Is the F-22 the Best in the World? Why?
Dave Majumdar
Yesterday at 10:58 AM
“Our role is to kick down the door,” 1st Fighter Wing commander, Col. Pete Fesler—a veteran F-22 Raptor pilot—said during a visit to Langley Air Force Base in Virginia.
With Russia and China deploying advanced new fighters and surface-to-air missiles (SAM), the task of gaining and maintaining air superiority over an increasingly more lethal battlespace falls to a small and elite group of U.S. Air Force pilots flying the mighty Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor.
Conceived during the waning years of the Cold War, the stealthy high-flying supersonically cruising Raptor was designed to defeat the most fearsome weapons the Soviet Union could hurl at the United States and NATO during a third world war in Europe. However, with the end of the Cold War and subsequent 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, the F-22 was left without a mission—or so it was thought. Indeed, the second Bush and Obama administrations cancelled the F-22 program in 2008 after only 195 aircraft—187 production planes—were ordered because they made the assumption that high-end state-on-state conflicts were a relic of the past. However, as it is becoming increasingly apparent, they were wrong.
http://www.scout.com/military/warrior/story/1733427-is-the-f-22-the-best-in-the-world-why
