Not Tsunami
In an effort to not read news about the Tsunami (which just passed 80,000 dead) I was very excited to find that they are scaling back the Raptor program in light of the Iraq war. It always struck me as odd that wars didn’t count against the DoD’s already impressive budget. You would think that if we were having a war the DoD would be the first group that would have to tighten belts.
For those who don’t know the Raptor is the F-22, the new fighter designed to take on frontline air to air defense. The main reason I am in to the military at all is airplanes which I find just amazing from a technical perspective. My admiration of these aircraft however doesn’t allow me to ignore the fact that we simply don’t need front-line interceptors any more. Our newest models are from the 70’s and they have mostly been retrofitted as attack aircraft anyway.
In addition the cost of this aircraft has gone completely out of control. The total program is now estimated at about $72 billion which, while no stealth bomber, still comes out to $260 million per plane. That is just completely out of control. IIRC it also didn’t include the initial R&D contracts.
The plane I am much more interested in is the Joint Strike Fighter, or F-35 which is built using many more modern manufacturing principles. Basically it is three planes (all attack variants) which use common parts. Some of the common parts (like the avionics and UI components) came from the work done for the F-22, but the big manufacturing parts are also common among the different variants, so hopefully the economies of scale will come into play. Unfortunately after one of the competitors won the design competition, the decided that all the major US manufacturers had to play a role, so the design got changed to allow that, and became more expensive. We will see how much it actually ends up costing.
Nowadays the munitions are more important than the aircraft anyway. My guess is that the next generation of aircraft will be pilotless.
December 30th, 2004 at 04:11
Defense spending has nothing to do with actual defense needs. It has more to do with doling out tax money to the constituents of powerful Senators and Representatives. A lot of the big defense contracting companies might as well be state-owned enterprises, and they’re about as efficient as you’d a state-owned enterprise to be.
But that goes into my rant about how the US military is increasingly coming to resemble the Soviet Union. (I’m not the only one who thinks this.)
We’re coming up on another Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process. In the last one, talk about which bases were needed for national defense took a back seat to talk about “jobs.” (The exception was the communities that had grown up around airfields, turned into wealthy suburbs, and didn’t want the planes anymore. Those bases got closed toute suite.)
December 31st, 2004 at 08:38
Military spending in general is so frustrating right now. It is really one of those things that shouldn’t be a WPA program, but it seems to have ended up as one.