F-22 - a plane you won't go to war with?

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Max2147

This thread has a fever.... and the only prescription is.....

MORE ONION!

http://www.theonion.com/content/vide...rce=videoembed

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.)