Budget Cuts : Raptor Or Jsf

[logster]

In regards to the title of this thread, I say the Raptor. I know the Air Force wants to hold on to the image of swaggering fighter pilots, the truth is that the Air Force spends most of its time transporting and bombing. As such, most of the money should be spent on aircraft for those purposes. Its not like they need to worry much about being caught short in a an air-to-air engagement. Most potential enemies have a joke of an airforce. JMHO

[Brad Edmondson]

Related.

 

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USAF Weighs Bomber Suggestions

By GOPAL RATNAM

 

 

The U.S. Air Force may try to develop a new fleet of bombers by 2015, when some of the Pentagon’s current fleet of bombers will be senile. But it’s unclear how the Air Force would pay to develop new systems, whose price tag could go as high as $50 billion, according to industry estimates. Nor is it clear whether the service may ignore them all to push for a bomber variant of the F/A-22 Raptor.

 

Last April, the service asked industry to propose ways to strike any spot on the globe “usually within hours or even minutes,” according to a document describing the concept. Targets would include fixed infrastructure as well as “fleeting or emergent high-value targets.” The ideas were to be based on proven technology and available, emerging or modified products.

 

“They didn’t specify range, speed, payload, whether they wanted manned or unmanned,” said Rich Parke, director of global strike integration at Boeing, which turned in six ideas. “They are doing a survey to see what the industry has to fill what they perceive as a gap.”

 

Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman responded with about 15 suggestions, including improvements to current bombers, new airplanes, modified long-range missiles, unmanned aircraft, high-powered lasers and intercontinental ballistic missiles tipped with guided re-entry vehicles. A handful of other firms offered ideas about components that might help.

 

Officials at the Air Combat Command, Langley, Va., are now sorting through the suggestions.

 

“Some things were penetrators, some had stand-off capability, some land-launched, some air-launched, and so on,” said Lt. Col. M.D. Dates, chief of bomber requirements at the command.

 

The command will formally examine the options in an analysis of alternatives that could begin in the next two years and take up to 18 months, Dates said.

 

That could mean that it would be 2008 before the Air Force is ready to pick a system or a supplier.

 

But since the Air Force intends to buy “something that’s already developed,” it could have the system by 2015, he said.

 

Congress Sponsors Search

 

The Air Force didn’t intend to begin the search so soon. In 1999, a service study recommended waiting to field a new family of bombers until 2037, when some B-52s would be 80 years old. The idea was to wait for the maturation of today’s esoteric technologies, including hypersonic engines that suck oxygen from the atmosphere to achieve rocket-like speeds with turbojet endurance.

 

But in 2003, Congress added $100 million to the Pentagon’s budget and asked the Air Force to examine ways to modernize its bomber fleet by 2015. Air Force officials referred to this effort as the interim bomber plan.

 

The Air Force’s search has been muddied by talk about the FB-22 concept, a highly modified Raptor whose 1,800-mile unrefueled range might rival the B-2’s 2,200-mile range. Since 2002, Air Force Secretary Jim Roche has pushed the concept, saying that the stealthy, speedy jet could defend itself better in a fight, unlike the slower-flying B-2. In 2003 congressional testimony, he said 150 FB-22 bombers could meet the military’s needs.

 

Lockheed echoed the suggestion in its list of ideas for future bombers, which also included a C-130J-based arsenal ship concept and hypersonic missiles, said John Perrigo, the company’s senior manager for combat air systems.

 

Maj. Gen. David Deptula, who led a future-bomber study group in 1995, likes the idea. The F-22 fighter also could become FB-, F/E-, F/EA- and RC-22: bomber, electronic attack plane, surveillance aircraft, and signals-intelligence sponge, he said.

 

“Modern aircraft are not just planes; it’s anachronistic to call them bombers or fighters,” said Deptula, who now directs air and space operations at the Pacific Air Forces, Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii. “They are multisensor platforms that can conduct a variety of missions previously associated with single platforms.”

 

FB-22 a Shoo-In?

 

This kind of talk leads some industry executives and analysts to wonder whether the April 2004 request for ideas was simply part of an attempt to justify the FB-22.

 

Barry Watts, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, Washington, and a former Pentagon program evaluation official, questions the Air Force’s seriousness in pursuing a new fleet of bombers.

 

“There isn’t a four-star [general] advocating long-range airpower in the Air Force,” Watts said. The Air Force “could pursue a lot of options,” but until the F/A-22 is safe and manufactured in sufficient quantities, the service “is going to be hard pressed to think about any of its other children.”

 

“If people are skeptical about the Air Force study, it is because [officials] have been talking about FB-22 a long time before it started this exercise,” said Christopher Bolkcom, analyst at the Congressional Research Service in Washington. “There was a lot of discussion about the solution before identifying the problem.”

 

Not so, said Deptula.

 

“We are not trying to find a problem to match the platform. The fighters of today have orders of magnitude more capability than bombers of the past.”

 

The roughly $40 billion already spent to develop the Raptor means that “with a little bit of money, we can increase the range of the platform,” Deptula said. “What we are looking for is a gap-filler between our current capability and the promise of future technologies.”

 

Dates at the Air Combat Command said his office was not looking for a regional bomber, another role for F/A-22, or a short-term fix.

 

“What we are looking for is a strike capability, a system of systems that will help us to do global strike and global persistent attack,” Dates said. “We are looking to buy something with taxpayer dollars that is beneficial and part of the overall concept of operations.”

 

The Air Force has released no cost estimates to develop and build the FB-22. Several industry executives said it would cost from $7 billion to $50 billion, including up to $12 billion for development.

 

One industry executive briefed by Air Force officials after they reviewed the proposals said none of the ideas could be paid for without cutting back major programs.

 

Others, and congressional sources, said the Air Force should put money in the 2006 budget if it is serious about the 2015 deadline.

 

The Dec. 23 Program Budget Decision 753 gave no indication of how the 2006 budget request would deal with bomber modernization, though it proposed reducing the F/A-22 program by nearly $10 billion over six years. •