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Partnership for a Secure America’s Congressional Fellowship Program is now accepting applications for the Spring 2011 session. This highly selective program is for Congressional staff interested in generating dialogue and developing the skills and relationships required to advance bipartisanship on national security and foreign policy issues. Through training, networking, and exclusive activities, this unique program aims to build a “next generation” of foreign policy and security experts equipped to respect differences, build common ground and achieve US national interests. The deadline to apply is March 11, 2011. For further information about the program, and to apply, click here.

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There has been much attention in the lame duck session of Congress on whether Democrats and Republicans will find any common ground.  Will they compromise on tax cuts and extend unemployment benefits? During a time of war, will gays and lesbians continue to be denied the opportunity to serve their country in the military?  Will the children of illegal immigrants continue to be denied the chance to pay taxes and seek the American dream? There is much work to be done in the final weeks of this year.  Democrats and Republicans have different approaches to some of these issues.  That’s to be expected.  However, there’s one issue on which pretty much all Democrats and Republicans outside of Congress agree – the New START Treaty.  Yet, it’s being held hostage in the Senate for purely partisan reasons.

Particularly on domestic issues, there are fundamental differences between the parties that generate intense disagreement.  Such discord can be healthy in a democracy as it provides clear choices to voters.  What is damaging is when political leaders lose sight of  their core values and emphasize winning at all costs.  When a policy disagreement becomes a zero sum game in which a win by one’s opponent is considered a loss by the other, gridlock ensues. Before long, the policy matters less than a mark in the win column.  This is what has happened with the New START treaty.

Sometimes both sides are at fault.  They both dig in their heels. In other situations, one side demonstrates willingness to negotiate and the other sees more political benefit from standing firm.  The latter is the situation we face today.  The Republican leadership (thought not all Republicans) in the Senate is playing political games with America’s national security.

The New START treaty is a follow-on treaty to the original START treaty negotiated in 1991 under George H. W. Bush that set limits on the nuclear arsenals of Russia and the United States.  Presidents Obama and Medvedev signed the New START treaty in April 2010.  Many viewed this as a sign of renewal of US-Russian relations and a small step towards President Obama’s stated goal of a nuclear free future.  It would reduce the number of strategic warheads to 1550 from the current limit of 2200 and establish new inspection procedures to ensure compliance.  It must be ratified by two thirds of the Senate.

Do Republicans have valid issues with the treaty?  Six Republican Secretaries of State think that despite any lingering concerns, it is still worth ratifying.  Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, James Baker III, Lawrence Eagleburger, Colin Powell, and Condoleeza Rice have all publicly supported ratification.  Richard Lugar, a Republican foreign policy authority in the Senate said, “We’re talking today about the national security of the United States of America. [T]his treaty must be ratified and be ratified in this session of the Congress.. . .We’re talking about thousands of warheads that are still there, an existential problem for our country. To temporize at this point I think is inexcusable.”  In June, the Partnership for a Secure America released a bipartisan endorsement of 30 prominent Democrat and Republican foreign policy figures of the New START treaty.  The U.S. military leadership is strongly behind the treaty according to Secretary of Defense Gates.  It’s hard to find people who are against this treaty…. except in the Senate.

But what about the American people?  Maybe the Republican leadership is standing up for a groundswell of public opposition to this treaty?  Or, maybe not. A CNN poll found that three quarters of the American public supported ratification.

So, what could be holding back the Republican leadership on this issue?  Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona has been leading the charge.  Every time he has brought up an objection, the Obama administration has gone to great lengths to address his concerns.  Kyl argued that modernization of the U.S. nuclear arsenal must happen in conjunction with the ratification of the treaty.  The administration responded with more than$80 billion for modernization during the next 10 years.  Whenever objections have been raised, the administration has bent over backwards to address concerns.

When asked about ratification of the New START treaty, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said, “…. 42 Republicans sent our friends on the other side of the aisle a letter earlier this week saying the two things we need to do first, decide what people’s tax rates are going to be come January 1, and decide how we’re going to fund the government for the next 10 months.”  McConnell seems willing to sacrifice national security to get other priorities addressed.  No one questions the need to address the tax issue.  What is appalling is that McConnell seems to think that Senators are incapable to addressing more than one big issue at a time.  He ignores the fact that the previous start treaty was ratified in a matter of days. Or maybe he just wants to hold the New START treaty hostage to benefit a political agenda.  Imagine Harry Truman proposing the Berlin airlift and the Republican leadership responding, “Sorry, not enough time to deal with that at this time.  Too much on our plate before recess.”

It’s time to stop playing games and get down to business.  Our national security depends on it.

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Kay King, Vice President of Washington Initiatives at the Council on Foreign Relations, recently released a report entitled Congress and National Security arguing Congress’s increasing inability to effectively address major domestic and international challenges has severe ramifications for U.S. national security.

King points to contributing factors which have led to a decline in Congressional effectiveness, including amplified partisanship, abuse of rules and procedures, outdated committee structures, decreased expertise, and competition with domestic programs. She specifically addresses how the toxic partisan atmosphere has contributed significantly to Congress’s mixed performance on its national security responsibilities:

…the nation’s political landscape has been realigning since the 1970’s, ushering in deep partisanship, severe polarization, a combative 24/7 media, and diminished civility. Over time, this environment has given lawmakers greater incentive to advance personal and partisan agendas by any means, including the manipulation of congressional rules and procedures. It has politicized the national security arena that, while never immune to partisanship, more often than not used to bring out the “country first” instincts in lawmakers. It has also driven foreign policy and defense matters, short of crises, off the national agenda, marginalizing important issues like trade. Combining this increasingly toxic political climate with an institutional stalemate in the face of mounting global challenges and it is not surprising that Congress has struggled for years to play a consistent and constructive role as a partner to as well as check and balance on the executive branch on international issues.

King then goes on to recommend reform in five critical areas: prompt and inclusive action on budgets and legislation, timely and knowledgeable advice and consent on treaties and nominees, realistic and effective oversight, closing the expertise gap, and bolstering the congressional-executive branch partnership on national security policy.

The entire report can be found here.

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The Fellows come to the Congressional Fellowship Program from diverse educational and professional backgrounds including military, political campaigns, think tanks, journalism, the legal practice and international service organizations. To view the full list of Fellows, click here.

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It is a good thing that that Liz Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, never tried to enlist in the U.S. military. Judging by her recent actions it appears she would never be able to say the oath of enlistment with a straight face. I mean the part where one swears to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution, which includes little things like subsequent amendments, such as those in the Bill of Rights.

What I refer to is when she and Bill Kristol, via their “Keep America Safe“ campaign, accused nine lawyers in the Justice Department, who had represented Guantanamo detainees of being the “al-Qaida Seven,” of working in the “Department of Jihad,” Perhaps Cheney and Kristol are simply exercising their First Amendment right to say anything that gets them on a talk show. After all, the right to cynically accuse someone of being a terrorist is protected under the Constitution. Unfortunately, for the rest of us, in so doing they trample underfoot other Constitutional rights that benefit all of us.

Over at Slate, Dahlia Lithwick details the problems with the Cheney approach.

Ten years ago, these were just words. Ten years ago, someone accused of being a terrorist had recourse to the same panoply of rights as everyone else. Ten years ago, an accused terrorist still had the right to a trial, for instance. But thanks to people like Liz Cheney and her dad, the Sixth Amendment right to a “speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury” is gone, once you’ve been branded a terrorist. Just ask Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. After 9/11, once you’re branded an enemy combatant, you can be held for years without any of your constitutionally protected rights, including the right to be told of the charges against you or to confront the witnesses against you. Thanks to people like Cheney, those alleged to be members of al-Qaida are stripped of their Sixth Amendment right to prove they are not. But that’s not all.

Ten years ago, if you labeled someone a terrorist, he had an Eighth Amendment right to be free from torture, since the very idea of “cruel and unusual punishment” was anathema, even for our enemies. But thanks to people like Liz Cheney and the brave souls at the Bush Office of Legal Counsel, it’s OK to torture terrorists these days. As long as you’re pretty sure they’re terrorists. This is good news for the Cheney way of thinking, because it means that you can abuse a possible terrorist into admitting that he actually is a terrorist without all that fact-finding necessitated by a criminal trial. But there’s even more.

Ten years ago, if some paranoid hysteric accused you of being an al-Qaida sympathizer or a jihadist, you could find a lawyer to help you make the case that you were not. But in the ever-expanding war on the Bill of Rights being waged by Liz Cheney, once you’re designated a terrorist, you lose your Sixth Amendment right to counsel. Because just by representing you-even if you’re acquitted-your lawyers become terrorists, too!

Given that the Bill of Rights pretty much evaporates once you’ve been deemed a jihadi lover of Bin Laden, you might think Liz Cheney would be super-careful tossing around such words. They have very serious legal implications. Not to mention that some of her dad’s favorite people, from Alberto Gonzales to Ted Olson, scolded the then-top Pentagon official for detainees, Charles “Cully” Stimson, for suggesting on a talk radio show in 2007 that American corporations should boycott law firms that provided pro bono assistance to detainees. Stimson was forced to apologize and resign for his comments. Lucky for Cheney, she doesn’t work for the Pentagon, so she doesn’t have to resign. She merely has to be ridiculed by Bill O’Reilly.

Liz Cheney isn’t careful about the words she throws around. She uses terrorist and killer the way normal people use words like salt and pepper. To her, they are just words. That’s probably the scariest part of all.

When the “al-Qaida Seven” and their two DoJ colleagues fought to defend alleged terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, they weren’t fighting to protect jihadist murderers. They were defending the U.S. Constitution-the great whomping chunks of the Bill of Rights that Cheney and her friends are so eager to write out of existence. They did it because that’s what lawyers are ethically obligated to do. They did it because-as Spencer Ackerman points out-the Military Commissions Act of 2006 expressly provided that detainees get defense lawyers. And they did it, as Jay Bookman notes, for the same reason John Adams agreed to represent British soldiers charged with killing civilians during the Boston Massacre in 1770. Because long before Liz Cheney was born and long after she’s gone, the Bill of Rights requires serious people to take it seriously.

…

Liz Cheney will weasel her way out of this week’s hyperbole. She’s already trying to parse her way out of the embarrassing fact that the Bush Department of Justice and Rudy Giuliani’s law firm also housed traitorous Gitmo lawyers. Now, Keep America Safe says its problem is only with pro bono Gitmo lawyers. Yesterday, Cheney told Washington Times radio she “doesn’t question anybody’s loyalty.” She just objects to the criminal justice model of dealing with terror. Those words jihad and al- Qaida? Having helped make them the foulest words in America, she wants you to think they’re mere words.

We should note that give the torture tactics her father championed giving prisoners legal representation is not a liberal affectation but crucial to preserving the rule of law. Last week Salon reported that Dick Cheney called waterboarding a no-brainer in a 2006 radio interview: But recently released internal documents reveal the controversial “enhanced interrogation” practice was far more brutal on detainees than Cheney’s description sounds, and was administered with meticulous cruelty.

Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney “specially designed” to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner’s nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking – and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.

The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding “session.” Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to “dam the runoff” and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee’s mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second “applications” of liquid in each two-hour session – and could dump water over a detainee’s nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding.

Just how out of touch with reality are Cheney and company? Salon founder Joan Walsh wrote:

Right now I’m watching Kenneth Starr denounce Liz Cheney on MSNBC’s “Countdown,” and it’s very disorienting. Starr was one of the villains of Clinton’s impeachment, dragging his investigation far beyond the Whitewater questions that triggered it, leading the nation through a tale of stained blue dresses, sad Oval Office trysts and more than we ever needed to know about cigars. But he’s delivering sense about our justice system tonight on MSNBC. Saying something nice about Ken Starr on Salon might cause our servers to meltdown – but I’m going to have to. Liz Cheney made it happen.

Even Starr is outraged by Cheney’s despicable attack on Justice Department lawyers who’ve defended terror suspects in their past. She’s labeled the group “the al Qaida seven,” and suggested they should be ineligible for Justice Department work.

By contrast Starr called such work “in the finest traditions of the country.” He noted that American founder and president John Adams “represented the British redcoats who were accused of the Boston Massacre – and he successfully defended seven of the British troops who were accused of these crimes.” Starr worked in Atticus Finch from “To Kill a Mockingbird,” remembering Finch told his kids “‘I’ve got to do this as a matter of conscience,’ and it was the conscience of a great profession… One needs to be courageous at times and stand up to power.”

Most recently New York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote:

Keep America Safe is on the march. Liz Cheney’s crackpot hit squad achieved instant notoriety with its viral video demanding the names of Obama Justice Department officials who had served as pro bono defense lawyers for Guantánamo Bay detainees. The video branded these government lawyers as “the Al Qaeda Seven” and juxtaposed their supposed un-American activities with a photo of Osama bin Laden. As if to underline the McCarthyism implicit in this smear campaign, the Cheney ally Marc Thiessen (one of the two former Bush speechwriters now serving as Washington Post columnists) started spreading these charges on television with a giggly, repressed hysteria uncannily reminiscent of the snide Joe McCarthy henchman Roy Cohn. This McCarthyism has not advanced nearly so far as the original brand. Among those who have called out Keep America Safe for its indecent impugning of honorable Americans’ patriotism are Kenneth Starr, Lindsey Graham and former Bush administration lawyers in the conservative Federalist Society. When even the relentless pursuer of Monicagate is moved to call a right-wing jihad “out of bounds,” as Starr did in this case, that’s a fairly good indicator that it’s way off in crazyland.

Truly, Ms. Cheney is a chip off the old blockhead. Apparently her understanding of constitutional rights and jurisprudence is about as accurate as her father’s aim with a shotgun. Actually, it is worse than that. She is at least reasonably intelligent so I’m sure that she and her cohorts do, in fact, know that their campaign of demonization runs counter to the facts and American legal tradition. They just don’t care. All’s fair when you are just another aspiring political hack positioning yourself to run for office.

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I confess that I have been fantasizing. I realize that most people have moved on from Iraq to Afghanistan. But given the enormous toll paid both by Iraqis and Americans in terms of lives and money and overall social and cultural destruction I have been trying to imagine what it would look like if the United States actually undertook a fact based investigation into the decisions by the Bush Administration to invade Iraq in 2003.

By that I don’t mean the past investigations by special commissions or congressional committees into what the intelligence community knew or didn’t know, or what pressure they were under to cherry pick information. Rather I mean an investigation into what former President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and other cabinet officials knew and did, day by day, leading up to the invasion.

Fortunately, I don’t really have to imagine. Instead I can just look across the Atlantic to Great Britain. There they have been conducting an inquiry, officially launched 30 June 2009. The terms of reference of the Iraq Inquiry,  also known as the Chilcot Inquiry, after its chairman Sir John Chilcot, state:

It will consider the period from the summer of 2001 to the end of July 2009, embracing the run-up to the conflict in Iraq, the military action and its aftermath. We will therefore be considering the UK’s involvement in Iraq, including the way decisions were made and actions taken, to establish, as accurately as possible, what happened and to identify the lessons that can be learned.

Consider some of what has been revealed just during the past few weeks. Tony Blair privately assured President George Bush in letters written a year before the invasion of Iraq that Britain would “be there” in any US-led attack on the country.

Senior British diplomats said that regime change was being discussed by Blair in the US in 2002 even though, according to leaked documents, Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, warned the then PM that military action aimed at regime change, as opposed to disarmament, would be unlawful.

Fresh evidence has emerged that Tony Blair’s discredited Iraqi arms dossier was “sexed up” on the instructions of Alastair Campbell, his communications chief, to fit with claims from the US administration that were known to be falseIntelligence outlining the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was taken out of context when it was used as part of the Government’s case for invading Iraq.

Sir David Omand, who was Mr Blair’s security co-ordinator, said that including the claim that Saddam had missiles that he could launch within 45 minutes in the now-infamous September 2002 dossier on Iraq was “asking for trouble“. If all the intelligence on Iraq had been published, the public reaction would have been “Is that it?”, he said.

Tens of thousands of secret documents form the core of the ongoing inquiry into the Iraq war. The inquiry also hinted that such documents showed British officials knew George Bush intended to invade Iraq even if it complied with the UN weapons inspections.

It is especially ironic that this investigation is taking place in Great Britain, the country that has D-Notices and an Official Secrets Act , not to mention it being the country that gave us the not so fictional concept of Big Brother.

Yet, the obvious point is that if Great Britain can do this so should the United States. The Obama Administration and the Democratic congress have refrained from doing so on the mistaken assumption that it would only antagonize out of power, but not out of venom, Republicans, like Dick Cheney, and make cooperation with Republicans impossible. News flash for the Obama administration. Cheney and Republicans are going to hate you no matter what you do, so you shouldn’t care. Concentrate on what is doing right, not what is politically expedient.  No to do so is to dishonor the memories of all those killed in a war that did not have to happen.

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In keeping with the PSA’s charter, we’re seeing bipartisan consensus emerging around U.S. policy in Afghanistan. The bad news? There are actually two bipartisan consensuses.

Technically, that is impossible. Consensus means “general agreement” or “a view reached by a group as a whole” so there can’t really be more than one.

And that is the problem. So long as the right is fighting the right, and others on the left are fighting the left, policymakers will be inclined to focus on other policy issues, content to let Afghan policy drift, and hope for a miraculous turnaround (e.g. Karzai becomes less corrupt and more competent; the Afghan economy begins to produce something other than opium; the Pashtuns decide to make common cause with the Tajiks, Turkmen and Hazara; Afghan men decide that Afghan women should have rights, etc). Our men and women in uniform, engaged increasingly in armed social work are caught in the middle while the pointy-heads pull on their respective chins.

Certain leading voices on the right agree with others on the left that we must redefine our ends in Afghanistan, and begin exploring ways to draw down the military presence there. My colleagues Malou Innocent and Ted Galen Carpenter have just completed a comprehensive study making this case (you can get a preview here), and will present it for the first time at Cato on Monday, September 14th.

A familiar group of hawks and neocons dismiss such sentiments as defeatist bordering on treasonous. Others suggest that talk of withdrawal is simply premature.

The debate got a jolt this week when George Will’s Tuesday column in the Washington Post declared that it was “Time to Get Out of Afghanistan.”

News of the Will column broke late Monday night. Bill Kristol — tipped off, no doubt, by the Post‘s editors who agree with him — had his response ready by 9 am.

The salient question: Would the GOP follow Will or Bill? By 4 pm, we had our answer when Michael Steele and the RNC weighed in…on Kristol’s side.

There is a debate on the left as well. George Will’s position echoes a stance adopted by Sen. Russ Feingold last month, and repeated this morning on NPR (with Rep. Jim McGovern). But scholars at the left-leaning Center for New American Security and the Brookings Institution have joined forces with those from AEI and CSIS in recent weeks to make the case for increasing the commitment to Afghanistan, and explicitly discouraging any talk of withdrawal any time soon. (See, for example, this account by The Nation‘s Bob Dreyfuss.)

The public favors withdrawal. A CBS News poll found that 41 percent of Americans want “troops to start coming home, up from 33 percent in April and just 24 percent in February. Support for increasing the number of troops dropped from 39 percent in April to just 25 percent now.” A Washington Post/ABC News poll taken last month found that for the first time since they began asking the question, a majority of Americans no longer think the war in Afghanistan has been worth the costs.

As noted, however, a vociferous — and bipartisan — group dismisses public sentiment, or else blames Obama for not expending sufficient political capital to rally public support. This faction says our objectives in Afghanistan are, if anything, insufficiently bold, and that we need more resources, and much more time, in order to achieve them.

The most outspoken of these is Max Boot, who weighed in on the pages of the Wall Street Journal on Thursday. After repeating a litany of claims that victory is within our grasp, and threats of dire consequences were we to narrow our objectives, Boot concludes:

Until now international forces and their Afghan partners have lacked the will and resources to implement a classic counterinsurgency plan designed to secure the populace. But that is precisely what Gen. Stanley McChrystal will undertake—assuming he gets the resources he needs from Washington.

In the end, the debate over what the public will support is based on unknowable factors. Polls are a snap-shot, and public opinion changes, sometimes quite dramatically.

Boot believes that the public will rally to the cause in Afghanistan, a mission to create a functioning democracy in a land trapped somewhere between the 12th and 14th century, if the message is delivered by a credible leader, and supported by a wise and far-sighted bipartisan coalition in Congress (think McCain-Lieberman).

I am skeptical.

There is only one way to know who is right.

The president should go before the American people and honestly explain: the likely costs of our current strategy; the likelihood of victory; and the likely consequences that would ensue if we were to adopt alternative strategies, including the small footprint advocated by George Will on Tuesday.

But President Obama must be honest. The costs of our current strategy will be very high. More troops, more money, more casualties. The likelihood of victory is 50-50, at best (most nation-building missions fail, so I’m being charitable here). We will have to be there for many years; honest analysts admit that the commitment would likely extend for decades. We might like allies to help us, but they aren’t much interested.

I’m hungry for this debate. The policy in Afghanistan might ultimately prove the decisive factor in rectifying the gap between what the public wants and what the policymakers are giving them. As noted at the outset, my only regret is that our men and women in uniform are paying the price in the meantime, while the policymakers and pundits dither.

But we cannot postpone this debate any longer. To pursue a chronically under-resourced strategy is worse than counterproductive — it is immoral. To pursue such a strategy because the leaders fear that they cannot be honest with the American people is repugnant.

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The more things change the more they stay the same; as in the military-industrial congressional pork barrel. As evidence one need only look at the current debate over Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ decision to stop producing the F-22 fighter. Gates and President Obama have threatened to veto Congress’ entire 2010 defense spending bill if it contains a single F-22 over the 187 now authorized.

This should not be a hard decision. After all, how often does the Pentagon actually try to kill a program it does not need? Keeping unnecessary weapons in the military budget is usually par for the course, thanks to the influence of weapons manufacturers and senators and congressmen who receive credit in their home states and districts for managing to save some jobs for constituents. Usually the Pentagon goes along because it is more trouble to fight it than it is worth.

But on the rare occasion that the Pentagon does not want weapons that it did not ask for it is clear that something stinks to the high heavens; higher even than the F-22 can fly.

Gates’ decision was in response to votes by the House and Senate armed services committees last month to spend $369 million to $1.75 billion more to keep the F-22 production line open were propelled by mixed messages from the Air Force; including a quiet campaign for the plane that includes snazzy new Lockheed videos for key lawmakers and intense political support from states where the F-22′s components are made. The full House ratified the vote on June 25.

But, contrary to the claims made by the various legislators on the Lockheed Martin payroll there are many excellent reasons to kill it. As the Washington Post reported earlier this month, the F-22 -22, has recently required more than 30 hours of maintenance for every hour in the skies, pushing its hourly cost of flying to more than $44,000, a far higher figure than for the warplane it replaces, confidential Pentagon test results show. The aircraft’s radar-absorbing metallic skin is the principal cause of its maintenance While most aircraft fleets become easier and less costly to repair as they mature, key maintenance trends for the F-22 have been negative in recent years, and on average from October last year to this May, just 55 percent of the deployed F-22 fleet has been available to fulfill missions guarding U.S. airspace, the Defense Department acknowledged.

The F-22 was created for a world that no longer exists. It was designed during the early 1980s to ensure long-term American military dominance of the skies andconceived to win dogfights with advanced Soviet fighters that Russia is still trying to develop. Its troubles have been detailed in dozens of Government Accountability Office reports and Pentagon audits. But Pierre Sprey, a key designer in the 1970s and 1980s of the F-16 and A-10 warplanes, said that from the beginning, the Air Force designed it to be “too big to fail, that is, to be cancellation-proof.” In classic pork barrel tradition Lockheed farmed out more than 1,000 subcontracts to vendors in more than 40 states. Sprey, now a prominent critic of the plane, said that by the time skeptics “could point out the failed tests, the combat flaws, and the exploding costs, most congressmen were already defending their subcontractors’ ” revenues.

Labor groups, including the United Steelworkers and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, recently sent letters to lawmakers urging continued support for the F-22. They cited the 25,000 high-wage, high-skill manufacturing jobs that could be lost across 44 states.

The F-22 is such a glaring piece of pork that Sen. John McCain has joined with the Obama administration in seeking to remove the 1.75 billion recently inserted into the proposed 2010 defense budget for seven more F-22s. McCain, along with Sen. Carl Levin, offers an amendment to restore the $1.250 billion in readiness-related spending that Lockheed, Senator Chambliss, and 12 other SASC senators thought should be raided from the Military Personnel and Operation and Maintenance accounts to pay for the seven F-22s. It also undoes a “management savings” of $500 million to pay for the rest of the F-22 cost — a savings that both Levin and McCain properly found unjustified; “bogus” would be a better word.

It is more than a little ironic that legislators who call themselves pro-defense would vote for more F-22s when doing so consumes money that would be far spent better elsewhere, like giving the troops now fighting in Afghanistan the equipment they need to detect and neutralize the improvised explosive devices that are killing American troops in Afghanistan.

President Obama got it exactly right when he wrote in a letter to Mr. McCain and Mr. Levin on Monday. “To continue to procure additional F-22s would be to waste valuable resources that should be more usefully employed to provide our troops with weapons that they actually do need.”

Some reasons being offered in support of the F-22 border on the bizarre. Army Maj. Gen. Bob Lee, the head of the Army and Air National Guard in Hawaii, said “The No. 1 priority is homeland defense, and to meet that mission, more F-22s are needed.” One can only wonder what he thinks will happen. Will Al-Qaeda develop its own advanced fighter fleet?

Is there a single reason to buy even one more F-22? Consider this excerpt from recent commentary by Pierre Sprey and Winslow Wheeler.

Instead of being such a close call, further production of F-22s ought to be laughed out of court. The F-22 is outrageously expensive. The 187 are costing just over $65 billion, about $350 million each.

Not a single F-22 has flown in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It would be foolish to deploy them since there is no enemy air force to fight against. To send F-22s as a bomber – at three times the operating cost of F-16s that are already bombing over there – would be just another drag on the war effort.

Even more important is the question of whether the F-22 is a good fighter. The truth is that the F-22s weaken US air power. Study after study show that pilot skill dominates all other factors in winning or losing air battles. The F-22′s maintenance costs have the Air Force to slash in-air pilot training. In the 1970s, fighter pilots were getting 20 to 30 hours a month of air combat training. Today, F-22 pilots get 10 to 12 hours. High tech theorists claim flying can be replaced by ground simulators. Experience teaches that simulators can be used for cockpit procedures training but, by misrepresenting in-air reality, they reinforce tactics that could get pilots killed in real combat.

If the F22s are kept in the budget it will be one more sad sign that it is business as usual for the military industrial congressional welfare queens.

As veteran military correspondent George Wilson recently wrote, “persuading the pols to kill F-22 jobs Lockheed Martin has spread around most of the 50 states will be a big test of how strong Obama can be when pitted against the military-industrial complex President Dwight Eisenhower warned the nation about as he left office in 1961.”

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Here at PSA we’ve been working hard to create a program for Congressional staff that adds value in the oftentimes crowded programmatic environment of Washington, D.C. The PSA Congressional Fellowship Program aims to bring together House and Senate staffers from both parties to socialize, debate, and learn together with the goal of enhancing bipartisanship in their daily jobs. The most recent event with the Summer 2009 Fellows was a dinner with 9/11 Commission Chairman and former New Jersey Governor Tom Kean, and Politico sent a reporter to cover the event. The resulting article, “Bipartisanship, in three courses”, published this morning, highlights many of the most important aspects of what we do at PSA.

“Whereas members of Congress at least have the opportunity to work together if they choose to do so,” the reporter writes, “staffers are rarely forced to remove their partisan blinders. Until now.” She quotes PSA Fellows Pablo Duran of Sen. Tom Udall’s (D-NM) office and Brandon Andrews of Sen. James Inhofe’s (R-OK) office lamenting the rarity of meeting staff from across the aisle. “‘I don’t know that anyone makes a concerted effort to not do it,’ Andrews said. ‘I just think it doesn’t happen, because people travel in different circles.’”

We will be visiting the White House to meet with President Obama’s chief national security speechwriter, Ben Rhodes, this week and going on a weekend Retreat after that. It’s been an exciting summer so far, and we appreciate Politico’s interest in the work we do here at PSA.

For those who are interested in applying to be a Fellow in the Fall 2009 session, information can be found on our website here.

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