AEI Tries to Sell Some F22 & F35 Pork in Post

In last Sunday's Washington Post (Outlook, 2/8/09), two AEI authors tried to make the case for military spending as "stimulus". Given that military spending zoomed upwards during the Bush/Cheney years, while the economy struggled mightily (even before the current huge downturn), this does not seem likely.
In fact, it does not only seem causative, it's not even correlative.
Plus, as has been pointed out frequently, mass transit construction, health care, education, and weatherization projects all produce many, many more jobs than military spending.
The gist of the article is that the new President should agree to continue to produce another $20 to $25 billion in F22 Raptors, as a "stimulus" project. Given that there is actually no strategic reason to have more F22s, since the Soviet Union has now been gone for almost 2 decades, I don't blame them for trying to sneak the planes in through the stimulus door.
But here's the kicker--their F22 funding is partly just a "loss leader" to get to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a hugely expensive (hundreds of billions of dollars, minimum), over-budget, repeatedly-delayed fighter plane that one of George W. Bush's DOD brass (a former Lockheed top dog) kept pushing forward.
The authors sneak this paragraph into the article: "Nor are defense programs a lifetime commitment...Continuing production of the F-18 and F-22 Raptor fighter jets for two or three years would, in essence, provide a bridge for the airplane industry until the F-35 Lightning is ready for full-scale production..."
So we can't afford to rebuild public schools, but we should keep producing unneeded F-22 Raptors until we are ready for full-scale production of the unneeded F-35? Not.