Senate votes 58-40 to end Production of F-22 Fighter -Bipartisan

by albertacowpoke | July 22, 2009 at 02:51 am

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On Tuesday the U.S. Senate, in a vote that crossed party lines, voted 58-40 to kill the premier fighter jet program.

President Obama and Robert Gates, Defense Secretary, had been arguing that the program was a drag on the Pentagon budget and was not needed. Senator John McCain supported the Obama/Gates argument. 14 other Republicans voted with him.

The plane was first introduced in the 80s in an effort to counter high tech Soviet fighters during the cold war. Robert Gates argued that the aircraft was not necessary in counter insurgency small wars. Gates won the support of the Joint Chiefs and Senator John McCain.

The F-22 has not been used in either Iraq or Afghanistan

The Senate voted Tuesday to kill the nation's premier fighter-jet program, embracing by a 58 to 40 margin the argument of President Obama and his top military advisers that more F-22s are not needed for the nation's defense and would be a costly drag on the Pentagon's budget in an era of small wars and 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 linchpin 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 Thursday in a speech in Chicago.