The company’s $37,500 in campaign contributions to our junior Texas senator since January is money well spent. Now John Cornyn wants the U.S. to allow Lockheed to sell the F-22 to allies. I am agnostic on that question. What I enjoyed was the first paragraph of his statement:
“Despite the fact that peace is neither at hand nor on the horizon, the president, regrettably, seems intent on cashing in a ‘peace dividend’ over the next several years, by reducing our nation’s investment in the cutting-edge weapon systems needed to ensure our national security,” Cornyn wrote.
Let’s review a few facts that Senator Corynyn knows perfectly well:
1. There are already 187 F-22’s on hand or in production.
2. The F-22 is not a very good airplane. “It is a disgrace that you can fly a plane [an average of] only 1.7 hours before it gets a critical failure,” says one Defense Department spokesman. (As one wag put it, our enemies don’t need to shoot down the plane; they only need to blow up the maintenance centers.)
3. The F-22 has never been used in combat.
4. No U.S. military personnel have been killed or wounded by an enemy’s air force since 1951.
5. The U.S., with its $1 trillion defense budget, currently spends more than Europe, China, and Russia combined. In 2005, the supplemental for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars was more than the combined budgets of Europe, China, and Russia.
But, as I said, John Cornyn knows all that.
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