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Home » Raptor Watch » Vote ‘No’ on More F-​​22s

Vote ‘No’ on More F-​​22s

raptor-sunset.jpg

I guess I’m going to have to dive in here…though I’m reluc­tant to because the sides are so polar­ized in the issue.

The fight in the Senate is going on over the added fund­ing for F-​​22s inserted into the 2010 DoD bud­get by Raptor allies in states with key Raptor man­u­fac­tur­ing facil­i­ties. Sens. McCain and Levin are on the administration’s side on this one, argu­ing that the bud­get should stick with the 187 plane plan. Obama has said he’ll veto the DoD bud­get bill if it includes any (seven in the Senate, 12 in the House) addi­tional F-​​22s over his plan.

Advocates argue that 187 is far too few air­craft to main­tain air supe­ri­or­ity in the future, even one still dom­i­nated by US air­power. And the under­cur­rent also flows with job-​​loss wor­ries — par­tic­u­larly in Georgia, where a large por­tion of the man­u­fac­tur­ing will be done.

They’re both right.

On the one hand we have Winslow Wheeler and his bros argu­ing that the F-​​22 is the poster child for a Pentagon pro­cure­ment sys­tem run amok and that it’s aided and abet­ted by a Congress always look­ing for pork to fry up for its con­stituents. And on the other, there’s an elo­quent argu­ment made by Air Force Association pres­i­dent Lt. Gen. Mike Dunn that the 187 F-​​22s is really 100 oper­a­tional F-​​22s and that’s way too few even for the most opti­mistic scenarios.

Arguably it’s not about raw num­bers — peo­ple can debate 200 vs. 800 vs. 100 all day long. On the one hand, it seems to me a good idea to have the most advanced fighter in the world in our inven­tory — and to have a good amount of them (no fair fights). But on the other hand it has been frus­trat­ing that the Raptor has taken so damned long to field. I’ve been in the defense report­ing biz for a while and I can remem­ber doing sto­ries in F-​​22 devel­op­ment (and even the com­pe­ti­tion for the Raptor) and see­ing some stat that the com­po­nents on it were from the 1980s…that’s a problem.

So maybe the F-​​22 is the B-​​2 of the fighter world. We need to call it a loss and keep a sil­ver bul­let fleet to sat­isfy all the con­stituen­cies involved and turn the chap­ter on this one. As far as I’m con­cerned, the future belongs to unmanned air­craft and it may be that we’ll go counter to our usual prac­tice and throw dozens of cheap drones at an air supe­ri­or­ity prob­lem in the next two decades rather than send up one or two Gucci fight­ers to knock down Mig-​​15s, if you know what I mean.

So I’ll reluc­tantly side with McCain/​Levin/​Obama on this one (though I don’t think it’s worth veto­ing the entire defense bill over seven more Raptors). But I’ll be sad to wit­ness the final death throes of the manned fighter air supe­ri­or­ity era…

– Christian

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July 14th, 2009 | Raptor Watch | 457668 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2009/07/14/vote-no-on-more-f-22s/Vote+%27No%27+on+More+F-22s2009-07-14+18%3A21%3A51Ward You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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  1. Razer says:
    July 16, 2009 at 10:17 am

    Israel has already started to reeval­u­ate their mil­i­tary allo­ca­tion strat­egy thanks to the recent bloody nose they received. Their num­ber 1 con­clu­sion: you can’t win a war with air supe­ri­or­ity.
    The F-​​22 is cool, there is no doubt about that. But will it win a war? Will it even con­tribute to win­ning a war? It feels like a Proof of Concept that can be used to design a dif­fer­ent class of fighter. It’s shown that stealth an be inte­grated into a fighter (sorry, the F-​​117 was not a true fighter). It’s shown that shared radar feeds can be used to fight a non-​​LOS air bat­tle. Now it’s time to apply those prin­ci­pals to a less advanced ded­i­cated A-​​to-​​A air­frame.
    The Air Force needs to stop cram­ming every toy it can into a sin­gle craft. Decide what you want: a mod­er­ately stealthy air supe­ri­or­ity craft with a phase radar sys­tem. OK, awe­some, now build it. No no no, stop try­ing to cram in the extra crap. Focus. Know what you want to stick to it.
    The same mis­take is being made with the F-​​35. The orig­i­nal con­cept of the plane was great. Don’t make every­thing top of the line, just inte­grate the con­cepts of other planes. Moderate stealth. Moderate A2G capa­bil­i­ties. Keep the cost low so thou­sands can be fielded by the U.S. and its allies. But every­one wants their lit­tle pet project added to it. Now we’re look­ing at a bloated craft that can do every­thing but costs a for­tune.
    Really time for the Air Force to learn how to stop scope-​​creep and stick to their game plans.

    Reply
  2. Brian says:
    July 16, 2009 at 11:37 am

    The prob­lem is that, thanks to short­sighted bud­get­ing from 15+ years ago, we face the prospect of hav­ing our air super­or­ity fight­ers fall out of the sky. There’s no way to sal­vage the F-​​15. We have to replace them with some­thing.
    Unfortunately, the only thing we have in pro­duc­tion is the Raptor. The Eagles must be replaced, and no amount of pol­i­tick­ing will change that. So the ques­tion is, do we buy more Raptors? Do we count on buy­ing the JSF? Or do we buy some other air­craft? Those are our only 3 options. No amount of Air Force hate will change that.

    Reply
  3. ReconTeam says:
    July 16, 2009 at 4:57 pm

    We built a grand total of 881 F-​​15 Eagles, and that does not include 200+ F-​​15E Strike Eagles.
    183 F-​​22A Raptors is not enough to replace those no mat­ter what way you lay down the num­bers. “The Cold War is over” is not a jus­ti­fi­able argu­ment to destroy our air supe­ri­or­ity fleet.
    Also the talk of more F-​​35As for the USAF? With the same politi­cians who cut down our F-​​22A pur­chase so much, there is no way we will be able to get enough F-​​35s to fill the USAF’s require­ment to replace F-​​16s alone!
    Just pray that our coun­try comes to it’s senses by 2012 and the F-​​22 is res­ur­rected as the F-​​22B. Or F-​​22C if that des­ig­na­tion was reserved for some­thing else.
    As far as UCAVs go, none of the UCAVs in devel­op­ment offer a cred­i­ble air-​​to-​​air capa­bil­ity. Really all they will have is the AIM-​​9X for self defense. These UCAVs are designed to be rel­a­tively slow but stealthy air­craft with a long loi­ter time, built for strike and recon­nais­sance mis­sions. They are not air supe­ri­or­ity air­craft and there are many more con­cerns with using UCAVs for such a role.

    Reply
  4. drago says:
    July 16, 2009 at 8:59 pm

    “There’s no way to sal­vage the F-​​15. We have to replace them with some­thing.“
    You can always build new and upgraded F-​​15s to replace the old ones. Can you imag­ine the per­for­mance of the Eagle with F119 or F135 engines? The powers-​​that-​​be should also put their focus on research­ing new AAMs to replace the AMRAAM.
    BTW, most of the F-15’s kills in the Middle East were already con­fused by ECM, killed by BVR Sparrow shots, after being stalked by AWACS planes, not from World War 1 –style dogfighting.

    Reply
  5. pfcem says:
    July 16, 2009 at 9:41 pm

    Way to much igno­rance to reply to all so just a cou­ple extreme cases…
    The Cenobyte,
    For the cost of 187 F-​​22s you could only get ~262 F-​​15SE or ~291 F-​​15E.
    drago,
    Sorry but there is tech­nol­ogy & capa­bil­ity in the F-​​22 that can can not be applied to the F-​​15 &/​or F-​​16. What you are say­ing is akin when the F-​​15 came out after we built a cou­ple hun­dred of them we should have can­celled the pro­gram & went back to build­ing F-​​4s…

    Reply
  6. citanon says:
    July 17, 2009 at 5:34 am

    “It wasn’t Japan per se that sold the pro­peller milling equip­ment but one Japanese com­pany, Toshiba. Simple case of cor­po­rate greed.…remember that when you buy a lap­top or TV.“
    I thought it was Mitsubishi. Imagine if GE wanted to sell such a piece of equip­ment to any coun­try. Would the US gov­ern­ment find out? Of course. Did the Japanese gov­ern­ment know? Of course. Did they stop it? No.

    Reply
  7. polaris says:
    July 18, 2009 at 10:05 am

    You do remem­ber the F-​​35 don’t you ?

    Reply
  8. Brian says:
    July 18, 2009 at 12:23 pm

    Yes, I remem­ber the F-​​35. I remem­ber that it’s not yet fin­ished and hasn’t been tested much.
    I also saw on the news that an F-​​15E went down today, and not due to hos­tile fire. Both crew were killed. If it turns out that it was due to an aging fuse­lage, will peo­ple finally agree that they need replaced?

    Reply
  9. Andy says:
    August 24, 2009 at 9:27 pm

    I’d rather see more money go into weapons plat­fors such as the AC-​​130, UAV, and cruise missles rather than more fight­ers. I’ve been in the USAF 13 years and let’s face it, we sup­port the front line troops more than any­thing. I know I’d feel much safer know­ing that an AC-​​130 was off cir­cling in the dis­tance wait­ing to deliver pre­ci­sion engage­ment right on my tar­get rather than hav­ing a super expen­sive fighter sit­ting on the ground wait­ing for a mis­sion. In terms of UAVs, throw A/​R capa­bil­i­ties into one and you have an unprece­dented capa­bil­ity. Plus, take into con­sid­er­a­tion main­te­nance costs of the F-​​22. It’ll take far longer to trou­bleshoot when com­pared to a C-​​130.

    Reply

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