The U.S. Air Force Has Promoted The F-22 Raptor as Its Fighter

For decades, the U.S. Air Force has promoted the F-22 as its fighter for the 21st century. Advocates tout its technical features: fuel efficient, high speed “super-cruise,” advanced electronics, and reduced profile against enemy sensors, known as “stealth.” While those are popular amenities, the measures that really determine winning or losing in air combat have been overlooked by the Air Force. The F-22 fails to improve America’s fighter force and degrades our combat capability.

The F-22 is a mediocrity, at best, on requisites four and five, but it is a liability on points one, two and three. The first attribute is the most important pilot training and ability. Great pilots get to be great by constant dogfight training. Between 1975 and 1980, at the Navy Fighter Weapons School (Topgun), instructor pilots logged 40 to 60 hours of air combat maneuvering per month. Flying the cheap, simple F-5, the robustly trained instructors consistently whipped their students who flew the “more capable” F-4 Phantoms, F-14 Tomcats, and F-15 Eagles. Today, partly thanks to the pressure on the Air Force’s training budget from the F-22’s excessive costs, an F-22 pilot gets only 12 to 14 hours of flight training per month. For winning future air battles, this is a huge step backward.

The aircraft’s stealth ability only contributes to the inability of the F-22 to meet standards two and three. The F-22’s stealth requirement adds significant drag, weight and size. Size is the most damaging to the aircrafts ability. The F-22 is much bigger than most fighters, thus it will be detected first by the sensor most likely to be the determinative one eyeballs completely reversing the theoretical advantage of “stealth.” Topgun had a saying, “the biggest target in the sky is always the first to die.” And once a F-22 is seen, it will have trouble outmaneuvering the enemy because its weight hurts its ability to turn and accelerate. Notably, both the F-15A and F-16A out-turn and out-accelerate the F-22.

The most obvious disadvantage stealth brings and why the aircraft fails attribute three is the F-22s extraordinary cost; it grossly reduces the numbers the United States will buy. New Defense Department data
shows the total program unit cost of the F-22 has grown from about $130 million to over $350 million per aircraft. The result? The original request to buy 750 F-22s is now down to 185, thus the chances of outnumbering enemy aircraft are slim.

The Air Force will argue strenuously that we are wrong and the F-22 has excelled in air-to-air exercises
against all comers. However, our information is that these are “canned” engagements in which the F-22 is put
in scenarios set up to exploit the F-22’s theoretical advantages and exclude its real world vulnerabilities.
But there is a way to find out who is right: Conduct an unscripted test of F-22 capabilities by pitting it against
pilots and aircraft that the tiny F-22 inventory expects to meet in hostile skies.

 

We both would be delighted to observe any such realistic exercises. Nothing would please us more than
to find that we are wrong and American fighter pilots have been given the best fighter in the sky.