U.S. Senate ends production of F-22 fighter

such as electronic warfare and combating enemy air defenses.”

Ratnam and Capaccio write that the Defense Department plans to buy 500 F-35s during the next five years and about 2,400 over the life of the program, Gates said. If the Pentagon is forced to buy more F-22s it will come at the expense of other Air Force and military programs, Gates said in the letter.

Pratt & Whitney, a unit of Hartford, Connecticut-based United Technologies Corp., makes the F-22 engines in Middletown, Connecticut. About 2,000 jobs there are tied to the program.

Los Angeles, California-based Northrop Grumman Corp. and Waltham, Massachusetts-based Raytheon Co. co-produce the F-22 radar system.

Democratic Senator Patty Murray of Washington state, where Chicago-based Boeing Co. builds part of the F-22 fuselage, decried the attempt to stop production. “If we end the F-22 program we are cutting a link in technology that we will not be able to repair overnight,” she said.

Three labor unions — the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, the United Steel Workers and the AFL-CIO — pressed senators to extend production.

The plane supports 25,000 direct jobs and 70,000 indirect jobs in 40 states, the unions said in letters to senators. “Ending the F-22 will result in immediate layoffs,” R. Thomas Buffenbarger, president of the Machinists union, said in a 9 July letter.

Gates denied the Air Force’s request to buy 60 more F-22s and said Congress’s desire to continue making the fighter is a “big problem.” “To be blunt about it, the notion that not buying 60 more F-22s imperils the national security of the United States, I find completely nonsense,” Gates said 18 June. On 16 July, the defense secretary told the Economic Club of Chicago that backers of the F-22 were using “farfetched” arguments about its utility to prevent the Obama administration from curtailing production. “If we cannot bring ourselves to make this tough decision, where do we draw the line?” Gates said.

The F-22, designed at the height of the cold war to counter the Soviet Union, was the focus of a lobbying campaign as Bethesda, Maryland-based Lockheed and its subcontractors said halting production at the 187 aircraft already on order could jeopardize 95,000 jobs in 44 states.