MS. DANIELLE BRIAN: Thanks very much for coming today. My name's Danielle Brian. I’m the Executive Director of the Project on Government Oversight, and it’s always terrific when we can get back to our roots, bringing voices out from the Pentagon underground.

I’m very proud to introduce Colonel Everest Riccioni. He has an extraordinarily illustrious career. He began with playing around with aircraft in 1943. He learned to be a test pilot at the knee of Chuck Yeager; was a flight test engineer and experimental test flight pilot instructor in the experimental test pilot school; taught the most advanced engineering course at the Air Force Academy; then went on to command both the prototype and flight mechanics divisions of the Flight Dynamics Lab at Wright-Patterson; inspired and chaired the first supersonic cruise fighter design conference in history; went on to fly 55 military aircraft of all types, most fighters, as well as bombers, transports and trainers. He then became one of the three legendary fighter mafia, along with Colonel John Boyd and Pierre Spray, which were responsible for the F-16, and ultimately the F-18.

And after retiring from the Air Force in 1976, [he] went on to Northrop, where he worked until seven years ago through both their ATF programs and their B-2 division. I think that the decision-makers in Washington really should listen to what Colonel Riccioni has to say, and I believe that what I have found listening to him, that the F-22 really is a case of a lot more bucks for not much more bang.

So I’d like you to welcome Rich Riccioni.

Thank you.

[Applause.]

COLONEL RICCIONI: Let me say I’m honored. Any time anyone's willing to listen to me, I'm honored, because that doesn’t happen to me very frequently. I’d like to establish what my goals are going to be this morning. I've got half an hour? Okay. Because I can't spell my name normally in less than an hour. But I have half an hour, and that sort of counters one of my goals. What I’d like to do is give you not opinions; I want to give you facts. I want to give you data. I want to give you no concept without backing it up. And in fact, I want to stick to the truth, and the legal definition is good enough for me and it’s lost all the time in the relations between the military and the Congress.

It’s going to be the truth as we all know what it is, you know, the legal definition. It’s a little bit redundant. It’s the whole truth, which is where most of the lies come from; they’re usually lies by omission -- and nothing but the truth, which means you won’t lie by disinformation. So that’s what I hope to stick to. And the rules of the road -- if I use a term that you don’t understand, I’m sure that there are others in the group that don’t understand it. Bounce me. Stop me. If you want to argue with me about my concepts, please save them till later. I’ll be delighted to engage you; I’ll be delighted to learn from you. But only interrupt me if I use a term that you don’t understand or appreciate. And I’m given to doing that because I’m so familiar with some of these things [that] they become part of me.

What I intend to reveal today is that -- oh, I would like to read some claims. I just read these in the airport, in Reagan airport. The F-22 will take 1 percent of the total annual budget, which is pretty large, for an advantage that makes the other 99 percent vastly more effective. We’re going to discuss that. The fact is, the F-22 could cost less than not having it. And my wife used to save me a great deal of money by buying things on sale, and so that one’s a little bit lost on me. A hundred percent of the skies for a lone one percent of the defense budget should not be a hard decision.

But the one I really like is, this airplane will deter war. It is so awesome, it will deter wars. Now if that’s true, I will be its biggest backer. In fact, I’m writing a book on strategic bombing and deterring war is a big concept, and I love that idea. Also they went on to claim that Slobo -- I guess they mean Milosevic -- and Saddam will beware of the aircraft. They will be intimidated. They weren’t intimidated by the preponderance of the United States military might, but they’re going to be intimidated by an air superiority fighter which is untested and unproven.

What I intend to reveal is that the F-22 is really not a very spectacular increase in capability over current aircraft. I’m going to indicate that it was maldesigned to an extent, conceived for a mission that no longer exists, and is totally irrelevant to modern warfare. It does have a redeeming virtue, however, and that’s a totally obscene cost. And we’ll discuss all of these items.

The dream mission, or the dream for this airplane was really quite good. It was intended to provide the United States with dominance of the air beyond the year 2005 and specifically designed against a very specific enemy. It was meant to do offensive counter-air operations deep in the heart of Russia. And to that end, the airplane was going to perform a very aggressive mission, which was a 100 mile flight to the borders of Russia, then a 400 mile supersonic penetration, supersonic for survivability, and then do its combat and fly 400 miles out and then 100 miles back to the home base. A very ambitious mission.

And along with that it was supposed to have ultra-high performance beyond that of current aircraft. And the other primary reason for the existence of the airplane is the F-15s and the F-16s are definitely wearing out. There is no question about that. So it was meant to rejuvenate an aging Air Force. That would become a subject of conversation.

The beauty of it is that it was all to be done for an airplane that was to cost $35 million, which, in 1982, which is when it was specified, or 1980, that was precisely the cost of F-15. These are unit fly-away costs, by the way, so the $35 million would translate in today’s inflated dollars and in total program costs, it would translate to about $40 [million] to $50 million. So that’s the cost that we’ll compare later.

To do that for the cost of the F-15, and weighing just 5,000 pounds more than the F-15, supposed to weigh less than 50,000 pounds, and you could only conclude that with all that good performance this was a rare bargain. It wasn’t going to cost any more, but it was going to be a tremendous amount better.

Let’s discuss how much better it’s going to be. And what I intend to do to describe the aircraft is to discuss its four major characteristics, which are the four pillars that the concept was based on. They usually say three pillars, but they changed the pillars, so I’m going to include all four of them. Okay? The first pillar, of course, high stealth. The second pillar was supersonic cruise, and I want to define these terms because it’s the failure to define these terms properly that’s leading your nation, my nation, astray.

It was to have ultra-high performance and to have dream avionics that would do all kinds of things, which we’ll discuss. And I’m going to discuss these four items in turn: stealth, supersonic cruise, performance and avionics.

First item, stealth. By proper definition stealth is the pragmatic suppression of the signatures that an airplane has so that the enemy can’t sense it, or at least minimize their ability to sense it. And therein lies part of the rub because the signatures are not one, they are many. There's at least six signatures, and I’ll discuss five immediately and one if I'm pushed, the sixth one if I’m pushed. I don’t discuss the sixth one because it’s sort of successful, and I would like to suppress it a little bit.

Any way, the first five signatures are the visual signature; second, radar signature; third, IR signature; the emissions signature, infrared. When things get hot, they emit signals, and the signal can be picked up by IR sensors, infrared, sensors, and the Russians are very good at that. So we’ll capture it in turn. And the fifth signature happens to be sound, which all of a sudden is becoming important for two reasons. One is computer technology and the other one is the airplane booms.

So the visual signature. You know, one of the things I’ve always prided myself in life is that I see things that other people don’t. And I see things that other people don’t because they’re obvious. The first thing that impressed me about the F-22 is that it’s the largest fighter in the American skies. Now when I was creating the F-16 airplane, a great, great consideration was given to keeping it as small as possible, and I didn’t quite succeed in getting it as small as I wanted because the Air Force wanted to put more goodies in it and the airplane grew and I lost that battle to some extent. But the F-16 is on the upper side of small.

And here’s an airplane that’s at least five times bigger than the F-16 in size. In fact, most people don’t even know how to measure size, but I won’t get trapped into that unless you want that conversation later. But allow me to say that the largest airplanes in the skies today are the F-15 and the F-14, visible at six and seven miles and identifiable, and here’s an airplane that’s considerably larger, about 25 percent larger. So visual signature -- it’s anti-stealthy visually.

Now why am I making a big fuss about this? For two reasons. One is, stealthy airplanes, true stealthy airplanes are supposed to fly by night. That’s the way they hide their visual signature. The F-117 is labeled the Nighthawk. The B-2 -- for one year I had trouble convincing Northrop that the B-2 was going to have to fly by night in its battle operations. And for one year they laughed at me, saying it was invisible in the daytime. The world’s most immense bomber, with the most immense wing -- invisible in daytime. I have trouble understanding. You know, being a dumb Italian, I have trouble understanding all this. Any way, the Air Force finally joined me and all of a sudden the B-2 became totally a night battle operation.

But why is the F-22 big? I said it was maldesigned to some extent because it was designed for radar stealth. And I’ll hit that in its proper place, but radar stealth means you’re going to carry the weapons inside the airplane; you’re going to carry a bunch of other things to make it stealthy, like radar absorptive material, and so on, which makes it heavier and bigger, et cetera. So the airplane gets bigger because you’re making it stealthy. It’s sort of counter-productive.

So visual stealth it doesn’t have. It’s the most visible airplane in the sky, very identifiable. And it’s anti-stealthy in that sense.

Q. Can you give us an idea about how big? Is it as big as a commercial plane? Compared to a commercial plane.

COL. RICCIONI: Oh, compared to a commercial plane. Well, I’ve never measured commercial planes, my lady, so I really don’t know.

Radar stealth. The airplane is designed to be stealthy. Now, it turns out that they claim that, but they don’t tell you what it’s stealthy against. You can’t design an airplane to be stealthy against ground radars which work at very high-power settings and lower frequencies, longer wave lengths, and be stealthy against airborne radars, which are high frequency, short wave length and very light radars and lower power. So you can do things that will hinder both types of radars, but you can’t defeat both of them all the time.

So the airplane is aimed at being stealthy at only one class of radar, the air-to-air radar. So you see the enemy before he sees you because they want first look, first firing, first shoot, first kill. So immediately, you’re being given some inadequate information. It’s stealthy only against half the radars of the world. But what’s been reported to the Congress and the GAO is the radar signature, plus or minus 20 degrees off the nose. That’s all. They don’t tell you what the signature is all the rest of the way around the airplane. Well, plus or minus 20 degrees is 40 degrees, divided into 360. That’s one-ninth. To an Italian, that’s one-tenth. It's an easier number. So you’re getting one-tenth of the data. And then they really should have given the same information all the way around the top and the bottom because you get enormous spikes up and down that radars, ground radars can use and look down, shoot-down can use. They aren’t giving you that information.

So now we’re down to a tenth times a tenth, times a half, because you’re only going against half the radars of the world. You’re down to a half a percent of what the real radar problem is, and that’s all they’re reporting. So the report is specious. It’s what you call lying by omission. And I don’t know if any of you saw the B-1B versus B-52 battle testimony that went on before Congress, but if you'd like to develop that, we’ll discuss it later. But that was a total misrepresentation from beginning to end. It turned out the B-1 and the B-52 were just as easily visible to the Russian radars, despite the fact that one signature was reported to be -- the B-1 signature was supposed to be 100 times smaller than the B-52.

So if the airplane is stealthy to radar, it’s stealthy only to half the radars, plus most of it is unknown. We really don’t know. Somebody knows, but we don’t know. The people, the Congress, the GAO doesn't know, because they haven’t really received that.

The infrared signature, IR signature. This airplane is unique if it’s going to super-cruise. It’s going to ram the air at 1.6, 1.7 Mach number. You'll get inevitable shock waves. You'll get inevitable leading edge heating, and you make a beacon in the sky out of the airplane because the heat contrasts well with the cold surroundings. Now in deference to the F-22, they very intelligently decided to cool the leading edges of the airplane with fuel. That was a very smart decision. You can cool the air frame but you can’t cool the hot air, and you can’t cool the hot air that comes out from the jet exhaust, because the only thing that moves the airplane, the only thing that gives you thrust is extremely hot air going at extremely high speeds out the back end of the airplane.

And they tried by putting sheets of cooling air above and below the two-dimensional nozzle, but the fact is the air tumbles when it gets out and so the jet wake is warm. The hot parts of the rear of the airplane are hot, and the shock waves will give you enough. Besides that, a good IR sensor can sense a subsonic cruise airplane. And who has IR sensors? The Russians have them on all their airplanes. The U.S. Navy has them on all their airplanes. Only the Air Force doesn’t have IR sensors on their airplanes.

Next is electronic emissions. If you’re going to see the enemy first with radar, you have to have power. You can play games to hide the radar. We’ll discuss that later. But you have to have power, because radar energy dissipates, the beam dissipates as it spreads out so you get an inverse square phenomenon because area's a result of the square of the radius of the beam, of the cross-section of the beam. And that signal goes out and dissipates, inverse square, and then it comes back to you, and now it’s dissipating again, inverse square. So the radar in the equation that tells you what you’re going to see and what you’re not going to see has distance to the inverse fourth power. And that’s just a truism of physics.

Now the Russians like to use anti-radiation missiles, which mean they home on your radar. So they sense your radar, and their signal is coming to them inverse square, whereas the fighter is getting his signal inverse fourth power. So the observer has the advantage. The Russians not only have infrared missiles, anti-radiation missiles air-to-air, they also have them surface-to-air, because the Russians like to get their dominance of the air by surface-to-air operations. So I’ve covered the IR signature.

There’s a sound signature. Sound has historically been a bad signature because war is noisy and it’s hard to locate an object with sound. But sound with a modern computer is an absolutely positive identifier. And when you have shock waves involved, you’ve really got it identified. So the signatures have been covered. The airplane is not stealthy. In some sense, it’s anti-stealthy. And the reason it’s anti-stealthy is because it was designed to be stealthy. I find that just a little bit incongruous. Any questions about that?

Yes. Okay, fine. Let's go on.

[Laughter.]

COL. RICCIONI: No, excuse me. What?

Q. I don’t really understand that, what you just said.

COL. RICCIONI: Because they designed it for radar stealth, they had to put the weapons on the inside. They had to grow the size of the airplane. They made it larger and more visible. So it’s less stealthy. Okay. It has to fly in the daytime. Air battle operations are normally fought in the daytime. You can do air intercept at night, but the enemy seldom flies at night, so, you know, that’s not very important.

Q. You were saying that because it's so -- it needs to fly during the day, but it’s so large that it’s easily detected? Is that what you're saying?

COL. RICCIONI: Yes. The only way it can be unstealthy in the daytime is if you tear the eyes out of the enemy pilots’ heads. They’ll see you before you see them. Visually.

Q. We ran all of our air ops in Desert Storm and every other operation at night. We know the daytime disability. The F-15s swept the field at night. Anything that came up, we took down. Why would they not do the same thing in any future air combat? This airplane worked perfectly fine in the nighttime.

COL. RICCIONI: It does. I agree with you. It will work just as well at night as it will in the daytime. But we’re now violating one of the rules. You can argue with me later. Okay. You can argue with me. I’m willing to clarify any questions of terms, of definitions, of clarifying what I’m saying, but not of debate.

Yes.

Q. You said that the ram is adding weight. How much weight do you think that ram's adding?

COL. RICCIONI: I really haven’t weighed it on the airplane, and I could almost guess at it. But you have to take that whole perimeter of the airplane, which is quite long, and multiply that by roughly, say, a pound per foot, or two pounds per feet. But it makes the airplane larger. Okay.

Next. Let's see. Where were we? Performance. The performance of the airplane is an interesting thing. The first thing that struck me was that they want to minimize the amount of testing they do on the airplane because they want to reduce the cost of testing, because the cost of testing comes out of the total program cost that might bite into the number of airplanes they can buy. But when you minimize the cost of testing, you are really taking a big risk.

You know, one of the glories of having grown up at the knee of Chuck Yeager in flight test is the fact that you get a little bit of his philosophy. And at that time we had an adversarial philosophy between the contractor and the Air Force, which no longer exists, by the way. And he said, Riccioni, an airplane is guilty until proven innocent. And that stood the Air Force in great, good stead for many years. Until the F-15, Air Force test pilots and the contractor test pilots both do cooperative testing. All of a sudden both sets know their careers depend on the success of the project. All of a sudden both sets of test pilots become marketeers as opposed to being critical observers of the aircraft.

One of the things to safe testing, and this is in a GAO report, they said they were going to use a single number as a criterion for the maneuverability of the airplane, the steady state G. How many G’s can you pull in a steady state turn at 30,000 feet at 9/10ths mach number? That’s a very good operational point, by the way. That part of it looks fine. But they wanted to use that one point. It turns out that fighter pilots are never at steady state when they’re in combat. They’re either increasing a speed, decreasing speed, tightening turns, losing air speed. They’re going from minus 3 to plus 7 G’s, from sea level to 60,000 feet. What do you mean you’re going to use one point?

Now I know eventually you’ll have to fill out the maneuver envelope, but they’re going to do that after the airplane is in production. So we won’t know before the airplane is produced what the airplane is going to be capable of. What they really should do is get all the points beforehand and then compare them. Compare them with what? Compare them with good current airplanes, F-15's, and preferably the enemy. The MiG-29 Flanker would be a good comparison. And this can all be done very easily with a computer, so there’s really -- and flight test methods are very efficient these days. There’s no excuse for not getting the data unless you want to hide the data.

The performance of the airplane is not going to be spectacular. Now how do I know that? From public literature. How can you deduce that? If you know F = ma, the laws of physics is very easy to deduce if you know a little bit of aerodynamics on top of it. The thrust of the airplane is a nominal 70,000 pounds, two 35,000 pound engines. The weight of the airplane is 65,000 pounds. That means the ratio of the thrust to the weight, which gives you some idea of the ability of the airplane to accelerate, is roughly that of the F-15C.

The wing loading of the two airplanes are almost the same. The F-22's wing loading -- I saw the question coming. The wing-loading is the pounds of airplane divided into the wing area, so it tells you how much each square foot of the wing has to lift. The wing-loading of the airplanes are the same; it's slightly inferior on the F-22. It’s not worth talking about. It’s inferior, higher.

The fuel fraction, which I’ll discuss at some length -- oh, I've missed supercruise. Wow! Wow! The fuel fraction is identical to the F-15. The fuel fraction is the weight of the fuel on board, ratioed or divided by the total weight of the airplane with fuel and weapons at takeoff. So it’s the percentage of the airplane that’s energy. It’s the percentage of the airplane that’s fuel. And those two are identical. They’re both 29 percent. So if the fuel fraction is the same, the thrust-to-weight ratio is the same, wing-loading is the same. It’s going to maneuver very much like an F-15.

Now it will look very impressive to the non-cognoscente, to the non-connoisseurs if the airplane can undoubtedly go booming down a runway, stand on its tail, go vertically for a short while, but so can the F-15; so can the F-16. But comparison is the key. As you may have seen in some of the literature, I don’t care whether you’re comparing tanks or guns or records or wine or courtesans or airplanes, comparison is the key. And that’s something that has to be instilled into the test organization. We discussed that at some length yesterday.

Okay. So I’ve discussed performance. I’ve got to discuss the centerpiece of supersonic cruise. There are two enormous discrepancies in the supersonic cruise part of the airplane. One is a little bit complicated, but it happens to be the thing that created most of the trouble. The entire country has focused on the wrong definition of supersonic cruise, and the GAO has bitten it off. They have reported that the airplane has demonstrated supersonic cruise. What they reported was that the airplane flew at 1.6 and 1.7 mach number in dry thrust, meaning the afterburner wasn’t being used, just the pure central turbojet part of the engine.

Now that feature bodes well for the airplane. You want that feature. But that feature is necessary and it’s desirable, but it’s not sufficient to give you super-cruise. And besides, what is proof positive of this is if Lockheed and the Air Force know what they’re doing, the airplane will not be cruising supersonically in dry thrust. It will be at low afterburner power settings. That I have to demonstrate to you.

It turns out that fighter aircraft have large wings for a very good reason. They have to maneuver very aggressively at slow speeds and intermediate speeds, subsonic speeds, so the wing of a fighter is designed by subsonic maneuver, not by supersonic cruise. So every supersonic cruise fighter simply has too much wing to be truly efficient in supersonic cruise. And let me back up a little bit on definitions. Cruise means you’re operating for pragmatic times or covering pragmatic mission-wise distances while supersonic. The dream mission, you remember, was 400 mile penetration, supersonic, combat, and 400 miles supersonic back. So cruise means distance. Yet what the GAO is reporting is speed. That’s the speed you cruise at, but it’s got nothing to do with cruise. Every airplane can fly at 1.6 mach in the US Air Force.

So to get distance -- and the other aspect is that the world has focused on the definition that it’s flight using dry thrust. Well, if you fly in dry thrust, the altitude for the maximum speed of the airplane optimizes around 35,000 to 47,000 feet, which is relatively low in the spectrum of a fighter. And if you fly at those altitudes, the wing, which is designed to lift a lot, is at a very low angle of attack at those speeds, and it’s at a very inefficient angle of attack. And in fact, the lift-to-drag ratios, which means how much lift you’re getting from the wing compared to the drag of the airplane, is of the order of 2 to 2.5 to 3, maybe, at those speeds at those altitudes.

But wings all have an optimum angle of attack. As you get higher and higher in angle of attack, it gets better and better, and then beyond that it gets worse and worse and worse and then ultimately stalls. So there’s an optimum angle of attack, and at supersonic speeds you’re at much too low an angle of attack. And if you get to the optimum angle of attack, you can realize a lift-to-drag ratio of five. Well, a lift-to-drag ratio of five means you have just cut your drag in half, but your dry thrust fuel consumption starts going up precipitously.

The afterburning fuel consumption is greater than that, but it isn’t much greater. But it turns out that the way to get a proper compromise between a propulsion system and the aerodynamic system is to fly very high, the order of 60,000 feet of altitude. Now you’re bringing the two into consonance, and you can’t get there without using the afterburner. You can’t stay there without using the afterburner.

Efficient supersonic cruise is done in supercruisers at high altitudes with afterburning. When you bite the definition that it’s going supersonic in dry thrust, you’re just talking about a characteristic of the airplane. It bodes well, but that’s not where you should be supercruising. You should be up around 60. And there’s nothing novel about this. The Russian MiG-31 supersonic cruise interceptor does it. The SR-71, which flies very fast and very high, uses only the afterburner. It bypasses the turbojet engine completely. In fact, it goes to idle, and so it’s operating purely as a RAM-jet engine. An afterburner is a RAM-jet engine tied to a turbojet engine. So there’s nothing mysterious about this. Supercruise, properly done, is done in afterburning.

Okay. Thank you. I don't have much time.

Proof positive that the airplane isn’t going to go very far in supercruise is the fuel fraction. It’s 29 percent. The F-4's fuel fraction is 29 percent, subcruiser, F-15. The MiG-29 is 29 percent, whereas the MiG-31, which is a Russian supercruiser, is up at 45 percent. And if you want a perspective on this from my experience in design, 29 percent and below gives you a subcruiser. That’s the F-22. Thirty-one to 32 percent gets you in the right direction. Above 35 percent you get pragmatic supersonic cruise missions.

Okay. I said I’d discuss the relevance of air superiority today. That’s a very easy problem. I even ran into an advocate of the F-22 and I asked them a leading question. I said, where in this world do we have an air superiority problem today? And I almost fell over. He gave me the right answer. He said, nowhere. The only countries that present any numbers of high performance Russian aircraft are Russia, China and India. I don’t think we’re going to go to war with Russia. China is not going to attack the United States. A sane U.S. is not going to attack China. Benevolent India is not going to attack the United States. So we haven’t got a problem there.

Where are other high-performance fighters? Europe. Well, we’re not going to go to war with Germany, France, Italy, England. So that’s not a problem. A few fighters in Bulgaria, Romania are not a threat to this country. There really is no air superiority threat. And an air superiority fighter is designed to shoot down enemy airplanes. We don’t have any opposition. Now World War II was important. We had to not only shoot down those hordes of German aircraft, we had to shoot down their Stukas, which were bothering our ground troops.

And incidentally, another myth. Everybody says because of our air superiority airplanes, no American soldiers die through enemy air attack. That’s a non sequitur. There has been no threat. There's no capability. Since the Korean war we’ve had no enemy that posed a threat to our ground troops. So there’s no problem with air superiority in the world today.

What’s the relevance of the F-22 to wars of the future? Well, they aren’t going to be pouring tanks through the Fulda Gap any more, or tanks. They could come down from North Korea, but that’s not frightfully likely. The primary source of wars in the modern era are going to be guerrilla wars, anti-terrorist wars, genocides which we might step into. We might even war against non-states like the Osama bin Ladens and the Ayum Shinrikyo. And we’ll be into anti-drug wars. What relevance does the F-22 have to those wars? Zero. So the F-22 is being purchased for military reasons for wars that it can’t serve.

A brilliant Israeli historian, Martin van Krebel, wrote The Transformation of War, a historical analyst. Absolutely brilliant. And he’s just as critical of Israel as he is of anyone else. And in his opening sentence in this book, he said there’s a ghost walking the halls of general officers’ offices, or generals' offices and defense departments in the developed nations of the world. He said that ghost is one of impotence, even irrelevance. And I submit to you the F-22 is irrelevant to future wars.

Now I have to discuss the impact that the F-22 is going to have on tac, on air combat command. Air combat command today is very capable. It’s got 1,600 airplanes which can go to 2,400 airplanes. They’re very versatile. They can go air-to-ground; they can support our ground troops; they can do air intercept. It’s a very versatile, powerful capability which is going to disappear. Their pilots are very confident that their training is getting deficient, but they’re still very confident.

But when you have an airplane that costs $190 million, that’s 339 divided into $64.2 billion, that cost, which is equal to one-third the cost of the B-1, is utterly obscene. Now why is it obscene? Because it’s going to actually degrade the fighting capability of air combat command. And I want to bring you to some history. They wanted 700 to 800 airplanes initially was to be the buy, for about $40 billion. Then they decided that it was going to be $70 billion. After one review, a SAR, selected acquisitions review, they put it down to $64.2 billion and 680 aircraft, 660 or 680 airplanes. And after the next bottoms-up review, they blew it down to 440 aircraft, but still for $64.2 billion. That’s important. And then after the last review they had -- I've got them in reverse order again. Okay. It doesn't matter. The quadrennial defense review. Thank you. The quadrennial defense review was 339 aircraft for $64.2 billion.

Now what’s happening here? Either the truth is gradually evolving or the truth is gradually being released. Now it turned out I had the privilege of buffeting around yesterday on the Hill, and my suspicions were confirmed. The number will go lower. The ball will go lower. The costs will go higher, above $200 million per airplane. That’s four times the cost of an F-15.

What does this mean to tactical air command? It means that they’re going to probably get, most likely they’re going to get something like -- well, the GAO has spoken of 175 aircraft. Others have actually gotten the number down to 100. And as a euphemism, they justify that by buying silver bullets. They’re not silver bullets. They’re platinum bullets. They’re much more valuable than silver bullets, much more costly.

What you’re going to get with that number of aircraft is two things. One, we will never again have air superiority in the air. Never again have superiority in numbers in the air with the F-22. That’s one. The other thing is, we absolutely will not be able to support what the going concept of two MTWs. MTWs are --

Q. Major theater wars.

COL. RICCIONI: Major theater wars. Thank you. And we’re giving that up. If we’re giving that up, you know what that smells of? Unilateral disarmament. Unilateral disarmament by the method of buying prohibitively expensive airplanes that we can’t afford.

So to make them affordable, what are we going to do? We’re going to try to sell them overseas. You know, they’ve already requested a license to sell F-22's overseas and F-18s overseas. Why? For two reasons? One, to bring the cost down, and the justification is we might have to fight our own high performance airplanes. Well, if we have to fight our own high performance airplanes, you know, many countries fly the F-15 and F-16s. Even Canada has been mentioned as a possible enemy. If we have to fight against our own airplanes, that means we are getting ourselves into a self-perpetuating arms war with ourselves.

So, in summation, if you'll give me a minute to wrap it up. In summation, we have an airplane that’s really not frightfully good, a little bit maldesigned; a mission that isn’t there; irrelevant to modern wars; an obscene cost. It'll degrade the capability, the fighting power of the Air Force and tactical air command. So my suggestion is that the remaining funding, which is most of it, be reverted to the Air Force to buy what they really do need. They need better training, more extensive training, which has been blown down badly. They also need to buy some air-to-ground airplanes because they’ve almost divested themselves of the ability to support the one organization that can fulfill our political-military objectives, the Army.

And the third thing is, if they really want lots of good supercruisers that are still versatile and very low in cost, they’re still trying to do that before the year 2005, and I know it can be done because it would be in kind with the F-16, but in a modern supersonic cruise era. And so we could build a very numerous force with able supercruisers and have diverse capability.

And gentlemen, that's my view. Ladies and gentlemen, that’s my view, and now I’m open to be challenged.

[Applause.]

Q. What makes you think the Air Force is going to be dumb enough to view air superiority [inaudible]. And the mission of the F-15 is to sweep the skies in front of the strike package. Most of the strike package is going to be non-stealthy aircraft for a long time into the future. So they're not going to go up in daylight. [Inaudible.]

COL. RICCIONI: Allow me to not stand corrected, but at least come in consonance with you. If the F-22 restricts itself to night operations, the size is more important. I agree with you.

Q. On the radar signature, the F-22 is expected to operate with an AWACS aircraft, which would be doing most of its long-range detection of airplanes. So it can go radar-off until it gets into close [proximity] where it can use its anti-radar detections to find the guy who's looking for him.

COL. RICCIONI: Sure. Now, that’s sort of true. But when you’re talking about the F-22, you’re talking about the capability of the F-22. The fact that you can get augmented capability with AWACS also extends to non-stealthy airplanes. So that's -- I don't mind. You know, it's always good to go at least one level of generality above where we’re at.

MAN: Could you go to the microphones.

COL. RICCIONI: Thank you.

So you’re absolutely correct in raising that point. But I was talking about the efficacy of the F-22, not the system, not the Air Force system.

Incidentally, there’s a gentleman here that knows much more about this than I do, but the Russians are planning to -- have laid plans to help the AWACS and the support airplane rivet joint to not exist. They’re developing very long-range missiles to cope with AWACS.

Q. If you don’t build the F-22, what are you advocating? Just to build the North (ph) Strike Fighter? Or are you just saying we don't need an air superiority fighter any more?

COL. RICCIONI: There’s no problem.

Q. You said the F-15 is wearing out.

COL. RICCIONI: Oh, well, the air superiority -- if there's no air superiority problem, we have no need for a fighter versus fighter airplane. Let’s put it that way. Because the Russians don’t gain air superiority in a battle area with their planes any more, or the countries they support. They gain it with surface-to-air missiles and surface-to-air cannon. And so what you need is, if you’re going to do air superiority there, you have to go against those things.

Now F-16's and F-15's go against other ground airplanes also. But to get back to your story, what would I advocate? I would advocate an airplane that’s capable of multi-mission, in case you are opposed by other fighters. So you want a multi-mission airplane. And the joint strike fighter is not going to be a fighter versus fighter airplane. And if you want that capability, you can get both if you don’t design for stealth. And if you don’t design for stealth, you can make it affordable. And if it's affordable, you can get the numbers you want, and you can have a powerful tactical air command. But right now we’re blowing down to very few numbers.

Q. It sounds like you're buying more F-16s.

COL. RICCIONI: That would be an alternative. That was an alternative. There is nothing wrong with buying more F-15s. In fact, in my mind -- excuse me, sir.

Q. I said 16.

COL. RICCIONI: Oh, 16. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm glad you said 16, having been the father of that airplane. But one thing is clear. I was just going to bring the F-16 up. The F-16 is still in production, if the Air Force wants numbers. It'll probably stay in production until the year 2010. I had a friend of mine, a member of the fighter mafia, say it would be in production until 2020. But that isn’t the Air Force’s plan.

Sir?

Q. Two questions. First of all, back to the radar. I’m not an expert, but isn’t the F-22 --

COL. RICCIONI: Yes.

Q. -- Does that cut the signature that you're talking about?

COL. RICCIONI: No. No. The electronic scanning doesn’t do a thing for the signature. It’s just a way of scanning. It’s a very effective way of scanning. Doesn’t do a thing for the signature.

I understand they’re playing games with the signature. Everybody does. They use spread spectrum tactics, spread spectrum emissions where you’re broadcasting over a bunch of different frequencies and doing frequency hopping, you know, with classified hopping. But that’s a radar game. And the Russians are very good at that counter game. I'm not saying -- you know, it would take a while for the Russians to catch up, but those games are easily counter-able.

But if you’re going to see an enemy airplane far out, power is the answer. Then back to his question, yes.

Q. You seemed to say at one point that if we buy the F-22 that it's going to be the silver bullet. Even if the silver bullet works, it will cut -- basically, you said we'll never again have air superiority --

COL. RICCIONI: In numbers, In numbers. Yeah, right.

Q. Okay.

COL. RICCIONI: We are unilaterally disarmed.

Q. But then you said that we don’t need air superiority.

COL. RICCIONI: Oh, well, that’s an interesting point, you know, and you’ve sort of trapped me, which is very good, as a matter of fact. I agree with you. If you don’t need them, then you can save the money very easily. Just cancel the program.

Q. Do we need them or don't we? Do we need air superiority or not?

COL. RICCIONI: Not today. Not today.

Q. Not today.

COL. RICCIONI: No. And certainly today we have more than enough. You know, today’s air tac command could almost take on the whole known world, almost any coalition in the whole known world with all its fighters. We absolutely don’t need new airplanes to counter the F-15s that we’ve sold to people.

Sir?

Q. You talk about maneuverability --

COL. RICCIONI: Yes.

Q. -- in the current aircraft in the wing-loading, weight ratios. You didn't talk about --

COL. RICCIONI: Yes. Vector thrust.

Q. -- Vector thrust. And the fact that with their computer controls, they're getting much better maneuverability. [Inaudible.]

COL. RICCIONI: No. Okay, let’s discuss that. The computer will do nothing for the basic maneuverability of the airplane unless it allows it to maneuver in domains that other airplanes can’t. Because maneuverability needs force. It’s acceleration tangentially and acceleration normally. Turnability. That's maneuverability and performance. The computer does nothing for that other than give you control over what you do while maneuvering. And we haven’t been limited.

Now they do have, and I didn’t cover it for lack of time, and I talk too much. The vector thrust is a two-dimensional vectoring nozzle. And it’s on there really -- I finally found out why it’s on there. It’s not on there so much for maneuverability, because what vector thrust gives you is the ability to maneuver an airplane in what they call post-stall domain, 200 miles an hour and below, maybe down to 40 knots. In fact, an advocate of the F-22 said you could stand it on its tail. You probably could if you could maintain control of the airplane at zero air speed on its tail, but you can’t. And it’s two-dimensional, which is why you can’t. You’d have to be able to do vector thrust controlling in not just two dimensions, but in three dimensions.

So -- but it’s on there for a very good reason. And I haven’t fully studied it out, but I think it’s right. One of the components of drag that hurts a supersonic airplane is that they get very stable when they’re at supersonic flight because the center of gravity is a long distance in front of the center of pressure on the wing. And to counter-balance that you have to put the up elevator, and that’s what causes your trim drag.

Well, what they use the two-dimensional nozzle for is to use that for a little bit of elevator control. They do lose something in the component of thrust along the flight path, but it’s very minimal because if you know trigonometry, it’s the cosine of the angle, and that diminishes very little for a very small angle. So I think that was a very correct thing. But you’ve got to maneuver at speeds around 200 knots, and I think we have Navy pilots here that will verify it. That’s when you get into a so-called knife fight, so-called knife fight, one-on-one, where you’re maneuvering and counter-maneuvering in close proximity with another airplane. You don’t want to do that. The result of that kind of a fight is usually a 50-50 outcome.

So it’s totally antithetical to an airplane that gets in fast, gets out fast, the slashing attacks, never to engage. I used to teach my people in F-100s, F-104s, never to engage. You engage, you make contact, you get in there and shoot, you shoot your missiles and get the hell out. Never to sustain is what I mean. So the vector thrust part of it does not really add much to the maneuverability, and I think it would only get the pilot killed in combat because he’s getting himself where the other pilot can equal him. His advantage lies in his speed.

Q. Can I ask you about the sister service airplane, what you think of it, the F-18E&F. And it's always puzzled me that the Air Force and Navy are building dramatically different planes with about the same end effect. What do you think? Is that the way to go or not?

COL. RICCIONI: What? Having different airplanes for --

Q. No. Well, a two-part question. One, is the F-18E&F a quick way to go? Or is that also a waste of money? And, two: how does it compute to have two very different airplanes funded at taxpayer expense?

COL. RICCIONI: Oh, okay. That's -- you know, I really would like not to take on the second question because I haven’t thought much about it, but I’ll take a pass at it. But with regard to the first question, the F-18T&E, is that a good way to go compared to what? Compared to the F-18A? Q. Well, I mean there're lots of alternatives. It could be the A or more F-14s.

COL. RICCIONI: Okay. Okay. Okay, I just wanted to know what your question was. What I get out of the reports that come out in the open e-mail and press and whatnot, is the F-18E was designed to go further than the A, which is the severe limitation of the A in the eyes of the Navy. And they decided to build an airplane with more fuel. Right there they made a mistake because they had the wrong statement. They said more fuel. What they meant was a higher fuel fraction. The day’s range equation tells you that the higher the fuel fraction, the further you can go.

And it turned out that in making the airplane bigger, with more fuel and doing this and doing that, putting bigger engines, the fuel fraction is almost the same as the A, so it doesn’t go much further. That’s one.

And what I also get out of pilot reports, that it isn’t significantly better in performance and maneuvering than the A, and, as a result, the buying of an airplane at twice the expense of an A is probably a mistake. I think it’s another form of unilateral disarmament on the part of the Navy.

Okay?

Q. Back to the F-22 now. I just want to make sure I understand what you’re saying on its range.

COL. RICCIONI: Yes.

Q. Because of the ratio --

COL. RICCIONI: Yes.

Q. -- that means it cannot fly --

COL. RICCIONI: Go very far supersonically.

Q. So it will not be able to fly the 400 miles --

COL. RICCIONI: No, absolutely not. In fact, I’ve heard numbers as low as 50 miles in and 50 miles out. But you can do that with the current F-15 in full burner. Not in full burner, but the part of afterburning you need to fly at 1.6 mach number. A 50 mile or 100 mile mission will get you all the way across Los Angeles on a short diameter. You know, it’s not a pragmatic mission. The dream mission was, 400 miles deep in Russia, kind of risky, but that’s a dramatic mission.

Q. You're a Northrop man, and Northrop lost to the F-22. Would things be different if the F-23 had won?

COL. RICCIONI: No, absolutely not. I mean, the airplanes are both designed to the same specifications. They both are observing the requirements of the Air Force, and they were very close in most ways. You know, I’ve been filled with the Northrop propaganda on how much better it was in stealth, and so on, but the fact is that both airplanes would be as expensive. No, there would be no difference.

And I just want you to appreciate something. At Northrop, I was hired as the loyal in-house critic, and I was very critical of the way they designed fighter airplanes, and that’s the way they liked it, because if you’re critical, they can improve it and so on.

Yes, sir.

Q. I’d like to ask the unspoken question. If the F-22 is such an average, standard, or perhaps lousy aircraft, what’s driving it?

COL. RICCIONI: Sir, you probably know the answer to that much better than I do.

Q. No, I don't. I’d like your opinion.

COL. RICCIONI: The F-22 program is really -- it grew out of a desire of the Air Force to resurrect itself, you know. Given that you have a fighter, it becomes axiomatic that you want a new fighter upgraded to the modern technology. I mean that’s a cult. Whether you need it or not. I mean, a replacement airplane for equipment you’ve learned to depend on, okay? And as it grew, I remember -- in fact, I was at the flight dynamics lab at the time. General Dixon ordered my division at the flight dynamics lab to get in bed with the fighter requirements people at tactical air command then and with the engineers at Wright-Patterson, in the engineering part of the base, to evolve the requirements for this airplane.

And in their rush to get a great airplane for the Air Force, they put in this requirement, that requirement, another requirement, without regard to either cost. Cost was not their problem. They didn’t observe cost. And also without regard to the resulting airplane. And I broke up a meeting one time in 1975, where I got to the meeting a little bit late and I listened to all these requirements. I said, do you know what you’re doing? You’re asking for an airplane that’s going to cost one-third as much as a B-1, and it broke the meeting up. They recognized the error of what they were doing.

But the result is, I had no effect on the outcome and we have an airplane that costs one-third as much as the B-1. So the Air Force is just trying to propagate itself, just like the Navy is trying to propagate itself. In fact, that seems to be a rule of life, to propagate yourself.

Q. When was that meeting you talk about?

COL. RICCIONI: It was a requirements meeting at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which was called by General Dixon to have -- I can’t remember the correct name on Wright Field. The engineering group anyway. I was in the flight dynamics lab. I had the aeromechanics division of the flight dynamics lab.

Q. When?

Q. What year?

COL. RICCIONI: Oh, what year? I think it was 1975.

Lady?

Q. I’m not trying to be an advocate for the F-22 --

COL. RICCIONI: Be.

Q. But I've got some questions here. Starting with the radar process, and granted that 800 aircraft is going to have a less -- when you're coming toward this, it's going to have a smaller radar image because of the shape of it. But it's my understanding is that the F-22, the design for the air superiority features is the F-22 pilot sees the enemy before it sees then, so they’re already blanked out. Because, obviously, a lot of people are going to see the dog-fight thing happening in wars of the future. But there are going to be Russian aircraft that have air-to-air missiles that can take out whatever else you’ve got up there. And if the F-22 sees them first, it's got the ability to take that out.

The other question I had is, when they do their test, they don’t just do it head-on. It’s my understanding that as they’re designing in the computer and they’re testing all the various angles, and things like that, they design it specifically for a lower air process. And when you have the RAM, which is a spray-on now, when we’re talking about a 50,000-pound aircraft, it adds maybe 100 pounds. I don’t see how it’s going to slow it up.

[Inaudible remark.]

Q. But it's a spray-on material.

COL. RICCIONI: That’s one kind of RAM. There are other kinds that go right into the leading edge in-depth --

Q. Yes, right. Yeah. I'm sure the composite material and things that are made out of --

COL. RICCONI: And they’re non-structural elements, so they add to the size of the airplane.

Q. How much size are we talking about?

COL. RICCIONI: Well, really, you know, I can’t answer that number directly because I don’t have the weight figures. But, you know, one of the silliest things I heard come out of the manager -- a good friend of mine, too. I really shouldn’t be saying this, because he’s a very bright guy. He said, you know, RAM doesn’t cost much on an airplane. He said, the increase in cost of an airplane due to stealth isn’t very large. He said, RAM only costs, and he quoted some cockamamie number for several dollars per lineal foot. How did the airplane get to be four times the cost of the F-15? Because it was designed for stealth.

Q. Well, what do you putting that cost at? Are you including the R&D costs going into that?

COL. RICCIONI: Well, that’s part of it. But that's part of it. No, the whole -- the airplane costs more. The unit flyer -- there is a significance right out there. You do wind up closing because you might get this guy, and somebody else closes with you. So it isn’t as simple as just throwing long-range missiles at one another. That’s a constant dream.

I saw a Navy commander put down Admiral Tom Connelly, the father of the F-14, because Tom Connelly saw the end of dog-fighting with the Phoenix missile, the F-14. And some young commander got up and talked about what was going on in Vietnam, and he said, that’s long been a promise and never been the realization. Just like long has been the promise -- you know what kills missile interchanges? And I didn’t get to cover this. Forgot. The requirement for visual identification.

Now the F-20 people think they have got enough integrated sensors in the airplane, even autonomously, that they can identify friend from enemy from neutral, and it isn’t just friend from enemy. Friend from enemy from neutral. And that’s long been promised. It was promised for Vietnam. After fratricides on the part of both the Navy and the Air Force, we went to visual ID before firing. As some gentleman reminded me this morning, that shoot-down of two helicopters in Iraq, which you remember, which was under AWACS surveillance, was a total misidentification. And fighter pilots are a little bit loathe to shoot down people when they don't see them, when they haven’t been able to see them to identify them. That’s why the visual ID is so important.

But that was promised with the Phoenix missile. The Phoenix missile had the promise of being able to shoot beyond -- I mean, at very long ranges, against multiple targets. And the Phoenix has been fired, I found out, twice in anger in the last four or five years. Twice in anger. And didn’t get a kill. But that’s neither here nor there.

Incidentally, the going statement for the Phoenix missile was, every man an ace. The going statement for the F-22 is every man will be an ace, every pilot an ace. Pilots love it. They love the promise. It’s not going to be the realization.

Any other question?

Q. Your sixth thing that you mentioned.

COL. RICCIONI: Oh, okay, I’m glad you brought that up, my lady. Somebody’s got a good memory; I haven't. If you redefine stealth as how frequently the enemy sees an airplane, or how infrequently the enemy will see the airplane, then it isn’t the technology that gives you stealth on the F-22. It’s a by-product of the technology called the cost. Since you're going to buy so few of them, the enemy will seldom see them. So it’s really the cost that makes the airplane stealthy, not the technology.

[Laughter.]

You know, if you send 70 airplanes out to the Pacific to fight in that area and attack a country as expansive as China, the Chinese commanders will be wondering which province you’re operating against. Cost is stealth.

You know, there was another classic example of unilateral disarmament, and, again, maybe it wasn’t necessary. Strategic Air Command was operating 1,360 bombers -- 1,360 B-47s. Then they bought 680 B-52s to replace them. As the B-52s got older, they were going to buy 206 -- shades of the F-22 -- they were going to buy about 250 B-1Bs. They bought 100 B-1Bs for the total program cost. And then for the total program cost they bought 20 B-2s. They were supposed to buy 135 B-2s for $40 billion. And incidentally, on black programs, when you get a cost number on a black program, be very leery of it. You’re not getting it all. It’s hidden. It’s hidden from the enemy, the people, and their representatives.

MS. BRIAN: Thanks very much, Colonel.

[Applause.]

Thanks very much for coming.

[END OF FORMAL EVENT.]

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