A Veto Over Seven F-22s? Please.

While the cherry blossoms may have come and gone, Washington posturing is in full bloom. This is made manifest in the administration's veto threat of the FY10 Defense Authorizations Act driven by the Senate Armed Services Committee's recent add of $1.75B for the purpose of buying seven more F-22s in FY10. Currently, a fleet of 187 F-22s is envisioned.

It seems unusual for the administration to engage in this sort of posturing at this point in the authorization cycle for a number of reasons. Importantly, this is the Senate, so the bill would have to be reconciled with the House version, which may be significantly different. Also, these are authorizers, not appropriators. The appropriators are the ones who actually apply monies against programs, so if the administrations is serious -- and they are -- they'll be watching the appropriations committees and subcommittees with as close to omniscient scrutiny as they can muster.

Is that the real reason for the posturing? Because we're talking about authorizers and not appropriaters? If so, this could be a shot across the bow. While everyone cares about having an authorization bill, having an appropriations bill is essential. If it ain't funded, it ain't.

The Air Force is on the horns of a dilemma. The F-22 has an air superiority mission and without air superiority, everything else in the battlespace becomes exceedingly more difficult. However, more F-22s raise the question of how much more money will then be needed for other aspects of the F-22 program -- the flying hours, with operations and maintenance funding, the facilities, with milcon, and the manpower, the aircrews and maintainers -- to fly perhaps a total of 60 or so more aircraft? And if the F-22 buy is ultimately plussed-up and there is zero real growth in the Defense and/or Air Force budgets, who will the programmatic bill payers be?