Veterans against the F‑22

Jon Soltz over at VoteVets delivers a stinging rebuke of Congress’s plans to buy more F‑22s — the $350+ million fighter aircraft designed to fight the Soviet Union, and that the Pentagon doesn’t want.


If the F‑22’s backers can round up the votes and the money, it won’t be the first time that Congress has overruled the combined wisdom of the SecDef and the Joint Chiefs. But you’d think that by now the specious arguments that military spending is an efficient way to stimulate the economy had pretty much run their course. Alas, they haven’t.


In that resepect, I think that Soltz is taking the right approach. Rather than assaulting the Iron Triangle head on, he highlights the aircraft’s limited utility (as I have on this blog and in my book), and suggests that the troops in the field, and the troops who just left, won’t appreciate it if Congress puts parochial interests above those of our men and women in uniform.


Whether the vet’s voices are stronger than the interests who will make money off the purchase of a dozen more planes is an open question. But I hope that the anti‐​F‐​22 forces prevail.