Stealth Takes Wealth

The military has lots of cool toys. Drones with remotely located pilots flying deadly missions like video games. Or submarines that no one can find but that can unleash a deadly barrage of cruise missiles (or nuclear-tipped big boys) at a moment’s notice. Ships that don’t show up on ocean-focused radar and of course, my fave, stealth aircraft. ‘Course all this stuff costs a lot of money, but when you are a superpower, you gotta have dem “superpower” threads. Some stuff is pretty cheap, hey, like the new Sea Wolf class subs (we have only three) run just under a billion each. Forgetting about the thousands of sailors and flyers needed to man the boat, new super-carriers are running around $6.2 billion (like the George H.W. Bush). Reminds me of a quote – decades ago – attributed to former Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen: “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money.”

We’ve got a failed effort in Iraq – unless your sole measure of success is the removal of Saddam Hussein – winding down, and a war that is failing in Afghanistan but sucking down cash like a heroin addict (oh, and Afghanistan still is the world’s major supplier of the raw ingredient for that substance – opium) at a Vegas craps table playing for his next fix. And we have lots of toys that, well, seem to tip the balance in favor of the U.S. military against any other major power on earth, but for obvious reasons, such technology appears to be total bust on the violence that threatens us the most: small pockets of un-uniformed terrorists striking clandestinely with suicide bombs, IEDs and trying to smuggle WMDs to blow us sky high. But back to my fave toys – stealth aircraft.

It isn’t even the cost of building these super-technologically-based military systems; you’ve got to figure the down time… the new F-22 Raptor jet fighter (average cost is about $361 million to build one) requires 30 hours of maintenance for every hour it flies. Each flight hour costs about $44,000. Wow! Got deficit?! The June 10^th Los Angeles Times did a terrific analysis of the cost of refurbishing a B-2 stealth (heavy) bomber, a process which, in additional to general maintenance (each hour of flying time requires 50-60 hours of work on the ground), must be performed every seven years and that takes vender Northrop Grumman a full year – and $60 million per aircraft – to accomplish. Guess that’s cheaper than ordering the latest incarnation of that aircraf t at $2.1 billion a pop.

Trust me, a “stealth paint job” ain’t an Earl Scheib special! The Times: “The cost may be staggering, but the B-2 is no flying bus. Considered the world's most technologically advanced aircraft, it can evade radar to slip behind enemy lines and knock out air defense systems and anti-aircraft missiles… The 20 B-2s in service were built at a cost of $2.1 billion each, with many parts one-of-a-kind. Contributing to the high cost of an overhaul is the meticulous care that must be taken in restoring the bomber's dar k gray coating, known as ‘advanced high-frequency material,’ which is the key to keeping it nearly invisible to radar… Even so, the overhaul costs are a sore point with some military industry critics who have long called the B-2 a gold-plated boondoggle… ‘It's the ultimate hangar queen,’ said Winslow T. Wheeler, an analyst at the Center for Defense Information, a Pentagon watchdog group… The bomber, he said, is not useful for waging the kind of warfare being fought today against low-tech enemies. ‘It's irrelevant in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,’ he said.”

I really like these toys, but I guess I could enjoy the same experience by letting Jim Cameron design a large-format sci-fi adventure film around the technology without breaking the taxpayers’ back. Sure we need some of this technology, and China and Russia clear have their own war chests with technology in their cross-hairs, and yeah, our capacity to deliver destruction to some global miscreant’s doorstep has to serve as a deterrent, but when is enough enough? When do we really shift our focus from toys that can blast only the biggest nations… to functionality that truly takes “little deadly terrorists” out of action? And when, exactly, does the reality of our never-ending “recession” actually sink in to our military leadership… and more importantly, to the administration that is supposed to be in charge of them?

I’m Peter Dekom, and I thought the Commander in Chief of our armed forces was the President of the United States?