The F-22 burns through fuel and taxpayer money at a massive rate. The military has no idea what to do with this plane, but Lockheed wants to keep building it, not because it has any military value, but because it is a “great way to create jobs.” Remind us not to go to Lockheed when we want economics advice.
Lockheed Martin has a high profile PR campaign to get the government to keep funding its ludicrously overpriced and incompetent F-22 fighter. This fighter is the pre-eminent example of out of control military spending with a price tag of $300 to $350 million each. Furthermore the US government gets almost no military capability for this massive price tag. Its complexity and unreliability have resulted in an average readiness level of 62%, the lowest of any US fighter, and it is designed to fight a threat tha does not exist and may never have existed. It redefines the term boondoggle. The F-22 actually reduces the Air Force’s capabilities and is considered a laughingstock by air power experts not in the military establishment. That is those with the combination of air power knowledge and who can exercise free speech. However, even if the F-22 were important for US defenses, and if it could stop crashing (it has never been used in combat, but keeps crashing in training), the argument Locheed Martin is putting forward is completely economically illiterate. Numerous studies show the exact opposite of what Lockheed and Congressment from the F-22 manufacturing state of Georgia propose. Time and again, defense spending ranks as one of the least effective ways to create jobs. The highest contributor to economic growth is actually infrastructure. One reason for this is it results in something that people can actually use, roads, rail, water, etc… Advanced fighter aircraft like the F-22 result in either more defense contractor fraud, or lots of dead people. Neither of these can be considered an “economic good.” The current crop of 180 F-22s already require $8 billion in refurbishment ($45 million per plane), and the fighters have yet to fly a single mission. They create such a massive logistics tail that they are unusable in any military thearter. The Pentagon’s best financial move is to mothball the current F-22s and write-off the $65 billion program as corporate welfare for Lockheed Martin, and send the planes to air museams around the country where they can serve as tourist attractions.
Defense Spending Is Only Justified for Real Security Needs – Never Jobs
This proposing defense spending as economically beneficial has got to stop. It is an idiotic proposition because the only logic by which military spending can be presented as beneficial beyond security, is through attacking other countries in order to procure their resources. If that is a policy of the US, then we need to have a discussion on this. Secondly, even if this is the official US policy, F-22s would not be the weapon you would buy. Countries that we attack like Iraq and Afghanistan do not even have modern radar systems (in the case of Afghanistan, they have no radar systems) so the F-22 is complete wasted on these types of “enemies.”
If Lockheed is indeed prepared to present the F-22 as a jobs creator, it should perform the economic research comparing the money spent on more F-22s to public infrastructure and publish it in a white paper. However, as soon as they do this, they would fall right on their face, because it works the other direction. So they won’t do this because it won’t be effective and the economics would be lampooned. However there are a number of think tanks that would be happy to falsify research like this for a fee. What is much easier is to create emotionally laded ads which have nothing to do with real life economics. When Lockheed says that the F-22 is responsible for a certain number of jobs, the question should be “compared to what?” That same spending spent on anything else – literally anything else – will result in more jobs, and will be better for the economy in the long run.
This video describes Lockheed’s campaign
References
http://defensescholar.wordpress.com/2009/01/07/its-time-the-kill-the-f-22-and-f-35/
http://militarywaste.org/2009/03/07/quotes-on-the-f-22-raptor/
It has spent massive amounts of money on being undetectable by radar, while not noticing that inexpensive Russian made radar homing missles can lock onto the F-22 based upon its radar. These missles are in the couple hundred thousand dollar range. This means a $300 million dollar investment can be destroyed by a $150,000 investment. More details are here…
http://www.cdi.org/pdfs/stevenson%20f-22%20brief.pdf
Lockheed gets the government on the front-end and the back-end. They continually overcharge the government for service parts. The increase in the cost of parts is tremendous and has no logical reason aside from price gouging. The government plays footsy with Lockheed because high ranking members of the military want jobs in the private sector after they leave the Pentagon, and the best way to get these jobs is to look the other way when contractors steal from the taxpayers. See this article for details.
http://spplan.wordpress.com/2008/10/03/pbl-a-real-trend-or-fake-trend/
