Is This Plane Necessary?

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt.

Standing in the hangar under bright spotlights, the YF-22 Lightning looks just like what it is: a low-slung, sharply angled killing machine. In the air, the advanced jet fighter is not only fast (sprinting up to twice the speed of sound) and agile (pitching and rolling like a Piper Cub) but almost invisible to enemy radar. If the Air Force has its way, the plane will rule the skies for the better part of the 21st century.

The YF-22 was the winner last week of an intensive five-year competition for | the richest prize in the history of military procurement: a contract for 650 jets costing nearly $100 million apiece. To be built by Lockheed, Boeing and General Dynamics, the YF-22 beat out the YF-23 Gray Ghost, a Northrop- McDonnell Douglas project, for the honor of succeeding the venerable F-15 Eagle, now more than 15 years old. The full cost of the new Advanced Tactical Fighter, stretched out over more than two decades, could exceed $95 billion in today's dollars -- $32 billion more than the contract for the B-2 Stealth bomber, the most expensive plane in Pentagon history.

Overshadowed by the furious debate surrounding the B-2, the ATF project was largely shielded from public scrutiny until last week, when Air Force Secretary Donald Rice announced the winner. Suddenly, after the expenditure of nearly $3.5 billion in development funds, official Washington was raising the questions that should have been asked five years ago: Who needs this jet? What is it for? And why does it cost so much? As Leon Panetta, chairman of the House Budget Committee, points out, "It is hard to justify building $100 million airplanes" in the light of the current budget deficit and increasingly urgent domestic needs.

The debate centers not on the merits of the YF-22 -- no one seems to have anything bad to say about it -- but on the role of the U.S. in the post-cold war era. Even the Pentagon concedes that the Soviet Union is in such a state of internal disarray that it is unlikely to launch an offensive against the U.S. or any other NATO country. As for the rest of the world, Operation Desert Storm has just delivered an indelible lesson in the superiority of America's existing technology.

The Air Force replies that the Soviets remain a threat, if not as an actual combatant, then as the chief arms dealer to Third World nations that the U.S. may someday have to fight. Many of these countries are already equipped with Soviet planes, such as the MiG-23, MiG-29 and SU-27, that are "aerodynamically competitive" with the F-15. Being as good as the Soviets' best is not good enough, especially when flying against an enemy that may have its entire air force at its disposal. "When you're a pilot, you don't want equality," says Ben Lambeth, a senior analyst at the Rand Corp. "You want to be the biggest gorilla in the sky." Thus, the emphasis on stealth and other technologies that give pilots the capability called "first look, first kill."

Critics reply that it is misleading to emphasize the speed and maneuverability of comparable Soviet planes. More important in the age of first-look, first-kill aircraft is how far combatants can see, and that is largely a function of computers and electronics, where the U.S. retains a huge edge.

Others question the Air Force's requirement that the ATF be both stealthy and highly maneuverable, a specification that helped push the cost of the plane to more than double that of the F-15. Planes must be agile to win dogfights, but since the ATF is supposed to destroy enemy aircraft long before it is seen, such encounters should never occur.

The strongest argument against the ATF is its cost. Speaking at a hearing of a Senate Armed Services subcommittee last week, Congressional Budget Office analyst Robert Hale declared that under its current budget restrictions, the Air Force simply cannot afford the plane. To build the full complement of ATFs will require either dropping the Multi-Role Fighter (the successor to the smaller F-16) or further reducing overall air strength.

Hale offered a variety of strategies for coping with this shortfall, ranging from canceling the ATF and replacing it with an upgraded (but still not stealthy) version of the existing F-15s to ordering only a handful of ATFs and deploying them in a small force of killer fighters: "silver bullets" in the jargon of the field. Congressman Les Aspin, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, had earlier put forward a compromise that would continue research on the ATF but hold off on procurement, staying for now with the F- 15.

In the current political climate, these arguments are not likely to carry much weight. The entire debate over the ATF has been skewed by the Air Force's impressive performance in Operation Desert Storm. Congressional Democrats who opposed the use of force against Iraq are looking not for defense projects to oppose but for defense projects they can support. The ATF in its current configuration is a lot of airplane -- probably too much airplane for the job it has to do. But the smart money in Washington says that when the votes are in, the Pentagon will get most -- if not all -- of what it wants, regardless of the merits of the case.

With reporting by Edwin M. Reingold/Los Angeles and Bruce van Voorst/Washington