MINITER: Pigs can fly — with a second engine and pork money

What does it cost to make pigs fly? $2.9 billion in taxpayer subsidies, with an assist from shameless lobbyists, brain-dead bureaucrats and gullible lawmakers of both parties.

The Joint Strike Fighter, known as the F-35, was supposed to be a money-saver. The plane would be jointly used by the Air Force, the Army and the Marines — avoiding costly duplication.

But sometimes when the government wants to save money, government contractors do not. General Electric’s engine lost a fair and square competition to Pratt & Whitney’s engine in 2001, but GE wanted to get paid to build an F-35 engine anyway. So for the past 10 years, its lobbyists have insured congressional funding to build a second engine for the fighter — over the objections of Presidents Bush and Obama, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the Chief of Naval Operations and virtually every other Pentagon official. “Only in Washington does a proposal where everybody wins get considered a competition,” Gates said. Stocking two different engines for the same aircraft would be difficult because, as the Chief of Naval Operations explained, “on a carrier, space matters.”

Nevertheless GE has been able to persuade congressmen with a clutch of campaign cash and a clever tale. Back in the 1980’s, GE said, the Pentagon agreed to buy two different engines for the F-16 Fighter — touching off a competition that shaved some 21 percent in overall costs. There’s only one thing wrong with this story: It isn’t true. Engine prices never really fell and what minimal savings did occur were won by reducing fees for late deliveries. As for that 21 percent savings, no independent study has confirmed that figure.

Some say we need to pay for a second engine to “maintain our military-industrial base.” Hardly. GE already dominates 70 percent of the U.S. military engine market, building engines for everything from the F-18 Fighter to BlackHawk and Apache helicopters.

Finally, there is that last refuge of a desperate lobbyist, jobs. Of course, government spending doesn’t create jobs, it only moves them from one sector to another. More than 40 percent of GE’s engine for the F-35 will be built in England. The remaining American jobs are mostly at subcontractors that both GE and Pratt & Whitney use. Without GE’s unneeded engine, those workers would be employed building the Pratt & Whitney engine that actually won the competition.

Meanwhile Pratt & Whitney’s engine has already been proven with 20,000 hours of ground tests and 500 hours of flight tests and a dozen flawless landings; GE’s engine is years away from any tests.

With the federal budget deficit and the national debt at record highs in dollar terms, it’s time to prune away pointless purchases. Every American military aircraft has only one engine design and there’s no reason to spend tens of millions of dollars per month on an engine that the Pentagon doesn’t even want.

GE thought it could buy political support by building part of its engine in Ohio, home to Speaker John Boehner. While the speaker supported the GE engine, he allowed the vote anyway. This week 223 congressmen (including 123 Democrats) voted to cancel GE’s engine and save the taxpayers billions in the coming years.

This week, pushed by the tea parties and 87 Republican freshmen, a little common sense intruded. Now the debate moves to the U.S. Senate, which is considering Defense cuts. Why not start with the $3 billion jet-fighter engine that no one needs?

Richard Miniter, a new Gazette opinion columnist, is a best-selling author and senior editor at the Hudson Institute. (See Miniter's Wikipedia entry)