Attack of the Drones

Correction (published Oct. 8, 2009): This story originally reported incorrectly that Gen. Curtis LeMay was the first head of the SAC. NEWSWEEK regrets the error.

For more than 60 years, the Air Force has trumpeted itself as the service of glamour, its pilots ruling the skies, soaring, diving, bombing, and strafing from far above—yet still commanding the clash of armies on the ground. In movies, they wore white scarves and set the girls' hearts aflutter.

But all that is changing in ways that few outsiders understand. A fierce fight is on for the mission, culture, and identity of the Air Force, and the Top Guns are losing. This is the real story behind a passionate political struggle this past summer over a major weapons system, the F-22 Raptor, the world's most sophisticated fighter plane.

On its face, the F-22 debate was a straightforward budget battle. The Air Force had 183 of the stealth fighters in its fleet, and another four on the way. It wanted $4 billion for 20 more planes in the next year—a down payment on 200 more it hoped to build in the next decade, for a total of 387.

For years, senior Air Force officers had pushed for the F-22 with an intense, almost messianic passion. Congress complied, largely because huge sums of money were at stake. (The Air Force had shrewdly spread the plane's contracts and subcontracts across 46 states.) But the request came at a time of economic calamity, mounting national debt, and a shift in thinking about military requirements. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said no, and President Obama announced he would veto the entire defense budget if it contained money for even one more F-22. The project was killed, story over.

But the struggle goes much deeper than that, and its consequences are more profound. To understand why, you need to go back to the beginning: 1981, the height of the Cold War, when the F-22 was born.

Its mission was air-to-air combat—keeping control of the sky during a major war, so that bombers could reach their targets, and soldiers down below could fight without worrying about enemy aerial attacks. With its stealth technology (making it much less visible to radar) and high-tech electronics (making it more powerful at longer ranges), the plane was designed to shoot down the latest Soviet combat planes with greater ease than anything else in the sky.

But the first operational F-22 didn't roll onto a runway until the end of 2005, after nearly a quarter century of delays, technical setbacks, and massive cost overruns. By that time, the Cold War was long over.

No country on earth had an air force remotely capable of going up against the latest versions of the U.S. F-15 and F-18 fighter planes, much less something newer. Many in Congress, and some civilian analysts in the Pentagon, wanted to cut our losses and kill the F-22 outright. But defenders of the plane were more powerful. To them, the Air Force meant fast, agile planes dogfighting high in the sky. To kill the most advanced fighter plane was tantamount to killing the Air Force. So they did what they do best: they put up a fight.