Lawmakers whose districts are home to jobs that depend on the endangered weapons procurement contracts are vowing to fight the proposed cuts to the Air Force's new F/-22 Raptor jet fighter, the C-130J Hercules transport plane and the Kinetic Energy Interceptor (KEI), a missile defense program.

Utah defense contractors have a stake in all three programs and the proposed cuts come at a time when defense spending in the state is at its highest level since 1992. State officials say after defense spending in Utah ebbed to $1.2 billion in 1997, it has since grown 145 percent.

Some of the fiscal 2006 defense budget proposals in the president's request delivered to Congress this week cut both ways for Utah. For instance, Hill Air Force Base would get a $4.6 million maintenance contract to repair battle-damaged F/A-22s. Eventually, Raptor repairs could replace the base's current primary mission of keeping the aging F-16 Fighting Falcon flying.

But the increasingly pricey Raptor gets its wings clipped early in the Pentagon's long-term budget, with a fleet drastically smaller than the Air Force had originally sought.

"It's a great sign that we get the work to repair the 22, but the bad news is there won't be any 22s to repair," said Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, whose 1st Congressional District includes the base and several of the 10 Utah subcontractors building Raptor components for prime contractor Lockheed Martin. "I don't care how expensive they are, we need this plane."

Hill also has a maintenance hangar capable of repairing the C-130J Hercules, a redesigned version of the workhorse transport that the Pentagon's top independent tester labeled "neither operationally effective nor operationally suitable" in its most recent evaluation. Like the Raptor, prime contractor Lockheed has C-130J subcontractors in several states, including Utah.

One of the Pentagon's biggest hits in the Bush budget request is at the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, which has been ordered to slice $5 billion in spending over the next six years. Most of the cuts will come in the KEI, a doubt-plagued system intended to launch high-speed interceptor rockets that would destroy enemy missiles just after they have been launched.

The prime contractor for the KEI is Northrop Grumman Corp., which is Utah's top prime defense contract recipient with $966 million of business in the state in fiscal 2003, according to the Governor's Office of Planning and Budget. ATK's facilities in Thiokol and Clearfield also provide components for the KEI.

In May, Bishop led efforts in the House Armed Services Committee to defeat an amendment by Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., to cut $75 million from the KEI program.

He claimed the trim would have negatively affected "hundreds of Utah jobs." But his legislative success was undone by the Bush administration's order to cut the KEI's expected $1 billion 2006 budget to $230 million.

"These were long-term contracts the government entered into, it's going to be expensive to abrogate them and it sends a bad signal out to other people that you can't trust the government to follow-through on their commitments," Bishop said of the administration's planned weapons program cuts. "I'm talking with people and hope to be part of the effort to keep the funding for these programs."