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This is easily the greatest paragraph ever written on the F-22:
The F-22 Raptor is sex on carbon fiber wings. This is America's premier air superiority fighter, and it's a bad, bad monkey. At an F-22 demonstration at the Reno Air Show in September, I nearly passed out from testosterone poisoning.That's Dan Neil, writing for the LA Times on the PR barrage supporting the F-22. Neil is discussing the fascinating shift of emphasis that F-22 advocates have made over the past several months: The F-22 may or may not be the bestest ever air-fightin' machine that anyone's done gone and thought up, but there's no question that it will deliver jobs jobs jobs. If you didn't like the F-22 a year ago, you hated America and wanted to see it grovel at the feet of your Chinese Communist masters. If you don't like the F-22 now, you hate America and you hate the working man. Indeed, the Communist part may be all cool now:
Meanwhile, the F-22 itself disappears from these ads to make room for industrial imagery that is practically Bolshevik. Consider the nearly full-page ad in last week's Washington Post. The plane is nowhere to be seen; instead, there's an image of a factory worker jabbing at a several-ton ingot of glowing steel. "Steel workers in Chicago," the copy reads. "95,000 jobs across America. All working to build the F-22 Raptor."Of course, there's considerable doubt as to whether cutting the F-22 would cost jobs at all, much less 95,000. I suspect that a decision either way on additional procurement will lead to job losses in the advertising and public relations industry. The fight to keep the F-22 is, in and of itself, an economic stimulus, as Lockheed pumps millions of dollars into the campaign to sell additional jets.It's interesting to me that the national security justification for purchasing additional F-22 Raptors has almost completely fallen off the map. I don't think that the public ever paid that much attention, aside from noting that Starscream in the Transformers was kind of cool. But it's now become clear that Lockheed considers such arguments a big loser. This, as much as anything else, suggests that Dennis Blair correctly asserts that the global economic crisis presents the single largest challenge for US military and intelligence institutions. When they have to justify themselves as economic stimulus, security concerns have really fallen by the wayside.--Robert Farley
