WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama vowed Monday to veto a pending $680 billion military spending bill for next year if lawmakers set aside funding for more F-22 warplanes than the Defense Department says it needs.
Obama’s intervention in the long-simmering debate over the wisdom of ending the F-22 program increased pressure on Senate lawmakers to respect his military priorities. It also sharpened his grievance with House and Senate Democrats who have defied the White House and supported keeping the F-22 production line open. Many such lawmakers, including Sens. Edward Kennedy and John Kerry, both Massachusetts Democrats, have F-22 contractors in their home states.
“We do not need these planes,” Obama said in letters to the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and the committee’s senior Republican, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, both of whom oppose the additional F-22s and spoke against them on the Senate floor Monday. “I will veto any bill that supports acquisition of F-22s beyond the 187 already funded by Congress.”
Obama noted in his letters that, under his proposal, production of F-22s would be terminated at roughly the same level proposed by the Defense Department during the Bush administration in 2004.
To override the proposal would “waste valuable resources that should be more usefully employed to provide our troops with the weapons that they actually do need,” he said.
