Everyone Who Wanted More F-22s Is Being Proven Right
Tyler Rogoway
Filed to: Raptor9/25/15 1:10pm
Everyone Who Wanted More F-22s Is Being Proven Right
As if they suddenly came to an epiphany, the United States Air Force brass is now admitting what many of us have been screaming about for so long: We didn’t build nearly enough F-22s, and the F-35 cannot simply pick up the slack. So why aren’t those who pushed so hard to cancel the F-22 program being held accountable?
By the mid 2000s, the F-22 was finally entering the fray as the world’s first true stealth fighter, offering a quantum leap in capability and performance when compared with anything else on the battlefield. It was a thoroughbred weapon system meant to shape the battlefield by vanquishing anything in the skies and neutering enemy air defenses, so that less capable combat aircraft could survive over the battle space. It was a high-end door kicker, the ultimate “anti-access” fighter.
At the same time that the Raptor was coming online and proving itself, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, of both the Bush and Obama Administrations, was calling for the F-22’s demise. This was said to be due to the aircraft cost and use as “only” an air-to-air, destruction of enemy air defense, and deep strike platform.
Everyone Who Wanted More F-22s Is Being Proven Right
Gates’s push for the Raptor’s demise came at the same time as the cost of examples of the jet were rapidly dropping. For the last batch of 60 of the super-fighters, the unit cost per jet was $137 million, which is pretty close to the cost of an “affordable” F-35A today – at a time when a similar number of F-35s have been built as F-22s, about 165 compared to the F-22’s 187.
Costs were slated to have continued to drop if another lot of about 53 jets were built to meet the Air Force’s stated minimum fleet size requirement of 243 airframes. But it never happened.
Instead the F-22 was cast off and all of the USAF’s fighter chips were put into the very much unproven F-35 bucket. Gates justified chopping the F-22 as he wanted aircraft to “fight the wars we are in today, and the scenarios we are most likely to face in the years ahead.” Considering air superiority and destruction of enemy air defenses is an absolute must for any conflict (aside for ones with totally permissible airspace), this was a very near-sighted evaluation, and as it turns out, prediction of the future.
Gates further rationalized his decision:
To sustain U.S. air superiority, I am committed to building a fifth generation tactical fighter capability that can be produced in quantity at sustainable cost. Therefore I will recommend increasing the buy of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
A misleading statement if there ever was one, as it’s impossible to build something in quantity at a sustainable cost when you’re not willing to build it in great enough numbers so that a sustainable cost is achievable. It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg scenario, but at some point, the costs eventually balance out.
For the F-22, that point was rapidly approaching.
The F-22 was by many accounts on the verge of a cost breakthrough that would have sent its unit cost plunging well below the $100 million line. Gates later said:
We have fulfilled the program. It’s not like we’re killing the F-22. We will have 187 of them... The military advice that I got was that there is no military requirement for numbers of F-22 beyond 187.
Considering that the minimum the Air Force said they could operate with was 243, this statement seems less than true. And that number was last ditch compromise, the real bottom-line fleet size the USAF required of the F-22 was around 339 jets, which itself was dropped drastically from the original number of around 750 jets originally envisioned. At 339 examples it was hoped that the F-15C/D force could have been retired.
Yet Gates was not alone in the push to cancel the F-22. The Bush administration was guilty of it too, although they were able to punt the final decision to the Obama administration, who demanded it be cancelled with a sharp veto threat.
Everyone Who Wanted More F-22s Is Being Proven Right
Key Congressional figures like Senator John McCain also wanted the Raptor line shutdown. Their justifications ranged from the program’s expense, which was largely sunk costs for research and development over the aircraft’s 30-year gestation period, to statements proclaiming that China would not unveil a stealth fighter until late in the next decade, with no chance of it being operational until the mid to late 2020s. Today, China has two stealth fighters flying, the first one, the J-20, getting airborne well before the last F-22 even left the production floor. The timing of the J-20’s first flight also occurred while Secretary Gates was in Beijing meeting with top-level government officials. The event was a well planned propaganda affair that aimed to make Gates look bad for underestimating Chinese technological capabilities.
For F-22 supporters it was an unwanted vindication.
Another common argument against the F-22 was that the idea of America meeting Russian, or any near-peer state fighter aircraft, head-on in battle was a relic of the Cold War, and had no place in 21st century. Because of this, less potent, multi-role platforms were more of a necessity. Fast forward a half decade, and that statement is far from accurate. In fact, the F-22 just made its first deployment to Europe as part of a security package to deter Russian aggression and to reassure our NATO allies. The F-22 has also been regarded as a force multiplier in the air war against ISIS, itself attacking many targets with great precision from the first night of air strikes in Syria on.
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