F-22 Raptor Cancelled 829
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."
Re:Poor Title (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
What a horrible summary! (Score:3, Interesting)
The F-22 is already in service! They just cancelled the next order of planes.
I agree with this decision. The F-35 is still a better fighter than just about anything else out there, and is also an excellent multi-role attack craft. Not to mention much cheaper per unit than an F-22.
The value of the F-22 lies in that it is probably the best fighter in the world for many years. Any adversary who intends to fight a conventional war against the US (cricket... cricket... but hey, we do expect our military to be prepared, so I'm not complaining) has to act as if the most badass fighter in the world will be contesting air superiority. That is a healthy kick towards solving things with diplomacy.
Re:The F-35 Lightning II is bad-ass, btw (Score:3, Interesting)
The F-35 isn't really a raptor replacement, it is a supplement. The F-22 is still likely to be the best air superiority fighter. However, that is really all it is good for. It is land based only, and not really suited for multi-role operations. It CAN be fitted to do bombing but not near as well as the F-35.
So what is likely to happen is the F-22 will remain active in air defense roles, whereas the F-35 will become the principal aircraft used for strike missions. However, you really don't need so many air-defense only craft. Good idea to have around on the just in case of a major conflict, but not the sort of thing you need tons of.
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.
F22 and F35 cost nearly the same (apples2apples) (Score:3, Interesting)
F-35 Flyaway Unit Cost
FY2011: $124.580 million (24 per year)
F-22 Flyaway Unit Cost
FY2007: $136.826 million (20 per year)
A bird in the hand is better than 2 in the bush. I'd bet F35 ends up costing just as much as F22.
Give me more F22s and fewer F35s.
Re:But they're a bargain if you buy them in bulk (Score:1, Interesting)
if the US happened to be going up against a nuclear power in some sort of Great Power battle, the losing side probably wouldn't care how good the enemy's aircraft are.
Re:Sucks for us (in Marietta, GA) (Score:2, Interesting)
Who's building the F-35's that were mentioned in the summary?
Oh yeah, probably China.
Re:Remote Drones (Score:3, Interesting)
Right on. If your metric is (military power)/(cost) then these planes would have to be *extremely* deadly for them to make more sense than drones.
Re:Remote Drones (Score:3, Interesting)
Not only that but,
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.
Re:Poor Title (Score:3, Interesting)
Ever heard of a limit equation? The total cost of an individual airframe will decrease infinitely closer to the manufacturing cost, and the number of unit increases to infinity.
Are you the CEO of GM by chance? That sounds like their "sell cars at a loss, and make it up in volume" plan.
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?)
Re:Poor Title (Score:1, Interesting)
Reason58: "As a bonus, we will have an unstoppable Air Force. Oh wait, we already did before the F-22."
Did you ever think that the deterrent created by the F-22 is one of the primary reasons we have an "unstoppable Air Force?" Based on your faulty assumptions, the answer is clearly "no."
If we continue to dismantle our defenses as the Democrats have to this point, our Air Force and other branches of military won't be "unstoppable" for long. Hope that stimulus and all of the other Democrat hand-outs was worth it.
Cost vs Return (Score:3, Interesting)
The pricetag on all this fancy military hardware goes up to beyond reasonable returns. We're losing the war to Al-Queda where their costs are nearly nothing (I suppose sending a fundamentalist nutjob to suicide bomber school is rather cheap) and the 2 Billion dollar bomber (The B-2 Spirit) crashes in 2008 in Guam on the way to fight him. As a taxpayer I think we need to say enough is enough and I think Congress is seeing the light. As far as I'm concerned, "slightly less capable, and far less expensive" is the exact tact we need to take as a country in the midst of a crippling recession.
Until Al-Queda grows an Air Force what's wrong with our fleet of 80's movie aircraft (the F-15, F-16, etc) The Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore. North Korea? What are they flying these days? MIG 29S's (their few but modern units - which match to the F-15) and MIG 21's (a Vietnam era unit)
I dunno, but didn't the Nazis lose with the current "Overengineering, exepensive and too few versus" principle the US is using today to the "Just barely good enough, cheap and lots of them" principle we had in WWII? The Tiger vs the Sherman?
We lost our way.
it's wartime (Score:4, Interesting)
During war time, there should be no profit driven motivation for developing the military, period.
War industry employees should all work for subsistence wages, and really should be volunteers if not draftees. Industrial business should not even be allowed to take profits for the duration of war. If they must be paid, they should be paid in interest bearing war bonds that are redeemable upon victory. Take away the profit-driven parts of the equation, from raw materials down to workers being paid more than subsistence wages, and I'm sure the cost of these airplanes will be considerably lower per unit.
The stakes should be "winning the war so that the nation can continue to exist", not something that's even measurable in monetary value.
Re:Poor Title (Score:1, Interesting)
To quote a previous poster, "Sounds like somebody skipped Calculus 101 on the day they discussed the Mean Value Theorem."
So, it's OK to cancel the project, but don't dare talk bad about it.
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.
Re:Poor Title (Score:3, Interesting)
You must be joking. Israel has one of the most advanced electronic design industries in the world and, in particular, for avionics, aircraft, radar systems and such.
If there is any sharing of technology, it generally goes the other way around - from Israel to the "major ally" US which is all to happy to get those technologies for free, while constantly denying Israel ability to sell fruits of their own work and benefit financially (even though quite obviously countries to which Israel sells its technology are generally not considered hostile to US). In fact, in more recent times Israel is attempting to sell to China in spite of US restrictions precisely because US can't really interfere in dealings with China anymore (Israel may be small and easy to push around by US, whereas China is big and powerful and right now has quite a bit of leverage against US, so a baby gets what a baby wants).
Re:Poor Title (Score:2, Interesting)
F14's were designed during the coldwar to reach out and smack soviet bombers before they could launch their missiles at carriers (possibly nuclear). They had an important role to play. Just because we were lucky enough to never have to use them for what they were built for doesn't make them useless. The F22 is somewhat more capable as an air superiority jet than the F35, but is lesser in every other capacity.
All shit aside, for what the worthless Iraq war has cost us, we could have built an F22 for every pilot we have. They would be totally invisible and yet have a wicked paint job too.
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?
Re:Poor Title (Score:1, Interesting)
Name one good example of this.
What is up with the mods today, an obvious troll with no factual basis gets modded +5!?
Re:Poor Title (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree that the Russians make some amazing planes. Better than the F-22 IMO. I would suggest that we build SU-37s under license, with domestic avionics. But keep their short range missiles. If the Russians have one major advantage it isn't the quality of their fighters, it is the freakish performance of their dogfight missiles.
Re:Poor Title (Score:4, Interesting)
The whole needing F-22s if we ever get into a conventional war with a Great Power thing is a canard. Great Powers have nuclear weapons, so conventional wars aren't possible; we send in F-22s and 8 hours later half the planet is glass.
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.
Actually, that was the thinking after WWII, armies would not be needed because of nukes, navies would no longer be needed, etc. But the way it worked out, nobody wanted to risk all out nuclear warfare so we saw proxy wars fought all over the place, Korea and Vietnam and Afghanistan and the like. The presence of nukes means that conventional wars probably won't become all-out world wars for risk of someone popping a nuke but it won't push all warfare out of consideration.
I'm extremely hard-pressed to imagine a scenario where we would be in an all-out technology war, the kind that Tom Clancy wetdreams about. As you said, they're all brush-fire wars right now with our opponents being decidedly low-tech. China's about the only scenario I can imagine with a high-tech war breaking out and that's still unlikely because we wouldn't dare risk fighting the guys who hold all our debt and sell us all our cheap plastic shit.
History is replete with examples of nations not properly assessing their threats and getting blindsided. But usually not everyone is surprised. A good example is with Japan. Pearl Harbor was a bolt from the blue for people who weren't paying attention to foreign affairs. It was not a surprise to the Navy who had been conducting exercises against mock Japanese forces for years, aka the "orange" navy. The Navy's only surprise was that the attack happened at Pearl and not in the Philippines. Congress had authorized more war spending in the period leading up to WWII but were slow about it because they still believed that Isolationism might still work.
But seriously, the F-22 is a cold war vestige and simply does not accurately reflect the current state of the battlefield. Shit, they were conducting the fly-off back when I was in jr. high! I think it was around '90 or so that they picked the 22 over the 23. I know this is some complex shit we're talking about but it still shouldn't take this long and cost this much.
Re:How many soldiers die if 187 F-22s aren't enoug (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Poor Title (Score:3, Interesting)
"it does not communicate with other aircraft because the electronics are deficient."
Where do we get these "experts"
The avionics are not deficient. The F-22 and for that matter F-35 don't use the old Link-16 data link that current aircraft use. They use a new low probability of intercept data link that hasn't been installed on the older aircraft. Putting a Link-16 on those aircraft would make them none stealthy.
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.
Re:Poor Title (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, bullshit. Most Great Powers have enough sense not to commit suicide. Nuclear war would only occur if we "march into Berlin" again (well, okay, the Ruskies did it, but you get my point). Instead of Der Fuhrer blowing his brains out, he would push the nuclear button. Basically, it does not rule out conventional warfare. It simply rules out total warfare, as practiced in the barabaric 20th century (as opposed to these enlightened times, of course ^_^).
Re:Poor Title (Score:4, Interesting)
I brought up the multiple support levels because the F-22 is extremely expensive for filling a role that isn't actually needed. It was meant to convey how far from supporting the troops its purpose is when compared to toher aircraft.
Re:Poor Title (Score:3, Interesting)
The other three fighter craft available to the USAF were commissioned in 1976 (F-15), 1978 (F-16), and 1988 (F-15E). I know that the F-15 (I assume it's the 1970s units) have been exhibiting structural failures that have cost the loss of several craft and the grounding of all units a couple of times in recent years.
Is there a reason we can't build new F-15E airframes?
It would be pretty easy for a foreign power (Russia and China) to have a modern aircraft that can out perform something we designed and built 30+ years ago.
Would it? The F-22 project started over twenty years ago. And, as far as I know, the only thing out there that can top our F-15s to this day are our own F-22s. What planes are out there that we need the F-22 so badly for? (that's an actual question btw, not a rhetorical device).
The F-22 out-rates the F-35 by every metric, even though it will be 6 years older.
Unless your metrics include things like: size of landing strip required, ability to be carried on an aircraft carrier, or suitability for any mission that isn't killing other fighter planes.
Here's a metric raised by Sec Def Gates: Utility in any conflict we are fighting now, or in the foreseeable future. The F-22 is a big ol' fail by that metric. And that's a pretty important one!
What's important is, going forward, is whether it's better to buy 2 F-22s, or 3 F-35s... If it's me, I would always choose to build more of the superior plane as long as the extra cost isn't too high, and I don't consider the extra cost to be too different in this case.
I would always choose to build more of the plane that you could use more of because it is superior in more situations. I would build fewer of the plane that is useful in fewer situations.
The F-22 is a superior aircraft for one thing and one thing only: air superiority. Great. Now, how many conflicts are we going to be in between now and when the F-22 is itself as aged and obsolete as the F-15 where we don't have air superiority by default? And in this hypothetical scenario, exactly how many superior Air Superiority fighters do you need? Once you've achieved dominance in the air you need to make use of your air power to influence the conflict on the ground. Having a plane that can then switch to attack or strategic bombing missions, or that can be moved to relevant areas via aircraft carrier, is very important. Every "superior" fighter you bought beyond what you needed to achieve air dominance is 1.5 planes you could have had for relevant missions.
The F-22 is fine and all, and yes it's good that we have such a capable fighter in the event that achieving air superiority requires it. But we absolutely should not be building solely those at the exclusion of a more versatile fighter like the F-35. That makes absolutely no strategic or financial sense. 187 is enough.
Re:Poor Title (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Poor Title (Score:1, Interesting)
Well, yeah, there are better tools available for "saturation" or "carpet" bombing, hehe. But the JSF has the capability of carrying bombs internally as well and one model is designed to do just that. Overall, I believe the aerodynamics of the F-35 are superior to the "must have expensive equipment and code on board" of the F-22 and make it more pilot friendly. :)
Just don't get me wrong here.. I am not knocking the F-22 at all. It's a nice aircraft, but I think that, eventually, the F-35 in the more sophisticated versions can be more superior in almost any role, maybe even in the air-to-air combat role that the F-22 was supposedly built for.
Re:Poor Title (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Poor Title (Score:3, Interesting)
People who fear China will "call in" their treasury obligations don't know what they are talking about. First, China can't call in their treasury obligations as they are not callable. Second, all treasuries are denominated in dollars, thus it is impossible for the US to default (the US can always inflate its way out by printing more dollars, devaluing the currency and screwing China in the process).
So as long as debt instruments from the US are denominated in dollars, the US cannot, by definition, default on the debt. Sure, we could go the way of the Weimar Republic, become the economical equivalent of herpes, and collapse our own economy, but we won't default on the treasury debts.
The first point (the trade imbalance) hits closer to the mark, but doesn't cover the whole picture. You see, our imports only account for a fraction of the overall imbalance in trade. Many US corporations have facilities in China either directly or through third parties. So while goods imported represents a small portion of our overall economy, the economic transactions between the US and China a far more significant.
From that standpoint, we need China more than they need us. If China were to cut off all economic ties, it would take a lot of companies here down (a disadvantage of outsourcing). They'd be feeling it too to be sure, however they really don't outsource much of their manufacturing/production here.
Of course, the whole picture is a lot more complicated than that. At any rate, it is exceptionally unlikely to happen.
~X~
Re:Poor Title (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually it was McDonnell Douglas who sued the DoD and initially won the case for Breach of Contract and was awarded $500M in damages. Just recently it was reversed by an appellate court, but the legal fight there isn't over yet as Boeing is going to continue to fight it.
However, what Mac did get right was the Super Hornet. Project came in on time and under budget and turned the hornet into an effective bombing platform.
That being said, what we need is a new A-10. Something that can fly low and slow and dish out a lot of death.
Re:Poor Title- Moron (Score:1, Interesting)
You farking idiot. Do you have anything, anything at all, to back up what you're saying????
In February of 2004, a group of F15c's from the 3rd fighter wing at Elmendorf flew to India for a little head-to-head tactical. The pilots were the absolute best I've ever worked for. The Indian Air Force flew Russian SU-30's, and absolutely handed our guys their asses in 9 out of ten encounters. Our F15's were outclassed from the moment they left the ground. There's a good reason to build the F-22:
You'll never win a war in the air, but you can stop the other guy from winning.
Re:Poor Title (Score:3, Interesting)
My point was that no one else has anything yet that can compete with an F-15.
You can argue over where each specifically falls, but the Mig 29 and Sukoi 27/37 are at least competitive.