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F-22 Raptor Cancelled
Posted by
timothy
on Wed Jul 22, 2009 01:25 PM
from the waiter-there's-a-fly-in-my-fighter dept.
from the waiter-there's-a-fly-in-my-fighter dept.
BayaWeaver writes "Slate reports that the F-22 Raptor has been cancelled by the Senate. At an estimated price tag of $339 million per aircraft, even the powerful military-industrial-congressional complex couldn't keep this Cold War program alive in these hard times. They look very cool though and have appeared in movies like Hulk and Transformers. But not to worry too much about the future of the military-industrial-congressional complex: the F-35 Lightning II begins production next year!
As a side note, in 2007 a squadron of Raptors became deaf, dumb and blind when they flew over the International Date Line."
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IT: Software Bug Halts F-22 Flight 579 comments
mgh02114 writes "The new US stealth fighter, the F-22 Raptor, was deployed for the first time to Asia earlier this month. On Feb. 11, twelve Raptors flying from Hawaii to Japan were forced to turn back when a software glitch crashed all of the F-22s' on-board computers as they crossed the international date line. The delay in arrival in Japan was previously reported, with rumors of problems with the software. CNN television, however, this morning reported that every fighter completely lost all navigation and communications when they crossed the international date line. They reportedly had to turn around and follow their tankers by visual contact back to Hawaii. According to the CNN story, if they had not been with their tankers, or the weather had been bad, this would have been serious. CNN has not put up anything on their website yet." The Peoples Daily of China reported on Feb. 17 that two Raptors had landed on Okinawa.
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Poor Title (Score:5, Informative)
Reading the title and summary would make you think that the entire program has been cancelled and the planes aren't going to be used by the US military. This is not the case. The Senate reduced the number of aircraft being produced such that no additional planes will be made. The F22 is already in service and will remain in service for quite some time.
Re:Poor Title (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Poor Title (Score:5, Funny)
The cost is also a little misleading. Additional units cost ~$130M each (which is still expensive as hell), the $339M figure is total program cost plus build cost divided out per aicraft. That number only decreases the more we produce. So if we ordered another singe aircraft, it would not cost $339M.
If that is the case then why don't we keep building them until they are free? As a bonus, we will have an unstoppable Air Force. Oh wait, we already did before the F-22.
Parent
Re:Poor Title (Score:5, Informative)
The per unit cost is so high because, unlike past US-built fighters and the upcoming F-35, it is illegal to build an F-22 and sell it to another country, per Congressional mandate. Because there are no other customers available besides the US, and because the US has enough of them (for now), there's no way to take advantage of the economies of scale that could be brought to bear with continued production.
Parent
Re:Poor Title (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, come on. The only country with an air force REMOTELY competitive with the US is Russia, and if the US and Russia ever get in a war, a lot of good a few stealth fighters will be. There is a REASON the superpowers haven't fought a real war since WWII. Did you miss the whole Cold War thing?
In terms of AF size, China comes in a distant second (about 1/3 the size of the US, and made up largely of ancient MiG21s)
Plus, the US has *12* nuclear powered supercarriers that can take about 90 aircraft each anywhere in the world. Take just 4 of those carriers and it outnumbers the entire air force of all but about 10 countries worldwide.
Congress made the right decision. We have spent trillions of dollars on mega-defense projects and equipment has largely been totally unnecessary apart from a show of force to the rest of the world. The fact is, US really doesn't need to keep building $140M fighter planes in today's political landscape (the USAF already has over 180 of them!) Which is good, because we can't AFFORD to anyway...
Parent
Re:Poor Title (Score:4, Informative)
Russia and France both have fighters in development on par with the F22. Russia, in particular, may not have many qualms about selling that fighter to foreign buyers who don't much care for the US.
Parent
Re:Poor Title (Score:4, Insightful)
France isn't known for checking with us before they sell military hardware, either.
Actually the worst offender in this arena isn't France or Russia -- it's our "major ally" Israel. At least when the French and Russians sell hardware to our adversaries they are selling stuff that they designed with their own resources. The Israeli's are all to happy to sell stuff that we designed.
Parent
Re:Poor Title (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonsense. Israel has sold US technology ... to India, in order to keep Pakistan in check. How in the world does that make them "the worst offender"?
Parent
Re:Poor Title (Score:5, Informative)
That's not strictly true - the F-22 has a decent internal carriage capability. It can carry two JDAMs plus four missiles internally. For strategic bombing missions that's plenty. If you want saturation bombing, get yourself a B-52 :)
But yes, your general point is correct - expanding it's payload beyond that does tend to lose you the stealth characteristics.
Parent
Re:Poor Title (Score:4, Insightful)
If it was any other plane I'd agree with you but these things barely get into the air before breaking down.
The F-14 did the same thing when it was first deployed until the Navy worked the bugs out of it. Once they did it was arguably the best carrier-borne air superiority aircraft of all time.
As with any complex system it's going to take time to fully integrate it and work the kinks out of the program. I don't pretend to know exactly how many F-22s we need but I do know that once you terminate production it's not a simple matter to start it back up again. That's why I said that we could find ourselves regretting this decision if we find ourselves in a conflict with an actual Great Power.
Parent
Re:Poor Title (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm blowing my mod points to respond, but I had to: The way things are going, the F-22 will never get the bugs worked out because it's NEVER been used in combat. According to the NYT article [nytimes.com]:
So great, we've already spent billions of dollars on a plane that is not helping us win the wars we are currently fighting. Fat lot of good it will do us to have incredible advantage to fight against China or someone else in the future if we lose our current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The time to stop worrying about the future is when it started impinging on your ability to cope with the present. The F-22 is designed for a war that hasn't happened, but for the price of ONE F-22 ($97 million), we can buy nearly NINE A-10 Warthogs ($11.7 million [wikipedia.org] each), which actually do help us win our current wars. The F-22 should have been canceled, and more so, 187 should never have been bought in the first place.
Parent
Re:Poor Title (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, now you're nitpicking.
Parent
Re:Poor Title (Score:5, Interesting)
I have news for you: China is funding our wars.
They don't need to fight us. What, are they going to fund our war against China, too?
Parent
Re:Poor Title (Score:5, Insightful)
As with any complex system it's going to take time to fully integrate it and work the kinks out of the program. I don't pretend to know exactly how many F-22s we need but I do know that once you terminate production it's not a simple matter to start it back up again. That's why I said that we could find ourselves regretting this decision if we find ourselves in a conflict with an actual Great Power.
FTFA:
No U.S. soldier has been killed by an enemy aircraft since 1951.
Production of F-35s actually starts next year and ... the FY 2010 budget contains money to build 30 of them. In other words, Levin said, "There is no gap."
As someone more knowledgeable than me on another forum eloquently put it:
The F-22 was more of a research project put into production because of it's gee-whiz capabilities, the F-35 offers a platform to refine those capabilities in a much more capable product for the threats that we face.
Parent
Re:Poor Title (Score:5, Interesting)
My understanding is that the F-22 is much superior as an air-superiority fighter, but the F-35 has more air to ground capabilities. The difficulty with the F-22 is that the F-15 is still the most dominant air superiority fighter in the world, and because of the cost involved in making anythign remotely better, is likely to stay that way for a good long time. The "Super Power" enemies, such as they are, relied on a greater number of less capable aircraft because they couldn't afford the price of the nicer aircraft. So in some ways, the cost of the F-22 making fewer units practical plays into the hypothetical "Super Powers" hand.
The other factor to maintaining air superiority is the AWACS platforms which can direct the air war over very large distances. I think the West, and the US in particular has a huge advantage in that as well. Plus, as far as protecting our airspace goes, mounting air to air missiles on UAVs is just as easy as air to ground. So we would likely use those to counter any numerical superiority that our hypothetical "Super Power" posses as well.
Finally, FWIW, I subscribe to the two level theory of war. The first level is the infantry, the second level is everything else: it exists to support the infantry since only the infantry can take and hold ground. Artillery, sea power, aviation, even tanks can deny the enemy ground, but only the infantry can hold it. So more A-10s putting more ordance where the infantry needs it seems a better deal than F-22's holding air superiority over a non-existant enemy air force. IMHO.
Parent
Re:Poor Title (Score:5, Insightful)
Conventional fighting these days is done against guys hiding in caves in third-world countries, and the F-22 does precisely nothing to help in those scenarios.
Parent
Re:Poor Title (Score:5, Insightful)
>> "You'll be eating those words when China unveils their brand new designed-in-secret anti-ICBM system."
China doesn't have to engage us in war. If they ever get pissed at the U.S., all they have to do is stop investing in our economy and call in all our notes.
We won't be able to buy ammo or fuel to attack or defend against anything, then. Instant capitulation.
Now, that's a scenario that we should be fear.
-dZ.
Parent
Re:Poor Title (Score:5, Informative)
China's GDP in 2008 $3.9-$4.4 trillion [wikipedia.org], so their trade with the U.S. accounted for about 9.3%-10.5% of their economy.
So economically, China needs the U.S. more than the U.S. needs China.
Parent
Re:Poor Title (Score:5, Informative)
Interesting? Wrong more like. The cost of the program is $39,000M + 187 * $130M. The marginal cost per plane is $130M. $209M of the $339M is the upfront R&D costs, and that money has already been spent. /. should replace the new account captcha with a math exam.
Parent
Re:Poor Title (Score:5, Insightful)
So, now the F-22 is nothing more than a jobs program? A regular GOP stimulus package, huh?
How about we take the money and have those same people build high speed rail? The jobs will last longer and Americans will actually benefit. Plus, high-speed trains have a use beyond killing people (though, to be fair, the F-22 is probably the least efficient way to kill someone ever devised).
Parent
Re:Poor Title (Score:5, Interesting)
I heard a story about this on NPR yesterday.
We've already paid for 187 of them.
Also, the $300-odd million figure does not include maintenance.
According to the NPR source, maintenance on the F-22 is vastly more expensive than on an F-15 or F16.
Apparently, we are buying a couple thousand F-35s anyway, which is - again NPR - "only slightly less capable, but far less expensive".
Parent
Re:Poor Title (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Which seems to make sense over all (Score:5, Informative)
The F-22 is a cool plane, but there are only so many the US really needs. Reason is that they are not carrier based planes, which is how a great many missions are done these days. It also is more or less strictly air superiority, not multi-role. Ok well there is value in that, while there may not be any current threats to the US, doesn't mean there won't be. You don't have good defense, in the real world or on your computer, by staying complacent. However that doesn't mean that there is the need or reason to roll out tons of the things.
The F-35 is more suited to a larger scale production because it is multi-role, and carrier capable. Thus with it likely to come out soon (next year if they remain on target) it doesn't make sense to produce a ton of F-22As. The F-35 also has the advantage of having a good deal of support from other nations, which helps pay for R&D and will also bring unit costs down in the form of increased orders.
So it makes sense to keep the F-22 around for when top-notch air defense is needed, it doesn't make sense to keep building them if an all around more useful plane is going to be coming out. Use what is complete, and use the research from the project on other projects (like the F-35).
Parent
Re:Which seems to make sense over all (Score:5, Informative)
They blow up other aircraft :D.
In terms of what makes a good air superiority fighter these days, it is a number of things:
1) Stealth. If the enemy can't see you, they can't shoot at you. Thus if your aircraft has a low radar signature and thermal signature, you have an upper hand. That was one of the big design characteristics of the F-22A. You'll notice that it very rarely has weapons on the outside. The missiles are instead kept in internal bays. The bays pop open, eject a missile and close quickly. Makes it a hard aircraft to find.
2) Maneuverability. Even though you aren't dodging bullets any more, dodging is still important. This is in part because no matter how good a missile is, it can still be fooled and evaded. However it is more because to get a missile off, a plane has to have another plane in its sights. So you need to maneuver behind the other guy, then he can't shoot you and you can shoot him.
3) Communications. This is important for any military vehicle, but particularly fighter craft. A bomber can very well be given targets back at the base and then sent on its way. It follows a pre setup flight plan, unless it has to evade enemy fire. Not so for a fighter. Your objective is to track the enemy fighters/bombers and engage them. More, you want to approach them in such a way they don't notice you. Well having an AWACS tell you where to go via radio is good. Having the AWACS directly cross link target and navigation data to your computer is better (the F-22A does this). Having fighters than can then take over and act as mini-AWACS in the event an AWACS is lost or unavailable is even better (the F-22A does this too). You need to be able to locate targets and coordinate an attack.
4) Speed. Part of what makes a good fighter good is the ability to be where it needs to be, when it needs to be there. If you've incoming attack craft, you don't have the luxury of waiting. You need to hit them before they are in range of their target. Means your craft has to be able to go extremely fast when needed, even if that means having less payload.
So it isn't as though multi-role craft can't play fighter, and indeed they do, it is just that you can optimize a craft for the fighter role. Same deal with a bomber. The B-2B is a good example of a pure bomber. It can't defend itself, it is slow, it is larger, etc. All it does is drop a LOT of bombs, and do so unnoticed (hopefully).
The F-35 should hopefully be the jack of all trades. Should be a good fighter, good bomber, good attack craft and so on. However as such it is likely to never be quite as good a pure fighter as the F-22A.
Parent
Re:Poor Title (Score:4, Informative)
And even that may be a bit misleading; the Senate eliminated funding for 7 additional F-22s that were proposed to be ordered, limiting the total run to 187, which includes not just planes which have already been delivered but also some that have previously been ordered which have not yet been delivered, so it is not the case that "no additional planes will be made", at least if by "additional" one means "additional to those that have already been made", rather than "additional to the ones already planned to be made".
Parent
Re:Poor Title (Score:5, Informative)
Having read about the F-35 [wikipedia.org], I can see why the administration and the Pentagon would favor it over the F-22.
-l
Parent
Re:Poor Title (Score:5, Insightful)
Is there a nation on earth that can f**k with 187 F-22s, the thousands of F-35s we have planned, not to mention the thousands of F-14, F-15, and F-16s that we already have?
I doubt it.
This isn't starcraft.
There are other things to spend money on besides weapons.
Parent
Re:Poor Title (Score:5, Interesting)
I do believe in designing and building these things to stay sharp, but not thousands of copies in peacetime. (And yes, this is "peacetime" so far as the F22 is concerned - they have flown 0 sorties over Iraq and Afghanistan, and why would they?)
Parent
Re:Poor Title (Score:5, Funny)
no it wont. it requires extensive upgrades because the RAM or the skin of the aircraft cannot survive a rainstorm. it does not have a working heads up display on the helmet. the canopy blisters and peels with exposure to sunlight. it does not communicate with other aircraft because the electronics are deficient. it requires 44 HOURS of maint for every hour in the air. the raptor is a pile of crap and will eventually be phased out.
So it is a high maintenance dry night fighter. Reminds me of my girlfriend ...
Parent
Re:Poor Title (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Poor Title (Score:5, Interesting)
As another comparison, the cost per hour in 2008 was $19K, compared to the F15 which was $17k. History shows that this typically goes down as the plane matures and is ironed out
I'm not arguing it shouldn't have been cancelled, but to outright bash it isn't being honest either. I'm hoping we don't find ourselves in a situation where we were wishing it hadn't been canceled because that means we're in a much bigger mess than we currently are in Iraq/Af.
Parent
Re:Poor Title (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? Do they take off and land from 25,000 feet, too?
Each one of these planes requires 44 hours of maintenance for every hour in the air, as someone has already mentioned. They are obsolete, and they have gone over budget by a factor of 3 or more.
The F-22 is now, and has always been, a boondoggle granted to military contractors by lawmakers who get large contributions from those contractors. As far as I know, no F-22 has ever flown a combat mission. They cost hundreds of millions of dollars and have never been used.
Meanwhile, we fight over whether a working family should have the god-given right to go bankrupt if one of their members gets sick.
Parent
Re:Poor Title (Score:5, Funny)
>> As far as I know, no F-22 has ever flown a combat mission.
The F-22 fought with some distinction against the decepticons in Transformers. They suffered heavy losses, but the proof of their effectiveness as shown in this documentary was enough to convince congress to keep funding the project.
There are also several novels out there that provide additional hard proof of their combat effectiveness.
Parent
Re:Poor Title (Score:5, Funny)
Marvellous. If ever the Russkies start a simulated war, we'll be knocking on the simulated door of the Kremlin in two weeks.
Parent
Only $339 million each? (Score:5, Funny)
With the way the gov't is throwing money I'm surprised anything under a billion registers on their radar. They've probably got rounding errors (intentional or not) that could pay for a whole squadron of these.
communications problems (Score:5, Insightful)
they have problems communicating with other planes:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/09/AR2009070903020_4.html?hpid=topnews&sid=ST2009071001019 [washingtonpost.com]
and don't seem to like the rain:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_07/019076.php [washingtonmonthly.com]
among other things like jammed canopies.
And it's funny too. People who don't like unions, bloated government and stimulus packages seem to think the government owes them a job when it comes to flawed weapons systems and unneeded military bases.
But it's nice to see A10s and B52s still in service. Made dack when the US actually knew how to build something.
Remote Drones (Score:5, Interesting)
Fighters are needed less and less now a days, if we want air superiority we can just put up dozens of cheap drones with Air-to-Air missiles with remote pilots. I am pretty sure they would not cost $100+ millions each either.
Good riddence (Score:4, Insightful)
These programs have become unsustainable. There's no reason for the F-22 to cost what it does. We're talking about runaway projects with padding to line the pockets of the military-industrial complex. This isn't about protecting the nation, this is about extracting wealth from the treasury. Defense contractors are doing more to harm the safety and security of this country than the long-haired hippies ever did.
The F-15 is still a world-beater. Why not just upgrade the avionics and fire up the assembly lines again? Retire the old airframes, field new ones.
Re:Most deserving (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't build them to use them, you build them so you don't have to use them. You also force anyone who thinks they need to counter them to spend resources on developing and deploying the countermeasures.
Parent
Re:Most deserving (Score:5, Insightful)
What's amusing to me is that if you want to education or health care funded in the US, you have to lobby Congress like hell to fund it.
Conversely, if you are the head of the Department of Defense and don't need or want a pointless weapons program, you have to lobby Congress like hell not not fund it.
Parent
Re:Most deserving (Score:5, Funny)
What's amusing to me is that if you want to education or health care funded in the US, you have to lobby Congress like hell to fund it.
What's amusing to me is that people think education or health care is a proper role for the Federal Government.
What's amusing to me is that people think education or health care is a proper role for unaccountable entities whose primary responsibility is profit.
Parent
Re:How many soldiers die if 187 F-22s aren't enoug (Score:5, Insightful)
Only because the U.S. doctrine has been to have total air superiourity and the Air Force (and Navy) have been able to achieve it through superiour technology (and training) --- if 187 Raptors aren't sufficient to achieve that in some future conflict, a lot of soldiers are going to die, and that statement will cease to be true.
William
Yeah - or you could just stop invading countries. That's a good way of keeping your soldiers from dying.
Parent
Re:How many soldiers die if 187 F-22s aren't enoug (Score:5, Informative)
if 187 Raptors aren't sufficient to achieve that in some future conflict
Which conflict would that be? It's not the ones we are in now, which we're going into astronomical debt over. I don't know who has an air force that would rival us, but I'd guess China and North Korea. Either way, we can't afford it even with these cuts. In fact, I think/hope we can't afford to fight ANY more unilateral wars against ANYONE.
Any war/conflict in which 187 raptors is insufficient is a war our economy is also insufficient for.
Parent
Re:How many soldiers die if 187 F-22s aren't enoug (Score:5, Insightful)
A good way to solve this would be to stop being the world police and pissing everyone off.
So you think that America would be better off for that? You may be right, it's hard to say. I wonder though at the 'pissing everyone off' part being better for everyone else.
America has certainly done a lot of damage around the world, but they've also done a lot of good. I'd say, on the whole, it has been more good than bad. At the end, some nation, somewhere, is going to have the strongest military. For all my problems with America, I can't pick a different nation I'd rather see as the strongest. Unfortunately the real world doesn't require that a perfect, or even good option exist, merely a choice of options from which you take what you can get and try to improve upon it. In my book America is a better starting point than any other nation.
I also am sure many would argue about the world being better off if America just minded it's own business. For all that people argue the good America has done in removing or fighting worse governments/dictators, the other side declares it would be better if America did not do so, that things would be better if those wars were not fought. For proof one can easily point to Africa and the fact America has no interest there because there is no profit in it. This would seem to prove that America is acting selfishly. I would point out that just because it is selfish, doesn't mean that it isn't also in the better interest of the civilians of the affected region. Disagree? Look no further than the original example. Which region is better off, the American manipulated Middle-East or the Africa it ignores?
For every Saddam that America is damned for warring against, there is an African genocide like Rwanda it is not being damned for ignoring. I used to be alongside the peaceniks in damning America for going into Iraq because they failed to go into a place like Darfur where people needed the help even more. I've now realized that if I really think they should be damned for not going into Darfur, it was contradictory to damn them for removing a genocidal dictator like Saddam.
Parent
Re:How many soldiers die if 187 F-22s aren't enoug (Score:5, Interesting)
Even if everyone in the US unanimously decided that we were no longer going to meddle in international affairs other nations will inevitably drag us back into them due to the simple fact that we're an economic superpower. It's unavoidable.
And the US government already spends plenty on social programs. The problem, like with this F-22 program, is that the money isn't being spent wisely. The US in general already spends more on education per student than most countries, and many areas, including the city where I live spends close to double what any other country spends. And yet education is by and large crap compared to other countries. The reason isn't because we're not spending enough money, it's because we're not managing anything properly and have this idiotic notion that more money will fix anything.
And back to my original point, there are a lot of nations out there that could potentially become a threat in the future. I realize some people hold the believe that love will fix anything, but there are many more who disagree and may try to take advantage. China might currently be behind the US, but they sure are working hard to catch up, working on their own advanced fighter. Russia may not currently be a threat to the US, but they are working hard on their own competitors to the F22 and will certainly be selling the aircraft to China.
That said, it made sense to cut back the F-22 program although it really is a drop in the bucket compared to how much the government is spending.
Parent
Re:The Lightning is no replacement for the Raptor (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:The Lightning is no replacement for the Raptor (Score:4, Informative)
Wow - it's not paranoia if everyone really is out to get you, right? Get at least your facts straight. Republicans and Democracts voted for the bill, and Republicans and Democrats voted against it. Not to mention that Gates, a Republican, Air Force and Joint Chief of Staffs didn't want to continue the purchase program. I don't know how you lump those people into the group of Obama's lunatic lefties.
How's the weather on your little planet?
Parent
That liberal lunatic lefty John McCain (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, it's not like that liberal left lunatic John McCain guy knows anything about war fighting and fighter aircraft.
Here's a clue for you: Levin-McCain Amendment.
People like you are never wrong.
Parent
Re:R&D (Score:5, Informative)
So one F22 (properly maintained and competently piloted) is equal to how many old F16s?
Many. In war games, single F-22s often take out entire squadrons of F-16s before they're even seen on radar.
http://www.acc.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123041831 [af.mil]
Parent
Re:Bad move (Score:5, Informative)
Thank you, Congress, for sacrificing the nation's safety so you can buy up the problems of those who make bad decisions. Not going to sacrifice power for their bad decisions, t.
Actually, the people who were OPPOSED to continued F-22 production include the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of the Air Force, and other top brass. The only people who are FOR the continued production are members of Congress whose districts include the defense contractors who build the plane, and those contractors themselves.
IOW, the MILITARY does not want any more of these planes.
Parent