Where I Stand — Mike O’Callaghan: The U.S. needs the F-22

Tuesday, Sept. 14, 1999 | 9:32 a.m.

Mike O'Callaghan is the Las Vegas Sun executive editor.

ACCORDING TO REPORTS coming out of Washington, the F-22 stealth fighter, known as the Raptor, is in a political fight for its life. Despite the House action to kill the program in July, even the most cynical observer can't imagine this bit of chicanery to be upheld after more thoughtful legislators speak up during coming days.

Supporters of the needed weapons upgrade must be alert to stop any attempt to limit the initial number of new planes to four instead of the desired six. The political games that result in damaging compromises such as this only result in much greater expense for the production of each plane.

The Raptor program has already cost $23 billion and the need for the new warplane has increased, not decreased, since the first plane rolled out April 9, 1997. Even then critics were saying that our F-15 could keep us equal and even superior to all foreign fighter planes until 2015. This kind of thinking was answered before the air operations over Yugoslavia when then-Air Force Secretary Sheila Widnall told the rollout gathering:

"Parity is not acceptable with the stakes so high. That is precisely why we have ensured the Raptor possesses capabilities beyond those of any other future fighter. Everyone here is familiar with the potent combination of stealth, supercruise and integrated avionics the Raptor will bring to the battlefield. We are excited by the technology. We are more excited, though, by the operational capabilities this technology will give this aircraft ..."

Lt. Col. Steve Rainey, the first Air Force pilot to fly the F-22, put the value of the new plane in words we can all understand. "When we have a fighter capability that is equaled by a potential enemy, we call it parity," he said in a report taken from the Internet.

"If the moms and dads of the '60s and '70s had not funded the F-15 and F-16, the (Persian) Gulf War would have been very different," Rainey said. "The F-4 would have still been our frontline fighter, and Iraqi MiG-29s and Su-27s could have shot us down. Parity is not a legacy I want to leave to my 4- and 5-year-old children.

"The F-22 will let the next generation completely dominate an enemy, who will not know what hit him until it's over," he said.

Here we are in 1999 with some people in Washington sounding like the legislators who stripped our military before and then after World War II. Won't we ever learn? Already our volunteer military forces are crying about not being able to attract and keep the people needed to maintain our position of power in the world. Then last week the House of Representatives voted to even stop funding the structure set up to provide manpower by draft if needed in case of emergency.

Professors Donald and Frederick Kagan in a recent Wall Street Journal article wrote about the history that led up to Hitler's bold invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. "Military weakness underlay the timidity, self-delusion and inadequacy of British policies when the blue skies of 1919 gave way to the thunder- and hailstorms of the 1930s. It sapped the will of Britain's leaders and led them to ignore, then permit and justify, Hitler's aggression until the war was upon them and defeat stared them in the face. That is the nature of international relations: They can produce deadly threats with amazing speed and punish nations that are thoughtless and complacent."

The punch line to the Kagans' article was, "If the new high-tech weapons are truly the magic bullets their advocates claim, they do not yet exist, and we are not spending the money needed to develop, test and acquire them. If we do not soon learn the proper lesson from the past we may, one day, face a Sept. 1 of our own."

We can only hope that political leaders in Washington will not repeat the errors of past years, which left our nation vulnerable to those who wished to harm us and rule the world with fear. We will know if the clear thinkers who learn from history won the battle in Washington when the first six Raptors arrive at Nellis Air Force Base in 2002. Anything less will alert us to the fact that there are still people running our country who can't see the storms because of the dark clouds.