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The Air Force's plan to buy 648 ultra-high-tech Advanced Tactical Fighters, which military analysts say could cost more than $100 million per plane, escaped last year's Pentagon budget cuts virtually unscathed.
Known as the ATF or the F-22, the jet was designed by Lockheed with the purpose of countering new fighters the Soviet Union was expected to produce in the mid-1990s. The Boeing Co.'s Defense and Space Group, working with Lockheed on the project, is contracted to produce several integral parts of the fighter, including the wings, aft fuselage and radar systems.
In "The F-22: An Exercise in Overkill," Technology Review calls the futuristic jet a multibillion-dollar boondoggle that has no purpose now that the Soviet Union has collapsed. While granting that the fighter would be more maneuverable and faster than the state-of-the-art F-15, and as undetectable to radar as the F-117 Stealth Bomber, the author convincingly undermines the premise for building the jet, while highlighting its eye-popping cost. With a total price tag of at least $98 billion through 2012, it is easily one of the most expensive programs in Pentagon history.
"With the former Soviet Union begging the West for aid, the case for a quantum leap in fighter technology is hardly compelling," TR's David Callahan writes.
Callahan points out that after the Soviet threat diminished in the late '80s, and especially after the Gulf War, the Pentagon changed its rationale for the need to build the fighter. Air Force leaders now say the plane is necessary to counter "unpredictable" and potentially dangerous Third World adversaries. But, according to Callahan, "Desert Storm showed that even the best-equipped Third World challengers lack the technological sophistication and training to take on a Western power."
Saying existing U.S. fighters are more than sufficient, Callahan writes that plans for the F-22 could be tabled for now, and that full-scale production could begin almost immediately if a new global threat actually were to emerge. Until then, the continuation of the F-22 program, which will cost $2.2 billion alone in 1993, "defies logic," he concludes.
About 1,000 Boeing employees throughout Puget Sound now work on the F-22, according to Peri Widener, a spokesperson for the Military Airplanes Division of Boeing's Defense and Space Group.
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