The F-22 Raptor is sex on carbon fiber wings. This is America's premier air superiority fighter, and it's a bad, bad monkey. At an F-22 demonstration at the Reno Air Show in September, I nearly passed out from testosterone poisoning.
If you're at an advertising firm -- say, Keiler & Co. of Farmington, Conn., the agency of record for Lockheed Martin Corp. -- and the product you're promoting is this sky-shredding death kite, you might expect to knock off early. Boss: So, guys, what should the ad look like? Johnson: Um, how about a big picture of the plane? Boss: Right, good, excellent! I like the cut of your jib, Johnson. You play golf?
Such would be the brief in ordinary times, which these aren't. The Obama administration has signaled that the Air Force will get no more than the 183 planes already built or on order, the last of which are to be delivered in 2011. Critics argue that the stealth fighter, conceived during the Cold War to go toe-to-toe with Soviet MiGs, is a classic example of Pentagon gold-plating, a vastly expensive and over-capable weapon system that is irrelevant to the current threat. Those critics include Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates.
The decision whether to end the program comes down in April. Ahead of the deadline, Lockheed Martin and its partners have been engaged in a carpet-bombing ad campaign in support of the F-22.
The ordnance of choice? Jobs.
Since January, the F-22's marketing blitz -- including full-page national newspaper ads and even billboards in the Washington Metro stations -- has reimagined the plane not as a vital war-fighting system but as a supersonic stimulus program. Lockheed Martin claims 95,000 jobs are at stake in 44 states (figures that are at the very least debatable).
"The defense industry has always tried to avoid directly invoking jobs at stake in the past because they didn't want to be seen as welfare queens," says Ivan Eland, a defense analyst for the Independent Institute and a critic of the F-22 program. "They're scared the usual buttonholing of congressmen won't work," Eland says.
Like Justice Potter Stewart, I know obscenity when I see it and these ads are certainly close enough. Yes, jobs are important, but there's something fundamentally indecent about holding jobs hostage to a weapons procurement program of highly dubious value, something even cruel about exploiting an economic crisis to pry more money out of the debt-strapped government.
