THE SKY’S THE LIMIT

The Pentagon, it turns out, is a building so well defended that even urgent messages that the cold war is over have failed to breach its barricades. At a time when budget zealots are attacking everything from Medicare to corporate welfare to whole Cabinet departments, the U.S. military has presented Congress with a plan to spend as much on new warplanes over the next decade as it did during the huge defense buildup of the 1980s. If Congress decides, as a growing number of experts have, that the proposal to spend a grand total of $415 billion over the next 35 years is unjustified, the task of balancing the federal budget could suddenly become a lot easier.

The shopping list is right out of the cold war. The Air Force wants 438 F-22 fighters at $160 million apiece. The Navy plans to buy 1,000 advanced F-18Es. The Army is counting on 1,292 Comanche helicopters. And the services together want 2,978 more Joint Strike Fighters. That’s 5,708 planes; this mere slice of Pentagon spending will cost as much as all federal environmental programs for the next 17 years.

To make their case, the generals and admirals needed to do some creative salesmanship while avoiding some basic questions, like Will they work? Are they worth it? Do we need them? And so it is that General Joseph Ralston, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has been presenting lawmakers with charts showing the deployment of warplanes around the world and the threat they represent to American security. What Ralston doesn’t point out is that this ominous global collection of nearly 6,000 advanced warplanes includes those of Britain, France, Canada–everyone except the U.S. Nor does he mention that many of the warplanes on his chart rolled off U.S. assembly lines.

Back in the bowels of the Pentagon a much different picture emerges. Navy intelligence, in the only publicly available Pentagon report on future threats to U.S. warplanes, finds that America’s most likely foes–Iran, Iraq and North Korea–have only about 100 front-line warplanes among them. That total, the Navy projects, will climb to 120 by 2005. Lawmakers are irritated by Ralston’s apparent sleight-of-threat. “There’s been a lack of candor in the whole process,” complains Representative Curt Weldon, the hawkish Pennsylvania Republican who chairs the House Committee on National Security’s research-and-development panel. “We haven’t been given a threat that warrants these programs,” he told Time. “We can’t justify them.”

Many defense experts contend the Pentagon is suffering from a cold war hangover. The General Accounting Office, the Congressional Budget Office and the private Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments have suggested dramatically paring back–and in some cases, killing–the programs. They point out that the Pentagon conceived the F-22, its superstealthy fighter, more than a decade ago to counter two 21st century Soviet warplanes then on the drawing boards. But U.S. officials concede that the Russians have scrapped one of the planes, and that only a few of the second are likely to be built.

Critics also point to the luxuriously indiscriminate quality of the shopping list. The Air Force strategy for getting its hands on the F-22 is, some Pentagon officials say, a “self-licking ice cream cone.” First, lower the plane’s cost by building more of them, then sell the extras overseas. The problem is that the Air Force says it needs the plane to counter, in part, U.S. airplanes that have been sold overseas. Then, of course, General Ralston could add the F-22 to his chart of potentially hostile foreign warplanes. Says former Navy rear admiral and aviator Eugene Carroll Jr. of the private Center for Defense Information: “We’re in an arms race–with ourselves.”

The exception to these profligate rules is the Marines. In most cases, they’re modifying existing aircraft with new engines and electronics, saving taxpayers gobs of money. Congress may also want to take a lesson from U.S. allies who are stretching their defense dollars. In Europe four nations recently began cracking open 300 F-16 jet fighters like eggs and stuffing them with new electronic components that turn them into the hottest fighters in the sky. At the same time, the U.S. Air Force has sent nearly 400 of those very same $20 million planes to its Arizona junkyard, never to fly again.