The Senate voted 58-40 to cut funding for more F-22 Raptors, signaling an eventual end to the fighter’s role in defense policy. Current budgeting provides for the United States to have 187 active-duty F-22s by the end of 2011, but the Senate vote on July 21 could have provided $1.7 billion for an additional seven F-22s and left the door open for a larger order. Instead, the F-22 will be phased out in favor of the F-35, a cheaper option that provides more flexibility in supporting ground operations, at a cost to its air-to-air capabilities.
Several days before and an ocean away, a poll in the United Kingdom showed that more than half of all Britons oppose renewing Britain’s nuclear deterrent–the submarine-based Trident missile system. This is further political bad news for embattled Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who, as chancellor, pledged in 2006 to renew Trident (at the time, 51% of those polled supported the measure), and has occasioned a round of calls for the project’s budget—some 20 billion pounds—to be spent on conventional forces.
Both developments represent significant deviations from accepted practice. During the Cold War, U.S. defense contractors raced to develop the most sophisticated air-superiority vehicles in the world and then build as many as possible, an expensive policy at least partially justified by the fact that the Soviet Union was playing a similar game. Nuclear deterrent, meanwhile, has been an artifact of British defense policy since the government of Clement Attlee, and had not been opposed by a majority of the population until the poll of July 16.
The explanation for this change in attitude lies, at least in part, in Afghanistan, where involvement in the conflict has been cited in the United States and United Kingdom as reason for a shift in policy. Neither the F-22 nor Trident is of any particular service in Afghanistan, and if it is assumed that the two NATO members will face similar conflicts in the near future (part counter-terrorism operations, part counter-insurgency, part complex-emergency-response), then it behooves both powers to prioritize the tools they will need for the job at hand.
There is one further key point. Six years after the invasion of Iraq, a joint military endeavor that stretched their military resources to breaking point and imposed severe political consequences on the authorizing political parties on both sides of the Atlantic, American and British lawmakers and citizens are pushing, albeit not necessarily deliberately, for policy decisions that increase their security interdependence. This is most clearly the case for the British, who would have to rely on the United States to provide their deterrent against attack from another nuclear state (as unlikely as that appears) in the event that Britain scraps Trident. From an American perspective, the decision in favor of the F-35 over the F-22 is a less stark, but nonetheless relevant, call in favor of defense cooperation. The development of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter featured design components, funding, and participation from a coalition of states, and the vehicle itself is better-suited than the F-22 for the kind of ground support missions that the U.S is likely to undertake as part of multi-lateral, Afghanistan-like conflicts. In essence, the F-35 is a product of and for a new generation of security integration.
These developments alone do not signal an end to Cold War-era thinking in defense procurement and planning (the Brown government is still on course to renew Trident, and the United States is still committed to the Cold War holy grail of national missile defense), nor do they mean that both nations are far down the road toward the kind of interoperability necessary to handle a future Afghanistan with greater efficiency than the current conflict. The new attitudes, however, do signify progress in the direction of American and British defense policies more suited to the conflicts likely in the 21st century and the integration needed to address them.
While it is difficult to project what the next data point on this trajectory might be, a worthy study would be how the United States and Britain approach the maintenance and development of aircraft-carrier battle groups. Originally designed for the great power wars (hot and cold) of the 20th century, these resource-intensive units may no longer represent the best return on defense-dollar investments. Their reduction or redesign would be an indication that the new thinking represented by the move away from the F-22 and Trident has taken hold. Until then, those developments represent progress in the right direction, with the potential for more.
Frank Spring has a background in policy, politics, and non-profits, and is currently a change and innovation consultant in New York and Washington, DC.