My friend in blogging David Axe, brings up the idea that military industry, along with all of its scaremongering of job loss if a program gets cancelled was alive and well in the F-22 program a year ago. This is true.
We are supposed to believe that work-skills in the F-22 will slide over into the F-35. This has happened and will continue; to a point. But lets take a closer look.
Who did the majority of complex avionics fusion for the worlds most advanced fighter; the Lockheed Martin F-22? Well, that would be Boeing. How about large portions of the F-22 wing? That would be Boeing also. When these skills become less in number—as they certainly will—America will have less of a military aviation industry. This has been happening since the end of the Cold War.
Congressional graft aside; Boeing, which doesn’t make almost all of its money off of the U.S. government like Lockheed Martin, will let people go because they know how to run commercial operations. These skills, along with some skills from the following list of major sub-contractors will melt away.
Major Subcontractors (partial list): Northrop Grumman, Texas Instruments, Kidde-Graviner Ltd., Allied-Signal Aerospace, Hughes Radar Systems, Harris, Fairchild Defense, GEC Avionics, Lockheed Sanders, Kaiser Electronics, Digital Equipment Corp., Rosemount Aerospace, Curtiss-Wright Flight Systems, Dowty Decoto, EDO Corp., Lear Astronics Corp., Parker-Hannifin Corp., Simmonds Precision, Sterer Engineering, TRW, XAR, Motorola, Hamilton Sundstrand, Sanders/GE Joint Venture, Menasco Aerospace.
While the above list also do some F-35 work, the F-35 has yet to prove it can spool up and take up capacity from lost jobs. 3000 F-35s? Where are the 750 F-22s? Or the X number of Y military program when they were all front-loaded-lies to Congress?
The U.S. can only downsize its military industrial complex so many times. While in many ways this could be a good thing, it turns into a bad thing when you need new advanced designs in the coming years to keep America safe and there aren’t enough engineers left to take projects to completion. “Why can’t daddy program manage?”, will become even more common.
While Bush and Rumsfield are incredible idiots for not realising overwhelming air power makes all other operations possible via direct action or deterence, the stupidity of the current administration and Gates fare no better.
As we do our best to field a fighter aircraft known as the F-35 that won’t be able to stand up to advanced threats in the coming years; thereby making it a very expensive second-tier bomb truck (hint that was always the plan—that there would be enough F-22s around to take out the big threats…750 of them) we can only end up realising this too late when certain air-campaigns can’t happen because we don’t have the right stuff.
So be it. Stupidity gets punished right away or a long way off. But hey, those that aren’t all that smart on big air power thinking have had their way. That seems to be the only thing that is important.
