The F-35 Folly

I want to tell you a story about political dysfunction in Washington.

Say hello to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program.

The F-35 joint strike jet fighter is the costliest weapons programs in human history, with each plane costing $90 million and the project taking more than a decade to complete.

The price tag of the entire program has nearly doubled since 2001, coming in at a staggering $396 billion dollars.  And, thanks to a number of production delays and safety concerns, that price tag is still rising.

To give you a little more sense of just how expensive this project is, when you combine the price tag of the program with Government Accountability Office estimated operating and maintenance costs of the planes– the total cost of the program reaches over $1 trillion.   That’s more than the entire $700 billion TARP bank bailout.  And it’s even more than the entire GDP of Australia – which only comes in at $924 billion. 

Now here comes the really absurd part of this story. Thanks to the decade of delays, the technology in the F-35, once thought to be the best of the best, is now almost outdated.

The program is one of several in the current Pentagon budget that is stuck in the last century, and has failed to adapt to changes in modern day warfare.

Yet, the Pentagon officials, like current Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, are still pressing for nearly 2,500 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters.

At a press conference in Ottawa, Canada last Spring, Panetta told reporters that, quote, “As part of the defense strategy that the United States went through and has put in place, we have made very clear that we are 100 percent committed to the development of the F-35. It’s a fifth-generation fighter, [and] we absolutely need it for the future.”

What Panetta doesn’t realize is that over the course of the F-35 program, the world has changed.  The F-35 is supposed to be the future of U.S. tactical airpower, but the fact is the entire program is stuck in an era when the U.S. faced major and aggressive power rivals, which is simply not the case today. Rather than face the current threats of today, like cyber warfare, we continue to pour billions, and potentially trillions, into this bottomless pit of a project. 

So where is all the outrage to the incredible amounts of taxpayer money being thrown at the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter?

Well, as we all know, when it comes to defense spending and the American military industrial complex, Republicans don’t dare open their mouths.

And many Democrats are on board with the project too, most likely because components of the planes are made in their home districts, which means a boost to their local economies.

On March 1^st, if lawmakers fail to reach a new federal budget deal, the automatic sequester cuts will go into effect.  Under these cuts, a variety of federal agencies and programs will lose funding, including the Pentagon. If those sequester cuts go into effect, the Pentagon will face more than $500 billion in spending cuts.  

That’s where Republican war hawks like Sen. Lindsey Graham come in.  Appearing on Fox News Sunday over the weekend, Graham said that, in order to avoid the looming sequester budget cuts that would  quote "destroy" the military , we should instead eliminate healthcare to the 30 million Americans who are covered under Obamacare.

Well, instead of taking healthcare away from millions of Americans, why don’t lawmakers in Washington do the unthinkable, and take away just a little bit of America’s military might.

The Pentagon is looking at $500 billion in budget cuts if the sequester goes into effect. Well, it just so happens that in the current Pentagon budget, there’s a program that’s incredibly outdated, ineffective and it just so happens to cost around $500 billion dollars.

The fact of the matter is eliminating the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program really won’t put much of a dent in America’s military power. 

As Congressman Justin Amash of Michigan, one of the few Republicans in favor of defense cuts, put it, quote, “We are spending maybe 45% of the world's budget on defense. If we drop to 42% or 43%, would we be suddenly in danger of some kind of invasion?”

No. We wouldn’t be.

But it would put a dent in the wallets of America’s war profiteers which really concerns Republicans like Lindsey Graham. 

He shouldn’t be too worried though.

In the past ten years, the defense industry has seen record profits.  In 2011, the combined profits of the five largest U.S.-based contractors were a staggering $13.4 billion.  And, despite going through a recession that devastated both families and business across the country, the defense industry is still making record profits.  

FDR once said during World War II that, quote, "I don't want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster.”

But, in this new age of never-ending war, whether it's waged on communists or terrorists, war profiteers are cashing in like never before. Glance across the Potomac from our nation’s capital, and you'll see enormous castles built up in gated communities - all belonging to today's class of war profiteers.

And thanks to these war profiteers and Republican war hawks, it’s ingrained in the American psyche that any decrease in military spending means an automatic increase in the danger that Americans face in their everyday lives.  

America has finally reached the top flights of the military industrial congressional complex that President Eisenhower warned us about in his famous 1961 farewell address.

So isn’t time we knocked down this military industrial complex of ours? Isn’t it time we eliminated a wasteful and outdated military project, instead of threatening to take away the healthcare of millions of Americans? Shouldn’t we stop firing teachers in order to pad the wallets of defense contractors? 

America is the strongest military power in the world. And that’s not going to change anytime soon. But wouldn’t it be better if we were the strongest military power in the world and the nation that cared the most about the health and prosperity of its citizens, and the education of its future generations?

It’s time we grounded the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program and other wasteful defense spending projects for good, and spent their vast sums of money to rebuild our economy, and to rebuild the middle class.