Pentagon Tightening Budget Belt

[unhappycamper]

Pentagon Tightening Budget Belt
February 14, 2009
Associated Press

WASHINGTON - A Pentagon spokesman said Friday the military must tighten its budget belt by looking at ways to share equipment and services instead of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines each paying for its own.

To that end, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell signaled that requests to build more F-22 fighter jets could be one area facing cuts.

The Obama administration is expected to decide by March 1 whether to spend $523 million on 20 more of the radar-evading stealth planes beyond 183 that are already planned - one of the first major defense spending decisions of the new presidency.

Lawmakers fear that ending F-22 spending would result in thousands of lost jobs during the global recession that began last year.

But Pentagon leaders, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates, have expressed doubt that more F-22s are needed, especially since the military plans to buy several thousand F-35s, a much cheaper plane.


Rest of article at: http://www.military.com/news/article/pentagon-tightening-budget-belt.html



uhc comment: The F-35 is a much cheaper plane? Really? The F-22 costs around $355,000,000 a pop and the F-35 (currently) costs $239,000,000 a pop.

There's a few problems with the F-35:

1. It still hasn't flown above 40,000 feet.
2. In it's current incantation, the F-35 is woefully underpowered.
3. And here's the killer IMO -> The F-22 has four milllion lines of computer code and the F-35 has eleven million lines of code. Even folks at the five-sided puzzle palace acknowledge that the F-35 will end up being more expensive than the F-22.

[w4rma]

1. The F-35 is meant to replace multiple legacy planes. It's also a single engine, compared to the F-22

which is a double engine. In terms of cost, The additional computer code is nothing compared to the extra bulk of the F-22.