Years before F-22 pilots began getting dizzy in the cockpit -- before one struggled to breathe in advance of a fatal crash, before two more went on television to say they refused to fly it -- a small circle of U.S. Air Force experts knew something was wrong with the costly stealth fighter jet.

Coughing among pilots and fears of contaminants in their breathing apparatus led the experts to suspect flaws in the oxygen-supply system of the F-22 Raptor, especially in extreme high-altitude conditions. They formed a working group a decade ago to deal with the problem, creating a unique brain trust.

Internal documents and emails obtained by The Associated Press show they proposed a range of solutions by 2005, including adjustments to the flow of oxygen into pilot's masks. But that key recommendation was rejected by military officials who expressed reluctance to add costs to a program already well over budget.

"This initiative has not been funded," read the minutes of their final meeting in 2007.

Minutes of the working group's meetings, PowerPoint presentations and emails among its members reveal a missed opportunity for the Air Force to improve pilot safety in the 187-plane F-22 fleet before a series of high-profile problems damaged the image of the aircraft and led to a series of groundings. Its production was halted last spring and the aircraft has never been used in combat.

The Air Force says the F-22 is safe to fly — a dozen of the jets began a six-month deployment to Japan in July — but flight restrictions remain in place, preventing its use in high-altitude situations where pilots' breathing is under the most stress.

The working group urged various repairs that the Air Force has only recently embraced. One, a backup ...

A former executive for the Pentagon’s top defense contractor collected $1.66 million in salary, consulting fees and retirement pay from two top defense contractors last year before becoming the Republican chief of staff for the Senate Armed Services Committee in February.

The appointment is the second by a Republican member of either the House or Senate Armed Services committee to provoke criticism from independent groups that consider it a conflict of interest.

Ann Elise Sauer, who was appointed to her present job by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., worked for more than a decade as a vice president and lobbyist for Lockheed Martin before leaving in Jan. 2011, according to a financial disclosure she made to the Secretary of the Senate in April.

In 2011, she was paid a salary and bonus totaling $660,390, deferred compensation of $769,574, and $232,872 labeled as “retired pay” on the financial disclosure form. Lockheed is the Defense Department’s largest corporate contractor, earning $28.3 billion, or 61 percent, of its sales from the department in 2011, according to the company’s annual report.

Sauer then worked as a consultant and analyst for BAE Systems, earning $55,000 from the firm, according to her financial disclosure form. BAE is the Pentagon’s ninth largest contractor.

The Project on Government Oversight’s Ben Freeman said Thursday that Sauer’s appointment to the principal Senate committee tasked with overseeing all military spending and contracting creates a huge conflict of interest.

“$1.6 million — that gives a lot of reasons to remember your former employer,” said ...

Lockheed Martin has big business in Washington, with Defense Department contracts representing more than half of the company's $46.5 billion in net sales last year. And now, Lockheed has a former top lobbyist in a key position on Capitol Hill overseeing the company.

Former Lockheed vice president Ann Elise Sauer was hired by Sen. John McCain in February as the top Republican staffer on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The revolving door swings regularly in Washington, but the size of the compensation package Sauer received from Lockheed when she left the company is notable. A financial disclosure form shows the defense giant gave Sauer $1.6 million in compensation around the time she took a buyout in January 2011.

At the moment, the stakes for Lockheed in Washington are even higher than usual, with the company leading the military contracting industry's charge to convince Congress to avoid a $492 billion, 9-year cut in military spending set to be triggered in January.

Lockheed CEO Robert Stevens was on the Hill this month warning that the company would have to lay off 10,000 employees if Congress does not make a deal. "Most tragically, we feel we will be unable to provide the equipment and support needed by our military forces," Stevens told the House.

As staff director for the minority on the Senate committee, Sauer has an important role in the battle over the possible military budget cuts. The committee regularly makes decisions ...

Retired Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, bounced out of his job for revels in Paris as witnessed by Rolling Stone, has recycled a perennial chestnut: Bring back the draft — i.e., a conscripted military, not the volunteer military of today.

These days, McChrystal teaches at Yale University with what must be a protection unique in the annals of academic freedom. Everything he tells his students is, by contractual agreement, off the record. But he made his proposal about the draft in a public venue, at the 2012 Aspen Ideas Festival. McChrystal said: "I think we ought to have a draft. I think if a nation goes to war, it shouldn't be solely represented by a professional force, because it gets to be unrepresentative of the population. I think if a nation goes to war, every town, every city needs to be at risk. You make that decision and everybody has skin in the game."

It's certainly true that the volunteer military is a mess. The Associated Press reported recently that suicides are surging among the troops. According to the AP, "the 154 suicides for active-duty troops in the first 155 days of the year far outdistance the U.S. forces killed in action in Afghanistan." The volunteer military struggles with increased sexual assaults, alcohol abuse and domestic violence.

Liberals like the idea of a military draft because they think it would curb any president's eagerness to go to war. There are indeed sound arguments for a draft. They were put eloquently not so long ago by Bill Broyles, a Vietnam vet: "In spite of the president's insistence that our very civilization is at stake, the privileged aren't flocking to the flag. The war is being fought by Other People's Children. The war is impersonal for the very people to whom it should be most personal. If the children of the nation's elites were facing enemy fire without body armor, riding ...

A host of problems plague the military’s newest jet fighter, the F-35, but one of the simplest yet most troublesome is identified in a new government audit as unreadable “symbology.”

The problem exists inside a small item at the heart of what makes the F-35 the world’s most sophisticated aircraft — if only it could be made to work. Namely, the pilot’s helmet visor. On the world’s most advanced, fifth-generation military aircraft, the visor is meant to be much more than a sun shield. It is supposed to do wondrous things.

Acting like a small, see-through movie screen, it is designed to display data showing how the plane is performing, where enemy targets are, and which weapons the pilot can use to handle them. As the pilot swivels his head, the display is meant to adapt, creating a direct link — as in a science-fiction movie — between the pilot and the aircraft’s unprecedented computing power.

The visor is, according to the Government Accountability Office’s latest annual report on the F-35’s development, “integral to the mission systems architecture.” In other words, the plane was more or less designed ...

Flight testing of the three variants of the F-35 joint strike fighter continues to go well even as the program's future pace is tangled in congressional budget and deficit reduction efforts.

October was the busiest month yet for flight tests, with 122 completed flights and significant progress on a number of fronts, Lockheed Martin reported Friday.

Overall, 837 test flights were completed this year through Thursday, and both the number of individual flights and total number of test points -- specific tests of specific capabilities -- are running about 9 percent ahead of a restructured plan set out in January by the Pentagon's F-35 Joint Program Office.

"Sometimes numbers tell the story best, and I think that's what's happening here," said Mike Rein, Lockheed's F-35 communications director.

One of the major highlights and testing accomplishments in October was the work accomplished using two F-35B short-takeoff vertical-landing models operating from the USS Wasp amphibious ship off the Virginia coast. Over a three-week period, the aircraft made 72 short takeoffs and a like number of vertical landings. "There's a lot of positive indicators we're seeing between the ship trials and the land-based tests," Rein said. "We're ahead of plan. We're seeing good indicators of things to come."

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How often does the Pentagon award contracts to defense companies that have already been proven to be defrauding taxpayers? A report the Department of Defense did at the request of Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) reveals an answer that should make Washington very uncomfortable.

The report, released today, showed that hundreds of defense contractors found guilty of civil fraud received more than $1.1 trillion in defense contracts since 2001. The study took into account only companies that were found to have defrauded taxpayers of more than $1 million dollars.

More than $573 billion went directly to companies that were guilty of defrauding taxpayers, and when you factor in the awards that went to the parent companies of those contractors, the total is $1.1 trillion. Of that $573 billion, more than two-thirds—$398 billion—went to companies after they had been found guilty of fraud.

Companies convicted of “hard-core criminal fraud” received $255 million in contracts, $33 million of it after conviction.

Some of the country’s biggest defense contractors were implicated. “The ugly truth is that virtually all of the major defense contractors in this country for years have been engaged in systemic fraudulent behavior, while receiving hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money,” said Sanders. According to the ...