Are We Being Gamed?

I give Secretary Gates points for political bravery. He stood up and told Congress that the Cold War was over, and the Soviet Union is long gone, so we don't need to spend any more money to build more F-22 Raptors. 183 of them is enough.
But I can't help but wonder if those of us who actually want to cut the military budget aren't being "gamed" here. I know that Secretary Gates is skilled at bureaucratic maneuvering, and very familiar with the ways of Congress--so he knows that there is a better-than-average chance that Congress will fund more F-22s, not cut them off.
Meanwhile, Secretary Gates quietly took a giant step down the road to institutionalizing the over-budget, delayed, incredibly expensive F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which very few people have noticed because all the attention is on the F-22 proposed cuts.
(Though I note that 4 F-22s have also been carefully requested in the Iraq/Afghanistan $85B supplemental, which seems tacky to me, given that one of the big criticisms of the F-22 is that it has yet to be used in either of our two current wars...So why do we need to "replace" 4 of them in an Iraq/Afghanistan supplemental, when they've never been used there?)
So what's the likely outcome? A requested cut in the F-22, which Congress ignores, plus a requested big increase in the F-35, which Congress gladly agrees with...Voila! We end up spending even more on unnecessary fighter planes, while supposedly cutting them...
The magic of military spending, where a 4% increase, after 8 years of massive Bush/Cheney spending increases, is characterized in the media as a cut...