All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Dina Razor is, uh, the chief investigator of the follow the money project.
What a cool name for a project, cool premise for a project and a partner in the Bauman and Razor group.
She's, uh, well, more or less been holding the Pentagon to account or trying to anyway for, uh, something like 25, 30 years, uh, writing about corruption in a Pentagon spending, et cetera, like that.
Uh, which leads us right to our topic.
The F 22 pilots as lab rats, the reprehensible risk taking on the F 22 Raptor, her latest piece in truth out.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Dina?
Oh, fine.
I should also tell you that I'm a permanent columnist and editor of truth out too.
Oh, I did not realize that.
I'm doing more journalism now than I've done for quite a while.
Oh, that's good.
Well, here, actually, let me mention a couple of these books here, uh, from 1985, the Pentagon underground, uh, coauthor of betraying our troops, the destructive results of privatizing war, uh, from 2007, uh, courage without martyrdom, a survival guide for whistleblowers, uh, more bucks, less bang, how the Pentagon buys ineffective weapons.
I like it.
That's a hell of a great Amazon page right there.
All right.
Let's talk about this F 22.
I want to start with my confusion really, which is that I thought they killed the F 22.
I thought that just for, you know, military Keynesian purposes, they were going to keep making them to sell to foreigners, but that the Americans had decided that they were going to focus on the F 35s instead, because you can use those to kill civilians on the ground in their own countries where we're occupying them.
Whereas F 22s are only good for some top gun fantasy.
That's never going to take place because we don't fight with our near peer competitors because they had nukes.
So, um, Robert Gates was on a tear about this.
He gave a big speech and, and there was a big riot over it, a big fight inside the Pentagon and in the newspapers.
And I must be missing something because apparently no, they're still flying F 22s.
And then, uh, that's the cause of the whole host of problems.
That's the rest of our conversation here.
So what am I missing?
What happened?
Well, you know, the victories, the victories that you have in DOD are always small, smaller than you think.
And so the idea, it was, everyone talked about it being killing the F 22, but actually all Obama and I mean, one of the reasons this happened is the good government groups got on Gates and Obama.
And Obama surprisingly said that he would veto a bill.
Uh, and then, and everyone said, Oh, you killed the F 22.
All they really did was that the Pentagon and the Congress wanted to buy more than the original plan.
And what Obama and Gates did was say, no, we should not buy more than what we originally planned.
And so they just cut it off.
The, they just cut off the buy at what they planned to buy originally, instead of, you know, it's the classic camels under the tent, nose under the tent thing with the Pentagon.
They always, well, let's just get them to start making this.
And then we keep buying it year after year.
And they said, no, um, now the price is still out of control and it's.
Well, wait a minute.
Let me ask you one, one little sub point there.
Was I right?
That the F 22 is really just to air to air combat jet, as opposed to F 35, which is also has ground attack capability.
Was that part even right?
That's that's right.
If you accept the premise that the F 35 is really going to have any ground support.
Right.
Oh, right.
If I accept the premise that that thing even works either.
Right.
No, I didn't mean to, I guess I just met on the drawing board anyway.
When you want ground support, you want something like an eight 10 that flies slowly, that is good for protecting the troops, the problem with taking these fighters and having them be quote bombers and, and ground support things, it's kind of like taking a Cadillac and put, you know, jacking it up and put some four wheel tires on it and saying, okay, now I got an SUV.
Um, well it does none.
When you try to have a multiple plane, it does nothing well.
And then when it, the idea for a high, very fast fighter to be able to help ground troops, you know, by the time you see the tank that you might end up putting a missile on, you're in Israel, you know, just turn it around, it goes over a couple of countries.
So the eight 10 was always the eight 10, which by the way, it was designed by the person who helped me with this article, Pierre spray was hated by the air force because it was slow and ugly, but it was very effective.
So the F-35 has its own problems.
We were, we took it as a big victory that we stopped the bleeding on the F-22.
Now we have to try to stop several things.
One of course is the price, which is going to continue to creep up.
And we used to make a joke about, you know, things will get so bad that we'll have a half billion dollar a piece fighter.
Well, we're almost there.
The F-22 is right now at 422 and rising.
422 million a piece, right?
So you're going to have a half a billion dollar fighter plane.
I remember, and how many of these things do they have so far?
Or I guess maybe the more appropriate question is how many have they paid for?
Yeah.
How many of them paid for?
Well, I don't have the exact number in front of me, but we bought the original lot.
It was, it was, it was hundreds of them, but not enough to make a huge difference.
So now they're going to keep them, you know, now it's, it's the, we're back to the cold war kind of mentality is that these guys, I heard a thought thing the other day, which was perfect.
They said the Pentagon wants parade weapons, right?
Oh, in other words, they look really, really scary when you parade them or, you know, you go and have an air show day and they weren't great in the Transformers movies.
Yeah.
All that kind of stuff.
But the problem is, is that they, they loved the cold war because they never had to put their hand down on whether anything worked or not.
And now you've got the F-22s.
They say, oh, we're, we're sending some over for a deterrent to Iran because, you know, we can sneak in and bomb their radars and we can do this with the F-22.
And they sent in some F-15s too, which they sent a, you know, very large bunch, but they only sent in from my understanding from one source who said, which may not be true.
He said, he thought they sent in six and you know, that's just a, it's just the classic thing of, we have stealth technology now against you.
And if anyone reads the article, you'll see that I go through all the rigamarole about worrying about the pilots and how this plane costs too much.
Well, you know what?
I want to, I want to talk about the, uh, the illness part and I guess I'm looking at the clock now.
It probably won't be till after the break we get to come back and talk about the, the, uh, raptor cough and the rest of it.
Um, but I wanted to ask you about what you say in here that there's no such thing as stealth anyway, dummy.
All you got to do is you, you know, turn the knob on your radar and use a longer wavelength of radar and Oh, there's your stealth jet.
Are you kidding me?
That can't really be right.
Well, it really is right, unfortunately.
And the thing is this long wave, long wave radar, long wave, long wave radar is the old radar.
So the Soviet union had a lot of stuff like that because they never threw anything away.
Well, these older countries, you know, you can get, I mean, smaller countries, you can get the older radar.
And the bottom line is that we exposed this in 1982.
That's why I'm still smacking my head.
But you know, stealth has gotten a tech has gotten a constituency.
Carter leaked that they had stealth technology to help him win reelection.
Didn't work.
But from then on, everything that was stealth, it was cool.
And the new cutting edge and the, it's very simple.
I mean, it's very simple.
I've had generals sit there and tell me, how can you have figured this out?
And I said, if I can figure this out in open sources, you certainly, you know, anyone can.
Well, wait, so does that mean that if we, if it really came down to it, brass tacks, right.
And we sent all of our stealth bombers and stealth fighters over to Russia in the event of the big one, that they would see every single one of them coming as well as if they were just plain old B-52s or something.
Well, they're not, it wouldn't be as much, but you know, because stealth that you do the angling and stuff.
But yeah, it is not, it's not nearly as effective as they say, because the coding is supposed to absorb the radar signal.
So it doesn't bounce it back or make the radar signal smaller.
So it bounces back looking smaller.
Well, all you got to do is get the old long wave and guess what?
The stealth coding does not absorb it.
And so as a result, you couldn't put enough coding on a plane to fly to do the long wave radar.
Now the long wave radar has its own limitations.
That's why they went.
It's not as clear, but that's why they went with a short wave.
But the bottom line is you could probably just use windows or something to combine the two radars into one effective thing there.
Well, yeah, you could put out the long wave to know that something's coming in the stealth.
So all that hundreds of billions we've spent on stealth has been for naught.
Oh my God.
And it could be what's making the pilots sick, by the way.
That's just incredible.
I think you just blew my mind.
That's the first time my mind's been blown talking about this kind of stuff in a long time.
But yeah.
All right.
We'll be right back.
Dina Razor from Truthout.org.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show, Tantai War Radio, talking with Dina Razor from Truthout.org.
She founded Pogo way back in the day.
And as the author of Betraying Our Troops, the Destructive Results of Privatizing War, we're talking about the joke that is Lockheed's F-22 Raptor, only it's not that funny because occasionally they fall out of the sky because the pilots in the cockpit are unconscious and they're still arguing about all of the different possible reasons they're being poisoned.
Is it carbon monoxide?
Is it the stealth substance, the glues?
Is it this ridiculous oxygen system that doesn't seem to make any sense?
That I don't know.
What do you think, Dina?
Do you have your best guess?
Is it all these things working together in combination somehow or something?
Well, it may be a combination of several things, but, you know, that's why I went to Pierce Braylor, who helped me with the article.
What's happening is that they thought it was just the mask, the oxygen mask, and they thought it was just, oh, maybe, you know, something's gone wrong, the mixture's wrong or whatever.
And one pilot, one of their best pilots, actually crashed.
And they said it was pilot error because he didn't pull the emergency oxygen thing and he didn't keep his plane on course.
Well, when you don't have enough oxygen in your brain, that gets hard.
And so, of course, two guys went on 60 Minutes and were not going to fly anymore.
And the Air Force, you know, claims they're not going after them, but their careers are probably over.
Well, that's a real big deal, and they must have known that up front.
Yeah, they knew it, and the other pilots are continuing to fly, are taking out bigger life insurance.
I suspect that it might be helpful to do the stealth coding for several reasons.
One is that the F-18 has the same oxygen system and has not had nearly the problem.
And the only difference between the two, really, is that the F-22's got stealth and the F-18 doesn't.
And that the foreground persons who were working on the plane had the same problem.
And it's not just a temporary loss of oxygen.
It's also these guys are now starting to have nightmares and sweats and rashes.
Well, this is something that you didn't bring up in the article, but what about the pilots of the F-117s and that kind of thing?
Do they have this kind of thing?
No, because they don't have that kind of oxygen system.
So what we're suspecting is that there's something to do with the oxygen system takes air from the compressor intake of the jet engine.
And so what we're thinking that it might be is it could be that there's, you know, when you make, it's not going to be the same kind of intake as a standard plane, because when you have a stealth plane, you try to cover all holes, all anything that's going to give a signature, any kind of movement signature and that kind of thing.
So it's probably designed differently.
And the other part about it is that, you know, the F-111 doesn't have that.
They use those liquid bottle oxygen that every plane's used since 1913.
This is a new fangled thing.
But we suspect that somehow the stealth chemicals are getting into the oxygen masks because the ground crew got sick and the ground crew got sick because they were, you know, every time this thing goes through, flies through dust or rain, you have to reseal the laminate, laminated skin.
You can't, you know, and you can't have any kind of opening.
So you reseal over everything.
It's kind of like, as I mentioned to another source, it's kind of like being sewn into your clothes each time.
You can't have open places.
And they use this secret laminate and secret glues.
And back in the 1980s, I was working with the people who are making the B-2 bomber who got sick from working on the skin, you know, the composite.
And then they would go to their doctors and doctors would say, you're having some kind of terrible chemical exposure.
And they went back to the Air Force and said, you know, tell us what these workers are working with so we can test for them and we can know what kind of danger they're in.
And the government wouldn't tell them because it's classified.
Big secret.
And so as a result, this has been a long, you know, a long time thing.
And so I suspect it's a combination of having this oxygen system in a jet that probably is in some way or another is introducing the chemicals.
It's like people saying formaldehyde in furniture.
You know, if you get enough of it, brand new couch and enough of it, you can get sick.
And if you've got it concentrated into your mask, then it can make you really sick.
Well, you know, I saw it is they should not let these pilots fly until they you know, they say, well, if they fly and it happens, then we can figure out what it is.
No, you've got machines on the ground that can do that.
But, you know, to put those pilots at risk is just ridiculous.
Yeah.
Well, Panetta announced just stay near the base until we figure out what's wrong with you.
But so now, wait a minute, because I saw on Discovery Channel or Military Channel or one of those things, they were interviewing two guys whose job it was to repaint and reseal and, I guess, fix any tears or anything in the skin of the F-117 stealth fighter, the old school stealth fighters.
And that looked like some pretty sticky, toxic, weird stuff, you know, I could imagine.
I'm sure the guys are there are probably getting exposed.
But the only difference between the F-117 and the F-22 is the F-22 has this new way of getting oxygen for the pilot.
So instead of you're saying instead of having their own just separate supply of oxygen and bottles, like always, they have this one very strange, newfangled oxygen system that they share with the F-18 that is not a stealth, that doesn't have any kind of stealth goop on it at all.
But this takes the air that they breathe from the engine intake.
Right, the compressed air that intakes the engine now, it hasn't mixed with the fuel or anything.
But of course, the other problem is that I've had writers, you know, people commenting on the things like, well, they're taking it before it ever gets near the fuel.
Well, yes, that's true.
But they're also, you know, they're also taking it in the same system.
And it could, the fuel could leak, you know, leak back or the fumes could leak back.
But what we suspect the most is that it's somehow mixing in with the stealth.
And to put the pilots back in the air.
And the other part of it is these pilots openly admit that for many of the places they fly them, they're flying over, they're flying, you know, one guy said, I fly over my kid's school.
And when these pilots get confused, they get, you know, they're too confused to even punch out sometimes.
Well, one of the pilots said it happened, it happened to him.
He knew where the emergency override was to get oxygen.
And he had practiced this a thousand times, you know, these guys train.
And he said, but he couldn't figure out where it was because he didn't have enough oxygen.
You know, when you're like on top of Mount Everest, you can't, you know, that's why a lot of people die in mountain climbing.
They become so goofy.
They can't make decisions.
But why don't they just go ahead and just scrap the thing and go back to the oxygen bottle?
What's the big deal?
Why do they got to stick with the primary system?
They gave Lockheed twenty four million to figure it out and they didn't figure it out.
So I think it's a matter of pride and budget.
You know, the fact is that this thing is already the weak sister in the system because of the F-35 and the Pentagon and Lockheed just don't want to be embarrassed about it anymore.
So they they didn't want to keep it grounded because, of course, you know, there was tremendous pressure, I'm sure, from Lockheed's lobby to, you know, get back on this.
So.
Get it back in the air, get them training, and it's ironic because I don't think they're going to be using them for anything except, you know, except it's except a parade.
But I just the idea of using the idea of saying, well, we can't figure it out, but we fly and you guys put in hours and you have these instances, then we'll be able to figure it out.
No, I mean, you won't be able to figure it out.
Because these guys don't know what is happening now.
You know, it makes sense from a scientific point of view to keep these things on the ground and test them until, you know, but sending them up over populated areas with these pilots who become, you know, are flying these literally flying these, you know, half billion dollar bombs that could go off and and land on a school.
It's just, well, OK, but all for convenience.
If you if you accepted the premise, though, that, you know, America has to, you know, the Air Force's and the Navy's point of view, I guess we have to have good enough fighter jets and enough fighter jets that we could absolutely blow up the Air Force of any other major power in the world in a day and a half or whatever like that are the F-15s and F-16s and F-14s.
I guess they threw all the F-14s in the sea.
I don't know.
Are the planes we already have, the F-18s, whatever, are they good enough to handle the next generation of MiGs?
Do we absolutely need a next generation of American planes?
I mean, yes, the answer is yes.
And but the other part of that is that.
But what they're not emphasizing is that pilots and pilots being able to fly and train is the more important than what the actual plane is.
Yeah, that's been shown out through history.
And these pilots that have these hangar queen planes, they can't fly anyway and now are making them sick.
So the bottom line is, is they're not emphasizing the pilot.
They're emphasizing the plane.
And that's the way you can lose wars.
All right.
Dina Razor, everybody.
Truthout.org.
Thanks so much.
Thank you.
Anytime.
