"Ladies and gentlemen, the F-22 team of Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Pratt & Whitney proudly presents Raptor I, the Spirit of America."

NARRATOR: On April 9th, with an all-out extravaganza reminiscent of Las Vegas, America's newest high-tech jet fighter, called the F-22 Raptor, was unveiled to the public in Marietta, Georgia. What the public couldn't see behind all the dry ice, smoke, music videos, laser light show and loud music is the controversy that continues to surround the Pentagon's F-22 jet fighter program.

ADM JOHN SHANAHAN (USN, Ret.): Welcome to "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR." I am Vice Admiral Jack Shanahan, director of the Center for Defense Information. Over the years on this show, we've kept a close eye on the ups and downs of the multibillion dollar F-22 jet fighter program. Last month the manufacturer of this new jet fighter, Lockheed Martin, gave top ranking military officials, politicians, the media, and the public a glitzy first look at the F-22. With the first test flight of this aircraft set for later this month, we decided to bring you up to date on a number of controversies that still surround this fighter program.

NARRATOR: The enthusiasm and fanfare that accompanied the unveiling of the F-22 jet fighter masked the tough decisions that Air Force officials and the nation's lawmakers will have to make regarding the F-22 program. Lockheed Martin, the company that owns the F-22 fighter, would like to sell the Pentagon some 438 F-22s at $159 million per copy, making it the most expensive warplane ever. With an estimated $70 billion price tag for the entire F-22 program, serious questions are being asked about the real world mission of the costly F-22.

What is an F-22? According to the aircraft's manufacturer, the F-22 will be a one of a kind jet fighter that will use sophisticated sensors and special materials to evade enemy radar. This capability will allow the F-22 to destroy enemy aircraft before it can be detected by the opposition. The F-22 fighter is reported to have the capability to cruise and manuever at supersonic speeds of Mach 2, or 1300 miles per hour. Presumably, these characteristics would make the F-22 fighter the most dominant warplane in the skies well into the next century.

Although the F-22 is being sold as a jet fighter for the 21st Century, its roots are deeply entrenched in the Cold War. Tony Capaccio is a senior correspondent for Defense Week magazine. He has been covering the F-22 program since it was conceived in the mid-eighties.

TONY CAPACCIO: The original rationale was to be able to counter something called the future Soviet fighter. This was a flying bogeyman that the Air Force, much like the Army and the Navy, would sell their weapons systems on future Soviet systems. This was a future Soviet fighter, very nasty, very unknown, but very lethal.

NARRATOR: Plans to design and build the F-22 started in 1986 during the height of the Cold War. At that time, the Soviet and American militaries were locked in a race to build increasingly sophisticated and deadly jet fighters. The United States spent nearly $12 trillion in today's dollars to wage the Cold War. A large part of that $12 trillion was spent on combat aircraft.

DICK CHENEY, Secretary of Defense (26 April '90 hearing): "If we look to the future, in terms of the kind of Soviet aircraft developments we anticipate in the years ahead, the general kinds of conclusions that we based our work on in connection with this review included the following: A general prediction that the Soviets will field two new fighter aircraft designs around the turn of the century, early 2000 timeframe."

NARRATOR: But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the threat from Soviet warplanes all but disappeared. As a newly emerging democratic nation, Russia struggled economically and was forced to drastically cut what had once been ambitious warplane production.

SEN. SAM NUNN (D-GA), Chairman, Senate Armed Services Committee (7 January '93 committee hearing): "I do think we have to watch very closely what the Russians are doing in their development, but they have cut something like 80 percent of all their military procurement. If you can imagine the scope and magnitude of that."

NARRATOR: Nevertheless, the F-22 program continued to be sold as a vital program for the US military, even though it was clear the F-22 was intended to fight Soviet aircraft that would never be built.

By 1993, American taxpayers had funded the F-22 program to the tune of $7 billion. Three experimental airplanes called prototypes have been built for research purposes, including this F-22 prototype that crashed and burned at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

Former Senator DENNIS DeCONCINI: The fact is, we don't have this threat that we had ten years ago from the former Soviet Union.

NARRATOR: At that time, many experts began to challenge the need for the F-22. Among them were influential members of Congress, like Senator Dennis DeConcini of Arizona.

SEN. DeCONCINI: We have some of the state of the art, the F-15, the F-16, the F-111, -117. These are fantastic weapons that I think can take us into the early part of the next century before we start investing in a long-term, multibillion dollar new fighter aircraft.

NARRATOR: Others questioned the need for the new F-22 fighters due to the resounding American defeat of Iraqi military forces during the Persian Gulf War. F-15s, F-16s and F/A-18s were the stars of the lopsided air war in the skies above Iraq against what had been the fourth largest military power in the world.

Josh Epstein, a highly respected military analyst at the Brookings Institution, praised the capability of the aircraft in the US arsenal.

JOSH EPSTEIN: The F-15/E is more than a match for Third World air forces that exist. The F-16, same. The F-18, the same. The F-14, the same. Nobody's even close.

SEN. DeCONCINI: We don't have the threat of advanced weapons from the Soviet Union or former Soviet Union. And even our competitors, allies that build similar type of equipment, are not looking as far ahead as the F-22 that I'm aware of.

NARRATOR: Nearly a decade after the Cold War, neither our competitors, nor our allies possess advanced fighter aircraft to challenge the capabilities of the US military from the air. And yet, advocates of the F-22 are pushing Congress to fund the full-scale production of the F-22 to the tune of $70 billion.

Supporters of the F-22 tout the high-tech capabilities that the warplane will possess.

REP. SAXBY CHAMBLISS: We currently don't have an airplane that can do what the F-22 can do because we don't have a stealth fighter. We don't have a fighter that has the advanced avionics, nor do we have a fighter that has super cruise. Those three things are crucial to the future of the air dominance by the United States.

NARRATOR: But opponents of the F-22 believe that the United States already has fighter planes, like the F-15, that will provide us with technological superiority well into the 21st Century.

Rep. DAVID OBEY: The F-22 is meant to replace the F-15 and we have hundreds and hundreds of F-15s right now, and that F-15 is going to last us till at least the year 2014. That's what we were told when we bought it, anyway. And so, it seems to me that to replace the F-15 with the F-22 is a $72 billion waste of taxpayers' money.

NARRATOR: But F-22 supporters are convinced that other nations might soon have a fighter plane to challenge American fighters.

Rep. CHAMBLISS: We have airplanes that are being produced overseas right now that are being upgraded, modified in order to catch up with the air dominance that we have right now. We have airplanes being modified that will be equal to or greater than what our F-15 capability is.

Rep. OBEY: They will also make the argument that, well, a number of third countries are getting the F-16s, and so we should be building the F-22 to get ahead of them. The way to solve that is to have us quit selling F-16s to Third World countries, as least as many as we're selling. We're our own worst enemy when it comes to that.

NARRATOR: Interestingly, the justification for building new warplanes, such as the F-22 fighter, is commonly linked to the sale of modern jet fighters abroad, often from the United States' own military arsenal.

According to a recent report by the Federation of American Scientists, within the past six years over $7 billion worth of modern military hardware has literally been given away or sold at rock bottom prices.

LORA LUMPE: We give away or sell at deeply discounted prices all sorts of military equipment, some of it as mundane as uniforms and combat boots, and some of it as modern and exotic as F-15 fighter aircraft, F-16s, F/A-18 aircraft, M-60 tanks, etc.

NARRATOR: Lora Lumpe is a co-author of the report and director of the Arms Sales Monitoring Project at the Federation of American Scientists. She argues that arms sales abroad can artificially manufacture a need for newer weapons.

Ms. LUMPE: Industry and the services both have an interest in unloading older equipment to make way and, in fact, in some cases, to justify new equipment. One case where this is most obvious is with the development of the F-22 stealth fighter. Lockheed has been lobbying for the $70 billion -- and the cost of that is estimated to go even higher -- but a $70 billion development program for this aircraft on the basis of advanced fighter aircraft already proliferating around the world.

NARRATOR: Lockheed Martin's promotional material uses a map to identify countries with advanced fighter aircraft. Oddly, most of the countries identified on the map possess modern US fighters.

Ms. LUMPE: And in their promotional literature to persuade Congress to spend the public treasury this way, they list F-15 aircraft, F-16 aircraft, and F/A-18 aircraft, all American aircraft that we're giving away now, or that the armed forces are trying to give away, as part of the advanced fighters that are out there which justify the F-22.

NARRATOR: Lora Lumpe believes providing weapons to foreign countries actually creates new threats to regional stability. These new threats put a greater burden on the US taxpayer to increase the military budget in preparation for potential conflicts.

Ms. LUMPE: And there's a real upward pressure on the defense budget that's created by giving away these weapons. We are helping exacerbate the threat that is the engine now for driving the US defense budget. In some cases, it's clearly used as justification for next generation weapons systems.

NARRATOR: In a surprising move, the Lockheed Martin Corporation, which makes the F-22, is already lobbying the Pentagon to sell the planes abroad.

In the past, the most sensitive avionics technology could be omitted from aircraft sold abroad. But on the F-22 this technology is fully integrated and cannot be easily left off or even replaced. Lockheed Martin's foreign military sales drive risks early compromise of the billions that taxpayers paid to develop the F-22. This proposal could ultimately allow the Pentagon to plead for more money to develop newer airplanes to counter the F-22.

Currently, there are several next generation weapons that the Pentagon plans to buy. The F-22 fighter, a new version of the F/A-18 fighter, and another new warplane called the Joint Strike Fighter. The combined total cost of these programs could reach $350 billion.

The justification for the purchase of these weapons, according to the Pentagon, is to replace an aging fleet of fighter aircraft and to deal with unforeseen threats in the 21st Century. However, with a defense budget that is expected to remain near $270 billion per year into the future, the ability of the Pentagon to afford all three new aircraft programs looks doubtful.

Rep. CURT WELDON (R-PA), Chairman, House National Security Committee (7 January '97 committee hearing): "The total program costs of these three planes, as estimated by CBO, would be over $350 billion, perhaps the largest ever acquisition program for the services."

NARRATOR: The investigative arm of Congress, the General Accounting Office, or GAO, recently released a "Combat Air Power" report that raises concerns over Department of Defense aircraft modernization plans.

LOUIS RODRIGUES, Director, Defense Acquisition Issues, GAO (5 March '97, House National Security Committee hearing): "Last year we testified before your subcommittees that DoD's planned investments in aircraft were not achievable within likely future budgets and appear to be inconsistent with the security environment. What we see in DoD's aircraft investment strategy is a business-as-usual approach that is wasteful, resulting in too many programs chasing too few dollars and adding billions of dollars to defense acquisition costs and delaying delivery of weapons systems to our military forces."

FRANKLIN SPINNEY: The F-22's basically business-as-usual in the Pentagon. Other than its gargantuan cost, it's really no different than any other program; it's suffering from the same basic problems.

NARRATOR: Franklin Spinney is a tactical aviation expert at the Department of Defense and a well-known authority on Defense Department budgeting. The views he expresses on this program are his own and do not necessarily represent the policies of the Pentagon.

MR. SPINNEY: The F-22 program, combined with the Joint Strike Fighter, assumes we will spend $68 billion in the ten years between 2003 and 2012. That compares to $50 billion spent in the last ten years of the Cold War which, taking out the effects of inflation, was the largest ten years of spending in the Cold War for tactical fighters.

NARRATOR: Franklin Spinney believes the staggering costs of the F-22 and Joint Strike Fighter programs will force the US to buy fewer new warplanes in the future. With fewer new warplanes in the US inventory, the average age of a fighter in the inventory will increase.

MR. SPINNEY: We won't buy enough planes to modernize our force structure. And the average age of a fighter in the inventory will go from about ten years today, a little bit less than ten years, to 19 years in the year 2007.

NARRATOR: In a nutshell, the cost of expensive weapons such as the F-22 fighter could force the Pentagon to compromise the size, shape and readiness of its military forces.

MR. SPINNEY: If the average age of your inventory is 19 years, that means the retirement age of planes in that inventory is pushing 42 years, because you have to replace planes that are lost due to crashes. So, it's not just the doubling, 38 years, it goes up to 42.

Now that's the same as buying a Spad in 1918 and retiring it in 1960, you know. That's what we call modernization in the Pentagon. That's what we say is giving our boys the best weapons to fight with. It's utter nonsense. We're going to trash our force structure if we continue to buy this airplane.

NARRATOR: Yet the sale of the F-22 fighter program is moving ahead.

The F-22 that made its debut on April 9th, 1997 is the first of nine research and development F-22s to be built by Lockheed Martin under the current contract. The first flight of these research aircraft will be in May of 1997 while low-rate initial production of the aircraft is scheduled to begin in late 1998. The Air Force plans to buy 438 F-22s, with the first delivery beginning in the year 2002. The total price of the F-22 program is estimated at $70 billion dollars for 438 airplanes.

But just as the plane was unveiled, the Pentagon's Cost Analysis Improvement Group said the production phase could actually cost $64 billion, 16 billion over Air Force and contractor estimates. The General Accounting Office and others have cautioned the Air Force against purchasing large numbers of the aircraft before adequate testing and research can be performed on the F-22 fighter.

MR. RODRIGUES: GAO (before House National Security Committee hearing, 5 March 1997): "We've also reported that the F-22 program has a high degree of risk because the Air Force plans to procure a significant number of aircraft before completing initial operational testing. Because neither the threat nor the need to replace the current front line air superiority fighter, the F-15, was urgent, we recommended that the Air Force not rush into high production rates for the F-22 prior to completing operational tests.

NARRATOR: Franklin Spinney, who agrees with the GAO's recommendation, believes that slowing or even stopping the F-22 fighter program may prove to be impossible.

MR. SPINNEY: Today we have a politically engineered F-22 program that is over cost. We've already had one cost overrun. We haven't even produced the first one yet. Well, we just rolled out the first one, but it's not a complete airplane. It doesn't have all its mission avionics. It's had considerable weight growth.

The fuel fraction, which is a very important term in the range equation of the airplane, is lower than was originally predicted. We simply don't know what we have at this point and if we have to cancel it, it's going to be a real bloodbath. And the way our government works, it probably won't cancel it. So, we could end up buying and inferior airplane.

NARRATOR: An inferior airplane because, according to Franklin Spinney, the F-22 program was rushed to avoid a politically vulnerable phase in its development.

MR. SPINNEY: Now if you think about a program in terms of its risks, there are three types of risk. There's technical risk, there's economic risk, and there's political risk. Prototyping reduces technical risk. It reduces economic risk because it gives you a decision point before you're too far committed. You can make a decision without having to undo a whole lot of commitments. On the other hand, it increases political risk to the contractor.

So, prototyping, from a contractor's standpoint, is bad news. And that's an important point to remember because what we did in 1991 is we represented the YF-22 as a true prototype and we used the flight tests as a justification to put it into engineering and manufacturing development.

NARRATOR: In the case of the F-22 program, Lockheed Martin used an experimental plane called the YF-22, to demonstrate it could cruise and manuever at supersonic speeds. However, the YF-22 test plane had underpowered engines, lacked stealth components and had none of the electronic sensors required of combat-ready aircraft. Despite these critical shortcomings, the F-22 program was sold to the Pentagon as if the weapon were ready to enter the engineering, manufacturing and design phase of development.

MR. SPINNEY: That authorizes the contractor to start designing the airplane, but also designing the production facilities and setting up his long-term vendor relationships. And the way we do business in the Pentagon, this is known as "political engineering." We start spreading the contracts all over the country to build a very loud, well-organized political support network, so that if Congress decides it may want to kill the program, they have to overcome all of this constituent pressure.

NARRATOR: But pressure to buy the F-22 fighter does not come solely from the leverage created by so-called "political engineering." Nor does it come from the external threats caused by the proliferation of high-tech fighter jet programs around the world. GEN RALSTON (USAF), Vice Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff (before House National Security Committee, 5 March 1997): "This airplane, the F-22, has been on contract for 11 years. 1986 the contract was signed. We are still today eight years away from the first combat airplane, 19 years. If you stop the program, I don't think we can afford another 19 years."

NARRATOR: GEN Ralston's statement before the House National Security Committee reinforces the belief held by some that an institutional inertia at the Pentagon for the F-22 program has been created by the lack of planned alternatives.

MR. SPINNEY: The decisionmakers at the Defense Acquisition Board -- that's the basic board of directors at the Pentagon -- they acknowledged that they did not have a plan to modernize the inventory, but they said they'd work on that later. Of course, now it's six or seven years later and we still don't have a plan and we've got an F-22 that is politically engineered all over the country. The bottom line is, it's very difficult to come up with alternatives right now because they've been systematically eliminated. That's a standard Pentagon tactic: eliminate all the alternatives, so there's only one solution.

NARRATOR: To make room for the F-22 fighter program, airplanes like the F-15, F-16 and A-10 will be phased out of service, even though their capabilities have been proven more than effective.

Mr. RODRIGUEZ, GAO (congressional hearing): "If DoD bought untested weapons at minimum rates, more funds would be available to buy proven weapons at more efficient rates and at lower cost, and it would get the equipment to the troops sooner. We also believe the need and timing of some aircraft programs should be reassessed. In our Combat Air Power Report, we pointed out that the United States has significantly improved its combat air power capabilities, while reducing its total combat aircraft since Desert Storm."

NARRATOR: It's also been suggested that many of the planes in the existing arsenal could be upgraded to modernize the force structure and give Pentagon planners time to develop alternatives to the costly F-22 program.

MR. SPINNEY: In the near term, since there is no threat to speak of in the next 10 years, or at least in the interim period, we could buy more F-16s to just replace some of the older F-16s in the inventory. We could also go to the boneyard and pull out A-10s and F-16s and remanufacture them and essentially put more life into them, modernize them.

NARRATOR: But Franklin Spinney cautions that this is only a short-term bandaid.

MR. SPINNEY: What I would do is I would cancel the F-22 and the JSF, which is politically unconscionable in Washington. And then what I would do is I'd start two competitive prototype programs. One would be for a Fighter X, which would be a replacement for the F-15 and the F-16. And the second prototype program, which I consider to be the most important priority in the Air Force and one of the most important in the entire Department of Defense, is to replace the A-10 close air support plane to support ground troops.

NARRATOR: Franklin Spinney believes it's possible to create a vigorous program to design lower-cost combat aircraft that will eventually replace older jet fighters in the current US arsenal.

MR. SPINNEY: We would set a target cost of being no greater than the original F-16/A and we'd essentially use technology to increase capability and reduce cost, like companies do in the commercial sector.

NARRATOR: The future for the F-22 fighter is uncertain. The F-22 fighter is a weapon born in the Cold War and seeking a mission in the 21st Century. Americans will spend whatever it takes to protect the United States, but it remains to be seen if the high cost of the F-22 fighter will outweigh the marginal capabilities it will provide over the existing jet fighters in the US arsenal.

ADM. SHANAHAN: Many in Congress and the Pentagon have been sold on the idea of buying the $70 billion F-22 fighter program, even though a threat to justify the need of the F-22 does not exist. Earlier this year, LGEN Patrick Hughes, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, testified before Congress about military threats to the United States. He said: "From a national security standpoint, the threats facing the United States have diminished in an order of magnitude and we are unlikely to face a global military challenge on the scale of the former Soviet Union for at least the next two decades."

General Hughes went on to list the likely threats to US security, such as terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, missile proliferation, resource scarcity and the growing disparity between North and South.

Newer, faster and more costly aircraft like the F-22 have little to offer by way of addressing these types of real world problems. Perhaps we should take another look at the F-22 fighter program in light of the challenges we will face in the future.

For "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR," I am Jack Shanahan.

[End of broadcast.]