Center for a New American Security

It's pretty amazing what had to be done to limit the number of F-22s to 187. I mean we are still going to have 187 of these planes. That's not too shabby.

@Anand,

You need to add China to that list, if 17$ Trillion dollar "Chimerica" economy counts. Or we can sell it to them to pay down debt. Ha Ha.

But ya gotta have a back up plan. This can be ours, in particular if "Triage" fails.

Dr Manhattan

Now here's a very interesting tidbit....St John the Baptist's father has his own feast day - in Baghdad.

Talisman's Gate

It's too bad the debate in the West has the Muslim presentation dominated by Islamists, or the central red herring of _______ the unmentionable debate. And I don't think that's the West's fault.

Or Bush's either.

Do we know anything about what will happen to the workers on the F-22 production line? Will they just get shifted to the F-35, or will the future shutdown mean we lose some defense manufacturing expertise? I'm thinking about this from a defense industrial base perspective, not a jobs perspective.

This really depends on who you ask. If you talk to the Aerospace Industries Association, they'll tell you that strategic shifts away from the status quo -- which is to say, towards irregular warfare and away from pitched aerial battles -- will impoverish the industrial base and make it impracticable for what few giant defense companies still compete for defense contracts to continue to do so. People with special talents will find other high-tech jobs, the knowledge base for sophisticated, technical aerospace work will dry up (young workers won't have the mentoring and experience of old airplane hands to rely on, seeing as they've left the business because their jobs disappeared), the barriers to entry into the fighter-aircraft business are too high for companies that haven't been doing it for the last sixty years, and tuhs the nation won't have anyone to build planes when the ball drops with the Chinese or neo-Soviets.

Of course, if you talk to most everyone else, they'll tell you that Lockheed and Boeing and Raytheon and Northrop Grumman will stay in the business of building airplanes because it's unbelievably lucrative, even if you have to take a break for a few years, and even if it turns out to be less lucrative than it otherwise could've been if the nation hadn't determined that irregular threats were more plausible and a strategic shift was necessary.

Having said all that, the thesis of the AIA paper -- that "DoD has traditionally made strateg decisions independent from any consideration of industrial capabilities, believing that whatever course DoD set, industry would be there to support. This belief is no longer valid" -- is of course true. Industrial base considerations need to be factored in, but things aren't so dire as the plane-builders would have you believe. Strategic shifts are based on a hedging approach that appreciates that (of course) a lag in fighter production will result in more expensive, less capable planes when the time comes in the future to build more, but also appreciates that this isn't the end of the world.

To answer the more specific question, yes, it's likely that a lot of F-22 workers will end up working on F-35, or on some new long-range bomber, or some other sophisticated system. What AIA also tells you (but doesn't emphasize) is that a number of sectors are likely to be mostly unaffected by strategic shifts: rotary-wing, long-range strike, unmanned aircraft, and so on. And incidentally, a lot of people (Andrew Krepinevich for one) will tell you that relatively short-range fighter/interceptor aircraft will be of marginal utility in the future, even against conventional powers. And so maybe in the future those guys who can build Raptors won't be the same sort of national treasure that we today believe them to be, and we ought not to worry so much about the fact that they're gonna be building helos and Predators one of these days.