It seems like every other week, Chambliss has a press release about the F-22. He rarely addresses our current debacles in Iraq or Afghanistan. What are our needs NOW! Where was Chambliss when our Humvees needed upgrades? Where was Chambliss when our kids needed helmet liners? Where was Chambliss when these kids were forced to served extended and repeated tours. Chambliss is a fraud and this debate is all about Lockheed and campaign contributions and not about what’s best for our country.

“It is time to draw the line on doing defense business as usual,” Gates said in a speech in Chicago. He said President Barack Obama would make good on a threat to veto a defense budget that includes money for new F-22 Raptors.

“The president has drawn that line. And that red line with regard to a veto is real,” Gates said.

The Obama administration has proposed capping production of the F-22 at 187 jets, meaning only four more would be built.

But a bill drafted by the Senate Armed Services Committee would fund an additional seven F-22s at a cost of $1.75 billion.

Speaking to the Economic Club of Chicago, Gates described the issue as a crucial test of whether military spending could be reformed and the defense establishment weaned away from habits of the Cold War.

“If we can’t get this right, what on earth can we get right?” he said.

The F-22 Raptors, equipped with radar-evading technology and built by Lockheed Martin Corp. (LMT) and Boeing Co. (BA), cost about $350 million each and have been in development for decades.

The Air Force had proposed building nearly 400, but Gates concluded the expansion was excessive, especially given the slow development of rival fighter jets by potential adversaries such as China.

Gates argued the U.S. jet of the future is the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which he said is more versatile and better at knocking out enemy air defenses.

The administration’s proposed $663.8 billion defense budget for fiscal 2010 scales back some major weapons programs while bolstering funding for unmanned aircraft, helicopters and other resources for counter-insurgency campaigns like the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The budget represented a modest increase over defense spending under former president George W. Bush, despite critics’ claims that the administration has slashed military spending, Gates said.

The military budget “adds up to about what the entire rest of the world combined – friend and foe alike – spends on defense,” he said “Only in the parallel universe that is Washington, D.C., would that be considered ‘gutting’ defense.”

Gates acknowledged that previous administrations have struggled to rein in Pentagon spending and encountered stiff opposition from lawmakers and their sponsors in the defense industry.

But he said “the stakes today are very high” with the country at war in an increasingly volatile world.

I think the operation commander Gen. Corley is far more credible because he just kissed any chance of promotion away by taking the stand that we need more F-22s. At only 187 we have eliminate sqaudron already in formation or reduce the number of aircraft below the current 18 which already low. The 243 number would give us enough to keep the sqaudron we have, the training units, the planes that are sent to the depot, and have attritions spares for long life cycle.

Before the announcement by Mr. Gates, both had fought hard for the F-22, saying the Air Force needed it as a hedge against Russia and China and even a possible war with Iran. They had advocated buying 60 more of the planes, which would have brought the Air Force’s fleet to 243. But in their essay, Mr. Donley and General Schwartz wrote that “the time has come to move on.”

The two said that as defense spending becomes constrained, and Mr. Gates shifts money to troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, budgeting “has increasingly become a zero-sum game.”