Made in the U.S. of A.

U.S. Department of Defense ^ | August 27, 2008 | USAF Staff Sgt. James L. Harper Jr.

[EnjoyingLife]

One Raptor, one flare, high above the Gulf of Mexico, U.S. of A. Via http://ChamorroBible.org/gpw/gpw-200905.htm (medium, large, huge)

The Photographer 
Staff Sgt. James L. Harper Jr., United States Air Force  

[MichaelP]

We need about 300 more of them...

Mike

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

While we do need more very high tech aircraft like this, their future is likely to be either in a first precision attack role, or as a second echelon defense role.

This is because the strategy of the future is to produce armadas of much less expensive, much lower tech drone aircraft. Many countries can easily afford to produce hundreds, or even thousands of such aircraft for the price of a single $150m Raptor.

Think of it as the 10th generation of the German V-1 buzz bomb, with an off the shelf PC microprocessor to guide its simple controls. Two models: one as a flying 1000lb bomb, and the other with a simple anti-aircraft machine gun. Shielded electronics to protect them from AESA radar overload.

A Raptor could easily kill six or eight of them at a time, but if there are eighty in the air, the Raptor would likely lose. As the Chinese would say, using an old analogy of theirs, “And thus the mighty dragon is overwhelmed and eaten by a multitude of rats.”