I love the Pentagon, I really do. They turn graft and incompetence into a transcendent art-form — as well they should, since we spend more money on their efforts to keep us safe from largely imaginary threats than we do on anything else each year, and the amount of money we give to the Pentagon annually is almost equal to the combined military budget of every other nation on the face of the earth.

(Check out Global Issues.org for a lot of great graphs on that subject)

A case in point is the F-22 fighter, a plane designed during our worst Cold War excesses to fight a threat that did not, at the time, exist. It still doesn’t; the F-22 was supposed to counter a next-generation Soviet fighter plane that, even now, the Russians don’t have in the air.

That’s ok though; we Americans aren’t about to be caught unprepared for imaginary problems that might, potentially, someday occur, or have *already occurred* in some hellish alternate timeline, or worse still, dystopian future reachable by paradox-generating, temporally displaced cybernetic robots dressed in the skin of steroidal Austrian potheads!

Duh-duh-DUHHHH (drama sting)

Where was I? Ah, yes, the F-22. They cost 350 million dollars a piece and serve absolutely no purpose, except to entertain rubes at air shows. They aren’t used in any of our Glorious Wars overseas, not even the Absolutely-Not-an-Oil-Grab in Iraq. Turns out there’s a very good reason for that:

The F-22 fighter jet can’t get wet.

Seriously. It breaks in the rain. Or if exposed to, say, the abrasive force of rapidly moving air.

I am not making this up.

The aircraft’s radar-absorbing metallic skin is the principal cause of its maintenance troubles, with unexpected shortcomings — such as vulnerability to rain and other abrasion — challenging Air Force and contractor technicians since the mid-1990s, according to Pentagon officials, internal documents and a former engineer.

A plane that melts in the rain, or more accurately, falls apart. All for the low, low price of 350 million dollars each, plus maintenance.

“It is a disgrace that you can fly a plane [an average of] only 1.7 hours before it gets a critical failure” that jeopardizes success of the aircraft’s mission, said a Defense Department critic of the plane who is not authorized to speak on the record.

…

Skin problems — often requiring re-gluing small surfaces that can take more than a day to dry — helped force more frequent and time-consuming repairs, according to the confidential data drawn from tests conducted by the Pentagon’s independent Office of Operational Test and Evaluation between 2004 and 2008.

…

The Air Force says the F-22 cost $44,259 per flying hour in 2008; the Office of the Secretary of Defense said the figure was $49,808. The F-15, the F-22′s predecessor, has a fleet average cost of $30,818.

It goes on and on and on — the F-22′s wings are held on by titanium bits that have a high rate of defect. Rather than stop making the bad part, the contractors got the Air Force to agree to inspect the planes more often, at taxpayer expense, to hopefully catch it before the wings fall off in flight.

The canopy for the pilot is defective, it wears out almost 3 times as fast as it should, and at least once failed to open, trapping a pilot inside the plane.

The army of subcontractors produces defective parts not to spec that have to be hand-modified and put into the planes, making each plane unique and parts non-interchangeable.

It can’t communicate with other types of planes, which all of its less costly predecessors can do.

It also can’t do precision bombing, and in an attempt to claim it could, Lockheed managed to crash one (thus costing us 350 million) and killed one of their test pilots.

On… and on… and on.

Oh, and of course whistleblowers have been trying to stop it for years. Fortunately (for the greedy bastards at Lockheed), the Pentagon lied about how much it would cost when they first proposed it, then broke up the plane’s production into a bunch of subcontractors and made sure to put at least one in 44 different states — so that it would be harder to stop making them when it turned out to be a waste.

Recently, Obama has been trying to cancel the F-22 as a token gesture of controlling the Pentagon, and it looks like he may succeed… though of course, the overall cost of the base Pentagon budget will increase, and the wars overseas will continue to pile more money on top of that already astronomical bill.

At least if we ditched the F-22 we wouldn’t be spending billions of our ‘defense’ dollars on a plane that can’t get wet.

Sources: The Washington Post, Global Issues.org, The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation