One of biggest problems of the F-22 is that is was not developed with "exports" in mind. In the past F-4's, A-4's,F-15's, F-16's, F-18's, even F-14's were sold abroad (and I'm forgetting a lot of other aircraft). It made good financial sense. If the F-22 were built more modular, then a less "stealthy" version could still be sold on the international market to friendly governments. Case in point, Japan prefers the F-22 over the other EF-2000 but they can't buy it.

IMHO, for several reasons, Russia is not a trustworthy country. Specially after they let eastern europe countries' people freeze and die for not paying the russian gas taxes.

Who said anything about selling F-22's to Russia ?
I talked about friendly governments as in NATO, and other allies such as Israel and Japan. Where the hell did I mention Russia ?

Sorry for moving away from your topic.

:yeah:

The F-22 was planned for a wartime environment matching the expectations of a big war with Russia. A war with russia, like a war with China or India, is extremely unlikely nowadays, espiecially on a scale where deep interdiction missions would take place. For local defence, however, defeating enemy ground radar is not such a big argument than if you would fly into enemy territory, and that is true both for A-G AND A-A missions. That's why the Pentagon's dominant assessement is that defending own airspace is possible even without the overpriced and work-intensive interceptors like the F-22.

The war scenarios that are to be expected for the forseeable future do not include major global wars between the superpowers, but are of the kind that we currently see in Afghanistan and Iraq. We talk of assymmetrical wars of limited scale in underdeveloped countries. This is the kind of war America - and Europe as well - needs to prepare for. In such scenarios, an overpriced super-hightech-toy like the F-22 has no place. You do not even expose it to risk in such conflicts, because a single machine lost would cost you so dearly.

Seen that way, and accepting the reasonable need to face financial and economic realities of a nation being the biggest debtor on Earth, stopping the F-22 is the only reasonable option. I meanwhile learned that the price for the F-22 already has raised to almost 400 million per unit (389 million). A nation in a condition like the US cannot afford such expensive toys.

The eurofighter also is an expensive plane, but in no way it's german fly-away price of 65 million and full-package-price of 105 million compare to those 389 million price tag of the Raptor. Nevertheless in the war scenarios to be expected it, can do the job of the F-22 - but much more cost-efficient than the Raptor, and being more diverse in it's possible mission profiles. Defence plicies cannot escape economic realities, but are embedded in them. From that perspective, alternative planes like the Eurofighter make much more sense than the F-22. they remain to be more economic and reasonable even when hypothetically referring to those simulated results against the SU-35, where the F-22 got a ratio of 10:1 and the Eurofighter in second place with "only" 4:1. Considering maintenance times and costs, the Eurofighter still brings "more aircraft" into the air even when having not as high a kill score like the F-22. Saying that is grim towards the pilot finding himself in the actual combat situation, but the whole debate is hypthetical anyway.

Strying off a bit, but this nevertheless is part of defence spendings:
These days, with 12 trillion in debts and a ruinous budget balance, America simply cannot buy anything anymore just becasue it wants to have it. If you have looked at stockmarkets lately, you will have noted commentator's observations that investors have started in huge crowds to abandon US state bonds, and invest into resources instead. Many take this as a signal that now the final mass-fleeing of non-Us investors from US bonds is about to get started. If that is true, Obama's spending frenzy will prove to have no effect, and the economic crisis in fact is not even near to the real low point - even more when considering that latest wins ob Golden Sacks obviously only were obained by shopwing that one had learned nothing and fell back to the same kind of high-risk operations that have led us into the mess. In other words: the next crunch is already in the making.

But carrying on to spend for weapons and guns like crazy...? There is no terrorist and no taliban and no third world dictator who could care a single second about the F-22. Because they would never be in the crosshairs of it. what these guys care for are Predator drones, CAS, boots on the ground, helicopter gunships, mobile ground manouvers, telecommunication, artillery. Where is the F-22 in all that? Nowhere. I know that some people here are almost eager to see a big war coming with China or russia so that they can see all those gimmicks of the military coming into action and feeling like Audie Murphy in a warhero movie - but such a big war will not come, guys. Live with it. Because nobody launches such wars between great powers since WWII, if the economic gains do not compensate for the costs - no country on Earth could afford that anymore. There will be regional wars and asymmetrical wars, and plenty of them. But no unlimited global wars between great powers anymore. the likelihood to see some kind of nuclear war is bigger than the the chance for a major war between the Us and Russia, India, or Brazil.

(That's why Kapitan's thread on Europe declaring war on Russia - is pointless from A to Z.)

Hey, now in fairness to our friend, 9 out of every 10 threads on this forum are pointless from A to Z. If we were to cut out the pointless content, no one would have anything to talk about.

Out of curiosity, is there somewhere a comparison of modern aircraft with the cost -if updated- of a Spitfire or a Me 109 in the pre-WW2 days? Even if those planes were state of the art in their time, they probably are still way cheaper in comparative terms than the F22.

I overall agree with Skybird's estimation of the potential future wars, but would like to know how precise is this statement from Subman1:

Isn't the F-15 a good enough air superiority fighter?

:D Point taken.

One thing one would want to add to what already has been said, is this: since the F-22 has been polanned for a big war in which you would need all your ressources, you nevertheless would not want to need to depend on such a maintenance-heavy piece of equipement with a major failure taking place every 1.8 hours. you want reliable equipement, since it will be put under enormous stress in such a big war, and you want your equipement not sitting in hangars, but putting air presence up into the air, where it belongs. So, even if taking into account the original kind of war the Raptor was planned for, it would be an anachronism, due to it's economic inefficiency.

It seems to me that if you compare maintenance time as well as production costs per piece, the F-22 would need to reach an even much higher kill ratio to justify it'S enormous costs. referring to that (disputable, btw) simulation of duels against the SU-35, and the F-22 scoring a kill ratio of 10:1 and the Typhoon "just" 4:1, you compare this 2.5 times higher kill ratio against 3 times as high costs and 3-9 higher maintenance time - time in which the Typhoon is in the air and the Raptor sits in the hangar.

It depends on the kind of enemy you go against, and how it is used and supported by electronic networking. Comparisons of this kind are difficult, because not only the aircraft's flight characteristics adds to the formula, but also the tactic way it is being used, it's sensors and radar, IR and radar profile, and especially the kind of missiles it can support. Presence of friendly AWACS makes a big difference, too. the Russians built some hell of capable anti-tank- and long-ranging anti-air-missiles, and modern IR-missiles from Russian, American and Israeli production are practically impossible to evade. Some russian radar AA missiles outclass the American AMRAAM in range, they even built an IR missile with the range of a LR radar missile in the past. Their good missiles and their strong radars is what gives russian fighters their strength - I would not call the Su-30 or Su-35 a good dogfighter. But classical dogfighting is not the decisve factor in air combat anymore, since nay advantage one side has gets neutralised more and more the shorter the combat range is. You can neutralise that by a design like the F-22 - or by improving your own weapon's precision and range, which is the cheaper way to go, and is economically less prone to own equipment being shot down. By this logic I tend to think that possibly armed drones are indeed the future, they also remove the availabilty of pilots from the pilot pool from the formula. However, as the high number os civilian csualties in Pakistan and Afghanistan shows, drones are no wonder weapon and the way they are being used and their capabilities must be improved. currently they are still too unreliable as weapon-platforms.


Regarding the most likely scenarios we need to expect, this all is of not much more than academic value. Guerillas and Taleban do not run air forces and tank armies.

I just would wish we would stop to trade top notch tanks, combat airplanes and submarines to foreign countries. It is so very stupid to sell your sophisticated weapons just to anybody.

Pf course I meant against the average enemy the US or NATO might act; i.e. second or third line countries with not very advanced armies, or if having some advanced units, at least not a big amount of them. I think that war against any nuclear power is nowadays ruled out for two reasons:

1) Interdependency and globalization: China & Russia, as nuclear powers whose interest could eventually collide with the US would probably in case of war act on a different level: Economic war, energy war, food supply war (Russia is a big net importer of grain from north america IIRC) etc. and besides I don't see how they would really even get to lock horns seriously.

2) Even in the unlikely case of entering a war, the ultimate resource of nuclear war when cornered would probably make the conventional war unnecessary.

So I was mainly referring to countries like Iran, Venezuela, African countries, etc. against which a limited conventional war could eventually happen. Isn't the F-15 a good enough aircraft against them? I think it should be, and even if those countries managed to get a bunch of advanced russian fighters, I don't think they would play a big difference if everything else around them is more outdated and they haven't the electronics supposrt you mentioned.

But someone correct me if I wrong :hmmm:

Hah? I don't know if people died when Russia cut off their gas, but what did you really expect Russia to do. Give them gas for free? They aren't nearly rich enough to do that. If you really expect free gas to be handed out when people can't afford it, then perhaps you should think America should buy the gas for the East Europeans.

Someone's been reading Thomas Barnett. :DL

To be fair, the MTBF of the F-16C is supposedly only 2.9 hours (at least by Russian evaluation, but I don't have an American opinion on this). Even counting possible different definitions ... it is bad but not a relative disaster.

The overall cost per flying hour is higher for the F-22, but compared to the F-15 it's supposedly not even twice as high according to your article:
So it is arguably not such a disaster on the economic front. It would seem that most of the 30 hours is waiting for glue to dry - so it is irreducible, but presumably at least they are not man-hours.

The problem with just going for the above number is that they came from a 90s DERA analysis, with unknown assumptions, but it is not hard to see that the Typhoon's advantages are less robust than the F-22.

Might also remember that 2-2.5 times poorer kill ratio means 2-2.5 times more planes that won't ever fly again, regardless of the maintenance time you dump on them.

There are also the problems of SAM penetration when facing a first-rate power, and here the difference is one of being engagable versus unengagable (at least with current tech). The Eurofighter IIRC has a cruise missile class RCS or something similar, which in the modern SAM world might as well mean it wasn't stealthed at all.

But all this knowledge is mainly speculative from various open sources so we can only conjecture how good any of these planes are.

True, but open sources are the only way citizens can decide on the merits of the programs.