The anti-war case for fighter jets
The Senate voted this afternoon to cut funding for seven F-22 fighter jets, capping at a mere 187 the number of the jets that the U.S. Air Force will build. There are two types of arguments against the F-22: first, that it is a waste of money, that 187 are plenty for any scenario that the U.S. is likely to face, drones are becoming more common, and a next-generation fighter, the F-35, is being developed. Second, opponents argue that building more F-22s is taking money away from the sort of counterinsurgency warfare that the U.S. will likely be fighting in the future and that it is now fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. As the New York Times puts it:
The F-22, the world’s most advanced fighter, had become a flashpoint in a larger battle over the administration’s push to shift more of the Pentagon’s resources from conventional warfare to fighting insurgencies.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates explicitly said last year:
The reality is we are fighting two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the F-22 has not performed a single mission in either theater.
F-22 assembly line at Lockheed Martin plant in Marietta, Ga.
The first set of arguments against the F-22 is entirely legitimate, and compelling. The plan for extra F-22s is just one of many Defense Department boondoggles that U.S. taxpayers are funding and this step — saving $1.75 billion in a budget that hovers around half a trillion dollars — is really a drop in the bucket.
But the second justification, that the F-22 is not suited for fighting counterinsurgencies, is more troubling. I’m not much of a military analyst, but pretty much everyone knows the danger of fighting the last war (or two wars, as the case may be). That should be especially true when the last wars have been utter debacles and should never have been undertaken in the first place (except, you could argue, the first couple of months of Afghanistan, the amount of time it took to dislodge al Qaeda).
Getting good at counterinsurgencies is not a good thing if it makes us more likely to try to attempt more counterinsurgencies, and smarter people than me think that is the danger of going down this road we’re on. To use another defense-related cliché, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When we get really good at defeating local rebellions against governments that are friendly to us, you can bet that is going to look a lot more tempting. Andrew Bacevich:
According to a currently fashionable view, the chief operative lesson of the Iraq War is that counterinsurgency works, with U.S. forces having now mastered the best practices required to prevail in conflicts of this nature. Those who adhere to this view expect the Long War to bring more such challenges, with the neglected Afghan conflict even now presenting itself as next in line. Given this prospect, they want the Pentagon to gear itself up for a succession of such trials, enshrining counterinsurgency as the preferred American way of war in place of discredited concepts like “shock and awe.” Doing so will have large implications for how defense dollars are distributed among the various armed services and for how U.S. forces are trained, equipped and configured. Ask yourself how many fighter-bombers or nuclear submarines it takes to establish an effective government presence in each of Afghanistan’s 40,020 villages and you get the gist of what this might imply.
Yet given the costs of Iraq-now second only to World War II as the most expensive war in all U.S. history-and given the way previous efforts to pacify the Afghan countryside have fared, how much should we expect to spend in redeeming Afghanistan’s forty thousand villages? Having completed that task five or ten years hence, how many other villages in Pakistan, Iran, Syria and Egypt will require similar ministrations? And how many more accidental guerrillas will we inadvertently create along the way?
Is a military oriented, by contrast, toward fighting “peer competitors” less likely to get us into trouble? Air power has not been much of a factor in our recent adventures: When The Atlantic wrote its paean to the F-22 earlier this year, the “ace” it profiled – the man who has the most air combat kills in the U.S. Air Force – had shot down a whopping three enemy planes, two in 1991 in Iraq and one in Kosovo. (He pilots an F-15, which has been plenty capable enough for the two-bit dictators and their third-rate air forces we have been picking on since the end of the Cold War.)
But, imagine an alternate reality where we subscribe to the old-fashioned notion that the Defense Department is actually oriented toward defense, rather than to “project power” (Pentagon-ese for “getting in other countries’ business”). Then sophisticated fighter jets actually are useful, as defense against an air attack. Ground troops – like the 22,000 additional that Gates asked for this week – are less useful, unless relations with Canada or Mexico decline quite a bit.
Whether we need 187 F-22s, or 381, or (probably) a lot less, I don’t know. And I understand the need, politically, to marshall all the evidence against the F-22 that you can, and if it helped save us a bunch of money on some airplanes we don’t need, then OK. But let’s hope we don’t need to invoke the need to focus on counterinsurgency for every pork barrel super weapon out there or else Pakistan, Iran, Syria and Egypt had better watch out.
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What you seem to be saying is that we can avoid becoming embroiled in future counterinsurgency wars by building a military that can’t wage counterinsurgency. The problem is that this confuses intent and capability. The decision to fight a war of insurgency is political, not military. The U.S. is fortunate – or not – to be so powerful that it can fight either type of war without too much trouble. Whether or not we have weapons like the F-22 won’t influence that decision, and probably won’t influence the outcome. We didn’t lose Vietnam because of bad hardware.
Congress did try to hamstring the Army after Vietnam by turning a lot of combat support functions over to Reserve and Guard units. The idea was that the U.S. military would not be able to fight a war without mobilizing the reserves, which would mean a political decision. Well, Bush made a political decision and committed the Reserves and Guards to Iraq.
I also have to disagree with your assessment of airpower. Airpower is the only reason that we have been able to fight in Afghanistan as well as the two Iraq wars. Air strikes pulverized Iraqi forces in 1991, which is why casualties were so incredibly low when the ground troops rolled in. Airpower lets us get away with subduing Afghanistan with 60,000 troops, because our forces can always call in a deluge of aerial firepower.
Michael – that’s a good analogy with the guard and reserve, and is a good reminder that, no matter what, poor leaders will make poor decisions no matter what constraints they’re under. I don’t mean to imply that funding F-22s will necessarily make us give up on counterinsurgency. And of course I don’t mean to imply that cutting funding for seven F-22s dooms us to a future of nationbuilding, either. My point is only that the elevation of counterinsurgency, which was a feature of the argument against the F-22, is dangerous.
But to say that the U.S. is “so powerful that it can fight either type of war without too much trouble” is obviously wrong; our experience in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown us that the U.S. can’t fight a counterinsurgency well. You would hope that would be a good lesson for us to learn, but if we convince ourselves that we can do it well, then we may decide that when we decide to nation-build the next time, we’ll do it better. And that would obviously increase the temptation to try. To quote Madeleine Albright: “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”
And you misunderstood me on airpower; we’re saying close to the same thing. My point is that the U.S. so strongly overpowers any air force that we’re likely to fight in a nationbuilding sort of enterprise that it doesn’t matter if we have F-15s or F-22s.
Except, we’re not saying exactly the same thing; the U.S. has definitely not “subdued” Afghanistan, and to the extent that it is still using air strikes there, all evidence is that it is making the situation worse rather than better. But that’s a different story.
Sorry, I was unclear. I meant to say that the U.S. has the RESOURCES to fight either a conventional or counterinsurgency war without having to specialize in either method of warfare.
I would say we did manage to subdue Afghanistan, in the military sense that a small number of ground troops backed by airpower managed to depose the Taliban government and occupy the major cities. Maybe “subdue” isn’t the right word – call it “occupy” instead – but by the standards of Vietnam (500,000 troops and 55,000 dead), we managed to accomplish a lot with relatively few forces. I think technology makes a huge difference. The British government is being roasted for not providing enough helicopters for its ground troops in Afghanistan.
Good point about the deification of counterinsurgency, which has become a cottage industry that’s making the reputation of some people.
In response to another comment. See in context »Considering that F-22 to the best of my knowledge has never seen combat duty, how could it be anything but a waste of money to order more. While the fighter is certainly one of the most advanced planes in the world it was design for a manner of war that just doesn’t exist anymore. Why you two are debating Afghanistan in terms of the F-22 just doesn’t make sense to me. And considering the plane never saw action in Afghanistan I’m not really sure why you brought up Afghanistan in the first place Joshua.
Building more of these planes is corporate welfare, nothing more. And Joshua it’s not just nations we might be involved in “nation building” that our air power is far superior to. Our air force is far superior to anything Russian and China currently have.
Call me a hippie, but I would like to see cost/benefit analysis comparing one F-22 to 1000 libraries with internet connections and air conditioning.