More mismanagement and strategic deficit disorder at the Pentagon.
The F22 Raptor is a very capable late 20th century aircraft and arguably superior to the much more expensive and increasingly anachronistic F35; it is being put out to pasture early because of planning missteps, acquisition problems, maintenance issues, software difficulties and a distinctly dysfunctional strategic environment that is not prepared for the near-peer and peer fight ahead.
Both the F22 and the F35 are maintenance hogs and expensive to maintain over their lifetimes.
If the Air Force and the US Congress don’t find a way to pay for the NGAD program and Congress lets the Air Force retire 32 older F-22s, the Air Force could soon find itself in a dangerous position: with a need to wrest control of the air from a growing and modernizing Chinese air force with a shrinking and aging fleet of F-22s – and with no help on the horizon for potentially decades to come.
Incredibly, those 32 older Block 20s aren’t the only fighters the Air Force wants to retire early. The service also wants to cut half of its Boeing F-15E Strike Eagle fighter-bombers while simultaneously reducing the number of new F-15EXs it buys.
The cuts might be less worrying if the Air Force’s other in-production fighter, the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II, weren’t such a disaster. The Air Force is decades behind and hundreds of billions of dollars over-budget compared to its original plan to acquire more than 1,700 F-35s – and hasn’t taken delivery of a new F-35 in a year as it waits for testers to work out kinks in the fighter’s latest software build.
The Air Force is in a fighter crisis. But it’s not going to solve that crisis by grounding training jets – and shrinking an air-superiority force that’s probably already far too small.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/the-us-air-force-seems-hell-bent-on-getting-rid-of-its-greatest-ever-fighter-jet/ar-BB1plHiE
If they reach 1700 F35s (present strength is 1,000 produced and not many aloft), I will be shocked but I will be even more shocked if they achieve a readiness rate above 30% of air-frames.
In this new era of the 21st century air wars, whenever you hear Western flag officers talk about air dominance, supremacy and superiority; they are speaking to the past with no martial eye to the future. I suspect the perfect record of stalemate and defeat for US arms since 1945 will continue apace.
Here’s the very real strategic error: the era of manned fighter aircraft is over and the sooner the US and the West realize this, it will possibly lead to a complete reappraisal of what air combat looks like in the 21st century.
Email me at cgpodcast@pm.me.
