Why Did America Stop Building the Best Fighter Jet Ever?
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The F-22 Raptor seemed vulnerable to challenges from the start.
Kyle Mizokami [2]
In the late 1990s, the United States was at a post–Cold War apex as an aviation juggernaut. Not only did it have the largest fleet of combat aircraft in the world, it was also producing the only fifth-generation fighter in existence: the F-22 Raptor. By 2009, the U.S. government had turned against the fighter, and only 187 were produced. What happened to the F-22 program, and why?
There’s little doubt the F-22 Raptor is the greatest air superiority fighter of its time. The problem was that the fighter’s development went on for so long that its primary adversary, the Soviet air force, went out of business.
The F-22 also collided with current events, as the economic demands of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the lack of a peer adversary made a $300 million fighter plane, in the view of government officials at the time, an unsustainable cost. An economic recession—nearly a depression—that began in 2008 and only ended in 2010 was clearly another reason.
Source URL (retrieved on January 9, 2017):
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/why-did-america-stop-building-the-best-fighter-jet-ever-18981
