Gates vs. CongressWhy do senators want to bust the budget for missile defense that doesn't work and a fighter plane we don't need?

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The other contentious debate was over the F-22 Raptor stealth fighter plane, which, to Gates and President Obama, is a textbook case of a Cold War weapon that has no place in the 21^st-century arsenal. It is telling that not a single F-22 has flown a combat mission in any of the wars the United States has fought since the plane entered the fleet. It might be useful in some future war, but Gates and others have calculated 187 would be enough—especially since the smaller, cheaper F-35 stealth plane is about to enter production, and Gates has in fact boosted its budget.

Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., went to bat for the F-22. The plane might not be needed now or against such foes as Iraqi and Afghan insurgents. But Russia and China are developing advanced fighter planes and surface-to-air missiles. U.S. Air Force generals have determined that there is a "requirement" for 243 F-22s to maintain air superiority in the coming decades. They could get by with 187 planes, but only at "high risk."

Gates responded that these calculations might be true if the Air Force had nothing but F-22s, but it will also have F-35s and probably still some F-15s. The Navy will also have F-35s and F-18E/Fs, and both services will have a large number of unmanned aerial vehicles—like the Predator drones, which have proved very effective. Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who testified alongside Gates, went further: The F-35, he said, might well be the last manned fighter plane. "We're in a time of transition in the future of aviation," Mullen said. Just because the Air Force (or any other single service) says it has a "requirement" does not mean that the overall Defense Department has the same requirement.

The "requirements" game is an old one. When James Schlesinger was defense secretary in the mid-1970s, he ordered the chief of naval operations to calculate how many aircraft carriers the Navy would need if it abandoned the mission of defending the Indian Ocean. At the time, the Navy had 13 carriers, two of which were assigned to the Indian Ocean. The chief put his staff to work. The answer they came up with: 13 carriers.

The point was clear. The Navy's fleet was, and is, built around aircraft carriers. If you cut the carriers, you also had to cut a proportionate number of destroyers, frigates, cruisers, the whole works. So no matter how drastically the secretary of defense might alter the Navy's mission, they would come up with some way to justify a "requirement" of 13 carriers.

The same is true today of the Air Force—which is dominated by fighter pilots—and its generals' desire for 243 F-22s. Any fewer F-22s than that, and there's a danger that the centerpiece of the Air Force's mission—the rationale for the size of its fleet—might shift to something other than fighter planes. (Adm. Mullen's remark—that in the near future there might be no more manned aircraft—only accentuates their worry.)

In the coming weeks, the debate over the defense budget is bound to intensify. Passions will flare. The fight may seem surreal, but that's because it is unusually primordial; it's stripped down to basic institutional interests. The battle, waged behind the scenes in the Pentagon, is fiercer still in Congress, because there, it's conjoined with the struggle for contracts and jobs. (It is no coincidence that pieces of the F-22 are manufactured in 46 states; for more than a half-century, the services have been subcontracting out their most cherished weapons to as many congressional districts as possible in order to maximize political support.)

This is why the budget debate will be worth watching. Gates' proposals aren't particularly radical by most objective measures, but they're deeply threatening to the inside players. He's trying to change the culture in the Pentagon, and that's like shifting the building's foundations. It's going to be a great fight.

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Fred Kaplan is Slate's "War Stories" columnist and author of 1959: The Year Everything Changed. He can be reached at .

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