Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Senate Votes Down F-22s

Politics almost bought us pricey and unnecessary F-22s. But alas, the Senate did the right thing:
The Senate voted Tuesday to kill the nation's premier fighter jet program, embracing by a 58-40 margin the argument of President Obama and his top military advisers that the F-22 is no longer needed for the nation's defense and a costly drag on the Pentagon's budget in an era of small wars and growing counterinsurgency efforts.

The decision was a key policy victory for Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who has been campaigning against the plane since April as a centerpiece of his effort to "fundamentally reshape the priorities of America's defense establishment and reform the way the Pentagon does business -- in particular, the weapons we buy and how we buy them," as he put it in a Chicago speech last Thursday. WaPo


Robert Gates says F-35 will create jobs: