Catch F-22: Enough Is Enough for Funding the $356 Million Useless Plane (AUDIO)
In a "Rachel:Re" segment, the history of the troubled F-22 Raptor is told, complete with a special surprise ending!
Thursday October 29, 2009 12:05 a.m.
Want to find out how to kill a military project that has direct economic benefits in nearly every state and is built to be "too big to fail?" Well consider yourself gifted with the perfect case study: the F-22 Raptor fighter jet. With parts and manufacturing being scattered across roughly 44 states (i.e. 88 Senators' states), ending funding for what most military analysts consider an outdated and critically flawed plane has proven especially difficult.
Both the Obama and McCain campaigns supported ending this "Mother of all spending disasters," as Rachel Maddow puts it, in the 2008 elections. Facts about the plane such as its radar absorbing skin having a severe vulnerability to rain, or its steep maintenance costs, began to spread. Valid reasons to end the program finally won out and the project under the Obama Administration has been given the axe.
The F-22 project showed how you could go on spending billions of dollars on an ultimately useless project without much to show for it and being killed off now is a small, but significant win for pragmatic thinking in government. Now, about those remaining 187 F-22's in America's fleet…
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Spend the money on drones and bring our men and women home from Afghanistan and Iraq.
Oh, how patently ridiculous all of this is.
Oh, such a bold, brave cut by Obama! It amounts to not even 1/3 of 1 percent of the defense budget.
More importantly, the idea that the F-22 is useless is so laughable that it's hard to even know how to respond. The Japanese want the F-22, the Australians want it the F-22, the Israelis want the F-22. More countries would surely ask for it, as well, but know to not even bother.
The Air Force's only other fighter planes are from the early 1970s, and they are showing their wear and tear.
Obama's decision is just going to cost the taxpayers more in the long-run. Without being in production, replacement parts will now skyrocket in cost, making the current F-22s more expensive and with a shorter lifespan.
It's already all over the media in China, Russia, and India that the F-22 has been cancelled, and you can bet that's good news to them. They can now all easily construct planes more advanced than our fighter planes which were designed when 8 track cassette players were high tech.
Rachel Maddow, much like Obama and his supporters, can only construct an argument against the F-22 by engaging in the most absurd lies and exaggerations.
F-22s can't communicate with other US forces? You have to be kidding me!
$352 million dollars each? Have you no shame?
The Pentagon doesn't want it? Hmm.. you mean a couple of Obama lackeys at the Pentagon don't want it. Gates had to fire top Air Force officials who were so adamant about the welfare of their country as to not give into this bullying charade.
Amazingly, some people use the lack of the F-22 being used in Iraq and Afghanistan as some kind of mark against it. Talk about ludicrous. Boy, that's a way to plan for the future. What are you Obama-ists planning on? More Iraqs and Afghanistan? (well, actually, you should be if you'd read anything about Obama's views on foreign policy.)
Uffdaguy here insists the plane doesn't even have a role! Uffdaguy apparently doesn't have a brain.
All this is about is saving just a few billion dollars for Obama to hand over to his cronies and his financier backers. That's it. Nothing more. And the end result will be to stimulate the fighter aircraft industry in other countries and in a few years we'll have to set up the manufacturing tooling all over again, at the cost of a few billion dollars, in a desperate game of catching up in a game where we were over a decade ahead of everyone. And in the long-run, we won't have saved a dime.
Obama fans are truly the most gullible, rationalizing morons in the world.
@2 coil coyle
Eisenhower was so prescient when he warned of the growing power and influence of the military-industrial complex. That power has only grown as the industry has consolidated, leaving fewer, but larger and more powerful suppliers. Case in point: the contract for the new tanker plane for the USAF. The only US company that builds planes of the size needed is Boeing. Northrop-Grumman has countered with a proposal using modified European Airbus aircraft. THAT is the total sum of competitors: 2. Do you think we will get any kind of reasonable deal on those planes when there are only 2 competitors. The situation was much the same with the F-22, which had only one competitor, the YF-23. Only one shipyard can build aircraft carriers, so they will always get the contract.
The Littoral Combat Ship is the next turkey that needs to be killed. It's fast, but it is incapable of defending itself against likely threats, and carries such a small crew that it would be difficult to do proper damage control procedures in the event it was damaged in an attack.
Uffdaguy,
That was one of the last ones. What's the next one is the question.
How can we stop the media machine that sells this stuff to us?
How indeed did WTC 7 fall?
What indeed has its collapse caused us to spend money on?
It's about time. It is an expensive plane that spends 30 hours in maintenance for every hour it flies, and it doesn't even have a role. Here's another way to look at it. You can buy an AIRCRAFT CARRIER for the cost of half a dozen of these turkeys. I was stunned when I heard that this plane can't even communicate with other planes other than F-22s. Lockheed Martin sold us a bill of goods, (surprise, surprise), winning the competition with the YF-23 primarily on the basis that the plane would be lower in maintenance time and costs, and wouldn't be as technologically risky. These were apparently lies, or at least gross exaggerations that tipped the scale in their favor. The cost of the 187 planes comes to over $66 billion. All of that money went to pad the pockets of CEOs, lobbyists and the campaign coffers of congressmen.
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