Comrade 0bama will cancel the F-22. It is the inherent nature of Marxists to weaken America to the advantage of our enemies, while pouring money into their Communistic agenda and of course, into their corrupt pockets.
Goodbye Raptor, it was nice while it lasted, which wasn’t long.
Comrade Bush wants to cancel it, too.
Unlike Bush I think that Obama will agree to the additional buy. To cancel it now puts all those jobs - union jobs - at risk of being lost. Obama will play to his base.
I don’t understand why the Air Force uses high tech aircraft to drop bombs in environments that are free of air defense and enemy air craft. It would be like the Navy delivering cargo with destroyers, or the Army using Abrams tanks instead of commercial trucks.
I think that it might be better to consider the F/A-22 to be an interim type. We’ve got two problems. First off they’re expensive. A hundred eighty million is what a destroyer or a frigate costs, and paying that much for what by the nature of it’s employment is a fungible asset is insane.
Secondly, they’re so expensive that we dare not hazard them in combat because soon they’ll be out of production and we can’t replace them. That’s about the same as not having airplanes in the first place. Losing any, will be a net loss to us no matter how many enemy aircraft they destroy.
So, I think that what we need to do is to keep the F-22 line open, but at the same time, we need to come up with what I guess we could call and Advanced Austere Air Superiority Fighter. Figure, a flyaway cost of fifty million or less.
Think about it. When I was a kid, McDonnell-Douglas produced around 2700 F-4 Phantom II variants at around four and a half million per copy, and Congress was threatening to close the F-14A production line because they cost thirteen point two million each, and it took a direct threat by Grumman to shut the line down themselves if Congress wasn’t willing to purchase Lot 13, which was the first production lot that they were going to make any money on. Idiots like Proxmire were outvoted and the Tomcat was the top line Navy fighter until it was withdrawn, prematurely IMHO, from service.
And even with inflation, we’re looking at the fifty to sixty million range as a comparative flyaway cost with the old Tomcat. We should be able to build an acceptable fighter that we can acquire in quantity for a like sum, when you adjust for inflation.
More importantly, we could have a plane that could deal with Neo-Soviet and Chinese Fifth Generation Fighter programs that has some small chance of being acquired in quantity— something that flat won’t happen with the F/A-22 Raptor.
And we can’t rely on the F-34 and it’s various variants because it’s really more of a modern equivalent of an A-4 Skyhawk, (although I do think that Ed Heineman could still have done it better— we really need a new “Scooter”) and it doesn’t change the fact that we need an air superiority fighter and we need one that we can acquire in quantity, risk in combat and tolerate losses which is inevitable in any form of air war.
Bottom line here is that the Air Force needs to start thinking like guys who are going to fight a real war, rather than guys who play for bragging rights.