN Broadband THE $45 BILLION defense budget increase this year - up 11.4 percent over 2002 - was the largest jump in two decades. The budget the president is expected to present next week for fiscal 2004 will be about $400 billion - and that is expected to climb to $500 billion by 2010. After Sept. 11, many expected the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps to rethink expensive weapons systems already in the pipeline in favor of lighter, quicker and stealthier arms designed for a new kind of warfare. Experts say this simply has not happened. “The secretary of defense has paid off the services,” said Christopher Hellman, a senior analyst at the Center for Defense Information. “There would have been tension within the Air Force had there been money for either the F-22 or unmanned aerial vehicles. But now there is enough money in the budget to buy both.” • Spending priorities belie 'transformation' • Congress: 'Vampire' programs Coming up: • Contractors: More for TOUGH CHOICES When Dwight Eisenhower left office in 1961, the hero of D-Day warned of a “military-industrial complex” that threatened to gain control of U.S. defense policy and use it to perpetuate its own agenda. More than 40 years later, the complex Eisenhower spoke of is widely referred to inside military circles as the “iron triangle,” the confluence of military commanders, defense contractors and members of Congress who are loathe to see anything interrupt the fundamental direction of the nation’s defense program. Defense spending is the largest single “discretionary” item in America’s annual less budget aside from Social Security, and it is set to grow enormously in the next few years. Over the next three days, MSNBC.com will look at how each tip of this “triangle” influences defense choices — decisions that will mean a heavy taxpayer commitment for two decades or more. It is the Air Force, in particular, that is being held up by critics as a prime example of the military’s failure to make difficult choices that would free up funds for anti-terrorism and other domestic programs. Critics, including some inside the Air Force itself, point to the planned purchase of three tactical warplanes — the F/A-18, the F/A-22 and the Joint Strike Fighter — as a case of generals spending too much money on cutting-edge warplanes at the expense of less glamorous, more relevant needs. • Deployed to the gulf • Iraq: Building toward war • Elite and special forces • OPS: Behind the lines • Weapons: new vs. old • National missile defense • The new battlefield Under the current budget plan, the Bush administration is funding 300 state-of-the-art F/A-22 fighters, as many as 3,000 Joint Strike Fighters, plus 500 F/A-18 E/Fs. Over the next few decades, that adds up to more than $300 billion — more than the federal government spends annually on all other federal programs combined, except Social Security. Air Force Secretary James Roche and other advocates of the F-22 argue the expenditures are vital. “The F-22’s combination of stealth, super-cruise, maneuverability and integrated avionics, coupled with improved supportability, represents an exponential leap in war-fighting capabilities and allows for the full realization of operational concepts that are vital to the 21st Century Air Force,” Roche said in a speech last year. Others say it is unfair to expect the military to do an about face on decades of doctrine less that two years after Sept. 11. “The idea that you can take an institution like the military, which has a $390 billion budget, and do ‘high G’ maneuvers on procurement policy simply isn’t reasonable,” says Bill Martel, an Air Force Advisory Board member who also works on new weapons with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. “It takes time to develop ‘transformed’ systems. They take years to show up in the budget.” Few dispute that the F/A-22 is an improvement on what the Air Force is currently flying. But that is beside the point, critics say. Secretary of the Air Force James G. Roche, a former executive of Northrop- “We cannot afford a full buy of all three tactical Grumman. fighters, given the resources we’re going to have over the next 10 years,” Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., told Aerotech News and Review this summer. Weldon, who heads the defense procurement subcommittee in the House, says: “They’ve got to make some tough choices, they’ve got to cut programs, they’ve got to realign.” WHERE’S THE THREAT? Behind Congressional worries about the impact of the three-plane strategy on a shrinking budget are questions about what these new aircraft add to U.S. military capabilities. The next generation Soviet aircraft the F-22 was designed to fight, for instance, died on the drawing board along with the Soviet Union. Russia designs top-notch fighters, but it lacks the resources to build them in sufficient numbers to rival the U.S. arsenal. Even as exports to potential U.S. foes, the Russian aircraft lack the sophisticated battlefield management systems that the United States uses to integrate its warplanes into a gigantic, all-present military machine that includes naval, ground and air assets. Some critics argue that, in a world where governors and mayors are telling the federal government they don’t have enough money to lay out reasonable terrorist response plans for American cities, it makes more sense to upgrade existing planes like the F-15 by adding advanced electronics. Michael O’Hanlon, a senior analyst with the Brookings Institution, points to Afghanistan, where U.S. special forces on horseback called in air strikes from 50-year-old B-52s. But the man on horseback was using a laptop computer and a laser pointer, and the aging B-52 was dropping “smart” bombs, O’Hanlon notes. “Most of the areas where technology is advancing rapidly are in the smaller sorts of things that go into a big weapon. You can take some existing weapons platforms and improve them without spending the money for an F-22,” he said. BETTER WEAPONS, FEWER PLANES? Two of those smaller improvements — electronics that allow a pilot to pick out a target and “smart” weapons that destroy it — now make it possible for one pilot to do work previously requiring many more aircraft. “Now there is real-time targeting in cockpits,” said Sam Gardiner, a former faculty member at the Air War College. “If you look at the numbers from World War II up to the first Gulf War, when an aircraft went out to kill tanks, it came back and on average killed .5 tanks. Today, the Air Force will come back with five, seven, 10 kills.” Carrier-based aviation now is “10 times as potent with precision-guided weapons,” said former Rear Adm. Stephen Baker, who was operations officer for the Theodore Roosevelt battle group during the 1990- 91 war. Advertisement So if each aircraft has ten times the killing power it previously had, critics ask, why does the Pentagon not reduce its request for new planes exponentially as well? Air Force officials say that’s because the United States has foes around the world, which spreads out the U.S. air fleet. “When you’re fighting an adversary, what matters is being over those guys at 2 a.m. and then back at 2 p.m.,” said Col. Kurt Ditmer, who’s in charge of planning the Air Force’s future combat capability needs. “You can’t have pulled your forces out of Korea and left yourself vulnerable there.” WHO NEEDS PILOTS? An even greater challenge for traditional air power advocates is the unmanned combat air vehicle, or UCAV, such as the Predator. Critics are quick to point out that it was not America’s aviators who first fired Hellfire missiles from the remote-controlled aircraft in Afghanistan — but rather the CIA, which has no large cadre of pilots clamoring for the most advanced airplane. “It’s a lot sexier to say you fly an F-22 than saying you operate the joy stick of a Predator,” says a senior U.S. defense official who once flew from Navy carriers. “UCAVs cost pilots jobs, and it’s the pilots who run the Air Force. You do the math.” Gardiner says that in the military “there is a willingness to embrace technology, but not necessarily the impact of technology.” The Air Force’s Ditmer disagrees. Unmanned attack aircraft are still not reliable or cost-effective, he says. It is the F/A-22 and Joint Strike Fighter that are truly transformational, because their stealth and speed render enemy defenses helpless. “Because an unmanned vehicle has no man, it has been called transformational,” he said. “But from our perspective, if it stops an enemy from going to war, that is transformational.” Counters CDI’s Hellman: “The military is not really committed to transformation. They say a lot of positive things about it and they’re willing to go so far as long as it doesn’t make inroads into their traditional missions in the world. The problem is: That war is not out there anymore.” Ultimately, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s ability to change those attitudes may determine his legacy — as either the defense chief who forced the military to face new realities, or the Pentagon leader who left America unprepared to face the military challenges of the 21st Century. The higher cost of aircraft The predicted and actual budgets for U.S. warplanes Plane ORIGINAL BUDGET # of planes Cost/plane FINAL BUDGET Total planes built Cost/plane Cost in 2002 dollars F-15 $7.4 billion 729 $10 million $29.9 billion 1074 $27.9 million (in 1990 dollars) $37.1 million F-16 $6.0 billion 650 $9.3 million $38.4 billion 2201 $17.5 million (in 1994 dollars) $20.59 million F-18 $46.8 billion 548 $85.4 million $48.8 billion 548 $89.1 million F-22 $99.1 billion 648 $153 million $69.7 billion 341 $204.5 million F-35 $226.5 billion 2,866 $79 million (current estimate) TBD TBD TBD TBD Source: U.S. Department of Defense