F-22 Was ‘Too Provocative’ to Send to Mideast: US Air Force
TOPICS:air forceF-22F-35Joint Strike FighterLockheed MartinRaptor
Posted By: Hope Hodge Seck August 2, 2016
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The F-35A will deploy around the world much sooner than the Air Force‘s other fifth-generation fighter did after achieving initial operational capability, the commander of Air Combat Command said Tuesday.
Air Force Gen. Herbert “Hawk” Carlisle, who announced to reporters at the Pentagon that the F-35A had achieved the IOC milestone, said while the F-22 Raptor did not see its first operational deployment until 2014, a decade after it reached IOC, the F-35 would not face the same obstacles.
“On a couple of occasions, we were going to send [the F-22] to different theaters and we didn’t because there were at least a group of people who thought that it was too provocative to send,” he said. “It was less about us not being able to or at least not wanting to; it was more about the message. … We didn’t send it to the Middle East, frankly because it was considered to be a provocative move to send the only 5th-generation fighter in the world to that environment.”
http://www.defensetech.org/2016/08/02/f-22-is-too-provocative-to-send-to-mideast-us-air-force/
