F-22 Raptor: News and Discussion

vann7 wrote:
No more will be done.. and the ones they made will be the total.Not even there are plans to upgraded or fix its major problems.since requires a major redesign of the plane to fix it.. simply Is a failed project and the pentagon now plans to use F-35 instead as its replacement. and there are no other plans.

There are even more problems that those mentioned.. in the video.. like electrical power issues ,pilots
who gets trapped inside the plane..

CDI: F-22 analysis: the good, the bad and the surly

picard578 / March 23, 2014
Today, America spends more on defense than at any time since the end of World War II, based on the Pentagon’s own official budget data. The previous high point in post-World War II defense spending was 1952 – during the Korean War – at $589 billion in today’s dollars. The Pentagon’s budget request for the current fiscal year totals $670 billion, or a substantial 14 percent above the previous high water mark.

U.S. defense spending is now also larger than the rest of the world – combined. The CIA’s 2007 Word Fact Book estimates all other nations to spend about $400 billion on defense. That amount is for not just our potential opponents, whoever they might be; that’s the entire rest of the world.

We are told we must worry about China and Russia and prepare against them; something we should really lose sleep over is how they can be such a major concern – to those who point them out as looming threats – with defense budgets of just $81 billion and $21 billion, respectively, according to the CIA.

A similar basis for worrying is why the Pentagon’s budget has trended up over the decades, while its forces have been shrinking. Today, we have the smallest defense inventory since 1946. For example, with a spending level considerably higher than in 1985 when the Cold War raged and after Ronald Reagan increased the Defense Department’s budget, we have now 10 active Army divisions, not the 17 we had in 1985; less than 300 naval combatants – compared to 542 in 1985, and we have just over 12 active Air Force tactical air wings, not 25.

A major reason is incompetence.

According to the “scorecard” of the Office of Management and Budget on how well U.S. agencies are run, the Pentagon has ranked among the worst since the ratings began. By bad management, don’t think of just “waste, fraud, and abuse” and incompetent book-keeping – the measures OMB uses. Add to those the incessant decisions in the Pentagon and Congress that favor bureaucratic and selfish interests, rather than the needs of war. Those latter factors provide most of the explanation for why the Pentagon budget delivers less for more.

Consider just one example; the Air Force’s F-22 fighter aircraft. It began in the early 1980s as the Air Force’s solution to maintaining air superiority over the Soviet Union during the Cold War. However, a lot of history unfolded between the “Raptor’s” conception back then and the Air Force’s announcement on December 12, 2007 that after more than two decades of development the F-22 had finally reached “full operational capability,” meaning that it was ready to go to war.

There is, however, no war for it to go to. While there are, of course, two very real ones in Iraq and Afghanistan, the F-22 is yet to fly a single sortie over the skies of either country. Nor has the Air Force announced any intention to send the F-22 to either theater.

The Air Force is quite right to keep the F-22 far away from those conflicts. The airplane is irrelevant to both, since its primary mission – to shoot down enemy aircraft – is useless against our opponents – al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other insurgents – who have no air force and don’t want one. Worse, if the F-22 were it to appear in those theaters, it would almost certainly harm our war efforts. It is not just that its huge logistics tail would strain our already overstretched support forces in both theaters.

But also, the F-22 has operating limitations. While it can carry two medium sized bombs to attack ground targets, it is a capability so modest our opponents in Iraq and Afghanistan might not even notice. It would also be ungracious to compare the F-22 to the ridiculously cheap, simple A-10 close air support aircraft that is built specifically for the ground support role and that has been indispensable for supporting soldiers in combat in both wars. It would be even more bad-mannered to point out that each A-10 can deliver per day eight times, or more, the payload that an F-22 can.

More to the point, the F-22 would be counter-productive. Data from Afghanistan indicate that U.S. and allied forces may have killed more innocent civilians than the enemy has in the past year, and from Iraq we read report after report of civilians killed as a result of US action. A major part of those “collateral” civilian casualties come from aircraft flying too fast and too high to positively identify exactly what they are guiding their munitions to. As such, the F-22 is too “thin-skinned” to endure ground fire, even from assault rifles, and it is too expensive to risk flying close enough to the ground to identify targets. In a form of conflict where winning over the civilian population is key to success, F-22 participation – along with that of other high flying, high speed aircraft – may help the enemy more than us.

By keeping the F-22 at its US bases, the Air Force is doing our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan a great favor.

Counter-productivity in 21st century warfare notwithstanding, the F-22′s advocates would leap to argue that in its intended role – shooting down enemy fighters – it is unsurpassed.

Let’s pretend for the moment that there exists, or will soon, an enemy air force for which the F-22 would be relevant. How, then, could the F-22 help?

We contend that as an individual performer in real world air-to-air combat, the F-22 is a huge disappointment. The Air Force vociferously disagrees – based on its hypothesis that air wars can be fought and won by long range, radar-controlled missiles fired at enemies you cannot see or visually – that is, reliably – identify. This “beyond-visual-range,” radar-missile hypothesis has been tested in real world combat, and it has failed repeatedly. If ever the F-22 finds itself in an air war against a serious opponent, all of us will find out who is right.

Here, we will focus on three issues about which there can be little argument and that explain how the F-22 contributes mightily to our shrinking, less ready-to-fight forces, while bringing vastly increased cost.

Force Size: Back in the 1980s, the U.S. Air Force planned to buy 750 F-22s to fight the Soviet air force. For development and procurement, Congress is generously providing $65.3 billion, a huge sum. However, because no stakeholder was interested in exercising discipline over the design, weight, and cost of each F-22, that $65.3 billion will only buy 184 aircraft, not enough to be a real threat to any major opposing air power.

Moreover, given the need to maintain a training base in the US and considering the demonstrated daily sortie rate of similarly complex aircraft already in our inventory, the Air Force will be lucky to be able to fly 60 F-22 sorties per day at the start of an overseas conflict against a major opponent. That number will shrink as inevitable combat attrition and maintenance down-time take their toll. The force size that the F-22 program generates is simply too puny to register against the major air threat the F-22 advocates hypothesize.

Pilot Skill: Unfortunately, we can expect that same tiny F-22 force to attrite all too rapidly in combat for the simple reason that the Air Force no longer adequately supports pilot training. F-22 pilots get only ten to twelve hours of flight training per month. When we provided 20 to 25 hours per month to train pilots for Vietnam, our pilots complained – rightly – it was inadequate. At the height of their prowess in the 1960s and ’70s, the Israelis gave their fighter pilots 40 to 50 hours of flight training per month.

The history of air warfare shows all too clearly that the most important determinant of who wins and who dies in an aerial dogfight is pilot skill, not aircraft performance. Because they have raided pilot training accounts to feed increasingly voracious procurement programs (such as the F-22), Congress and the Air Force have virtually guaranteed high pilot losses for us in any hypothesized, large scale air war.

If the advocates of more air power for the U.S. were serious about winning and saving American pilots lives, they would double, then triple, the amount of money available for pilot flight training before spending a single penny on new aircraft. Revealing its real priorities, in help pay for the pork it added to the 2008 DOD appropriations act, Congress cut air force training by $400 million.

Unit Cost: The current plan to buy 184 F-22s for $65.3 billion calculates to $354.9 million per aircraft. The Air Force contends that such a calculation is unfair; it distributes the cost of all prior testing and development equally to every aircraft. The Air Force would rather use a calculation for prospective purchases – what it calls “flyaway” cost, which considers the development costs to have been sunk and that the only cost that should count now is the cost-to-go. Various estimates are circulating in the Pentagon to buy an additional 198 F-22s at a “flyaway” cost that varies from $176.8 million to $216.3 million per copy. (Even at the lower range, it would still make these new F-22s the most expensive fighter aircraft ever bought by any nation – except for, of course, earlier F-22s.)

The F-22′s cost history makes it painfully obvious that we should consider the higher end of the currently advertised cost band to be a cost floor for any new purchase. At every stage, the F-22 has cost more than promised. For example, when Lockheed and the Air Force were pushing a three year contract to buy 60 aircraft now being delivered, “fact sheets” and lobbying materials widely distributed on Capitol Hill were promising a “flyaway” price of $130 million per aircraft; instead, Congress was required to actually appropriate approximately $180 million per copy. (In 1986, the Air Force originally promised a “flyaway” cost of $35 million.)

Time has not been kind to the F-22; neither to its costs, nor to its relevance. Even in the wars the F-22 advocates postulate against a Chinese or Russian air force, the F-22 is deeply flawed, and its ultimate impact is to degrade our most important assets in the air, our pilots and their skill.

The most prominent mission that Lockheed and the Air Force are currently pushing to buy more F-22s is demonstrated in recent newspaper articles and advertisements. Nowhere do these talk about a dangerous new air threat that explains the need for more F-22s. Instead, they focus on the 44 states that will receive corporate spending and jobs. Put another way, it is Congress’ lust for pork and the perverted thinking that jobs and profits should drive defense spending, not the threat, that is driving the campaign to buy more F-22s.

The overall defense budget is stuffed to the gills with similar examples. Budget-inflating, war-irrelevant, dubious-performing, and pork-ridden examples in the other military services include the Navy’s DDG-1000 destroyer, the Army’s Future Combat System, and the Marines Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle. In fact, such programs are now the norm; it is the war-relevant, cost-effective ones that are scarce to the point of extinction.

There should be no doubt how we got to where we are.

– Winslow Wheeler, Pierre Sprey, and James Stevenson

July 13, 2009

“Stop the F-22 Now”

by Winslow T. Wheeler and Pierre M. Sprey

The Senate should debate the F-22′s fate this week . Sen. John McCain, ranking member of the Senate Armed Services committee, has pledged to lead the fight against the F-22, which the committee approved over the
objections of McCain and Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the committee. Following is an op-ed by Winslow Wheeler and Pierre Sprey calling for an end to a plane they argue doesn’t work nearly as well as claimed
and is far too expensive.

Lawmakers beholden to Lockheed are leading the charge to overturn the Secretary of Defense’s decision to stop producing the F-22. Gates and President Obama have threatened to veto the 2010 defense spending bill if it contains a single F-22 over the 187 authorized.

Both the House and Senate Armed Services Committees have already voted to overturn Gates’ decision. The House wants to make a down payment on 12 more F-22s. The Senate wants to pay up front for seven more in 2010. The House of Representatives passed its version of the bill on June 25 by a vote of 389 to 22. Clearly, Obama and Gates have a long way to go to pocket the 145 or so votes they will need in the House to sustain a veto. The Senate should debate its bill this week. Obama and Gates will suffer a huge legislative defeat if the F-22 supporters
win.

Instead of being such a close call, further production of F-22s ought to be laughed out of court. The F-22 is outrageously expensive. The 187 are costing just over $65 billion, about $350 million each.

Not a single F-22 has flown in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It would be foolish to deploy them since there is no enemy air force to fight against. To send F-22s as a bomber – at three times the operating cost of F-16s that are already bombing over there – would be just another drag on the war effort.

Even more important is the question of whether the F-22 is a good fighter. The truth is that the F-22s weaken US air power. Study after study show that pilot skill dominates all other factors in winning or losing air battles. The F-22′s maintenance costs have the Air Force to slash in-air pilot training. In the 1970s, fighter pilots were getting
20 to 30 hours a month of air combat training. Today, F-22 pilots get 10 to 12 hours. High tech theorists claim flying can be replaced by ground simulators. Experience teaches that simulators can be used for cockpit procedures training but, by misrepresenting in-air reality, they reinforce tactics that could get pilots killed in real combat.

The Air Force, Lockheed, and their congressional boosters tout the F-22 as the silver bullet of air combat. The F-22′s so-called stealth may hurt more than it helps. In truth, against short wavelength radars, the F-22 is hard to detect only over a very narrow band of viewing angles. Worse, there are thousands of existing long range, long wavelength radars that can detect the F-22 from several hundred miles away at all angles. Believers in stealth’s invisibility should ask the pilots of the two – not one, as commonly believed – stealthy F-117 bombers taken out of action by old Russian radar-directed defense systems in the 1999 Kosovo air war. Moreover, a new whistleblower scandal is presenting evidence that the F-22′s stealth skin has failed to meet its stealth requirements because it has been badly fabricated and dishonestly tested.

The vaunted invincibility of the F-22 founders on two incurable flaws: First, the plane’s so-called “low probability of intercept” radar may now be easily detected, thanks to the proliferation of spread spectrum technology in cell phones and laptops. That creates an environment where, if the F-22 pilot turns on his radar, he announces his presence over hundreds of miles. Even better for the enemy, the radar makes an unmistakable beacon for opposing missiles.

Second, when combat forces F-22 pilots to turn off radars, they’ll find themselves forced into a close-in, maneuvering fight. Compromised by stealth and heavy radar electronics, the plane’s agility, short range missiles, and guns are nothing special – as one of us observed at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada when an F-16 “shot down” an F-22 in exercises.

As for the plane’s advertised ability to cruise supersonically the F-22′s low fuel capacity (27% of takeoff weight, only two thirds of what’s needed for combat-useful supersonic endurance in enemy airspace) reduces this to an air show trick. Why the big fuel shortfall? To make room for stealth technologies and radar electronics.

In summary, a vote for continuing F-22 production is a vote to decay pilots’ skills, to deny them a truly great fighter, to shrink the number of pilots and planes we can field, and to reward Congress’ unending appetite for pork. The new 2010 Defense Authorization bill should be vetoed if a single F-22 is added.

# # #

Winslow T. Wheeler, a former GOP congressional budget expert, is
director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for
Defense Information in Washington.

Pierre M. Sprey helped bring to fruition the F-16; he also led the
design team for the A-10.

Hope Russia will not follow the same dramatic US's path, that lead US into the bankrupcy. I wanted to say, Russia will have to give up SU-PAK T-50. I doubt if SU-PAK T-50 is effecive as Mig-35, or SU-35.
Someone told me that SU-PAK T-50 reach more than 100 million $/ aircraft, meanwhile MIG-35 reach only at best 50. Will a SU-PAK T-50 more effective than 2 MIG-35, or 2 SU-35 ? I doubt.

We contend that as an individual performer in real world air-to-air combat, the F-22 is a huge disappointment. The Air Force vociferously disagrees – based on its hypothesis that air wars can be fought and won by long range, radar-controlled missiles fired at enemies you cannot see or visually – that is, reliably – identify. This “beyond-visual-range,” radar-missile hypothesis has been tested in real world combat, and it has failed repeatedly. If ever the F-22 finds itself in an air war against a serious opponent, all of us will find out who is right.

GarryB wrote:
The problem here is that as Soviet and Russian equipment has become more capable, particularly AAMs like the R-73 and helmet mounted targeting systems allow look and shoot capability getting in to a dogfight with a modern fighter has become suicide...

In tests with Mig-29s flown by German pilots the high offboresight R-73 plus helmet mounted targeting systems meant while the well trained western F-16 pilot starts to manouver to get onto the MiGs tail for the best possible chance of a kill the MiG pilot has looked at the F-16 which has meant the R-73s seeker is turned and looking directly at the F-16... gotten a lock and launched his missile and is free to turn and do what he likes while the F-16 pilots is still trying to get behind the MiG and to get the Mig within about 15 degrees of where his nose is pointing so he can start his Sidewinder scanning for targets to get a lock so he can launch his weapon.

62% of the time the lightly loaded new model F-16s got on to the tail of the MiG-29B export version MiG with a centreline fuel tank for training, but 100% of the time the MiG pilot had already fired a missile that was deemed to have been good enough for a good chance of a kill.

This means that more than half the time the F-16 pilot managed to get into a kill shot position but was likely to have already been shot down...

The Solution for the US was a shift away from Sidewinder and dogfighting and towards AMRAAM and BVR engagement. wrote:GarryB

Soviet and Russian built fighters might have had the advantage in short range aerial combat, technologically, in the late 1980s to early 1990s, but those days are long gone. The same goes for BVR combat as well.

The USAF has always considered Beyond-visual-range missiles as the primary weapon system for aerial combat since the 1960s at least. The AIM-120 project dated back to the 1970s.

This is all a sham. The price for each sub by most exerts is in vicinity of 3 b usd.
10 subs cannot be bought for 17.4 b usd.This is another scam on the U.S industry.

GarryB wrote:

It is not about advantage... it does not matter that the R-73 uses deflection thrust vector control to allow exceptional manouver capability on launch and in the early stages of flight, nor that its high resolution two colour IR seeker is not as sophisticated as the IIR seeker of the AIM-9X... in practical terms the only way to stop an R-73M is with DIRCMs... just the same as the only practical way to stop AIM-9X is also DIRCMs... and war stocks of both missile types could have lense filters that block DICRMs lasers to make them deadly in combat when needed.

Very true, but the realities of the hardware is that detection and accurate identification of targets at BVR, plus the actual kinematics of actually shooting down enemy aircraft mean it was not very successful. As shown during the Vietnam war... the enemy got in close and rendered the BVR missile largely ineffective.

Are you sure that the R-73 has a 2 colour seeker I read recently it was only a single-colour seeker - still at a disadvantage to AIM-9X I'd say.

Is that your opinion on all BVR missiles? Is it your view on the effectiveness of R-40, or the BVR missiles of the MiG-23?

Giulio wrote:I will not go into the matter, but the picture above the article shows a japanese Mitsubishi F-2 fighter jet, not an F-22.
If they tell to me the Italian source I'll be happy to check it.

Airbornewolf wrote:"stealth" is over-rated, i think most of us remember that F-117 shot down by the Serbs that just made some basic adjustments to their "obsolete soviet" hardware. when that F-117 opened its bomb-bay it got painted and killed. the pilot ejected and survived.

that US Pilot that ejected out of that aircraft is still friends with the serb commander that shot it down. RT aired that episode some time ago.

but Nemrod, a lot of European weapon tech firms do sell their technology too to China. Germany delivers a lot of ship engines to the Chinese Navy, France sells Excocets ASM's and fire-control hardware. Dutch Thales also sells a lot of C&C systems too to the Chinese.

as much as the U.S hates that fact, the E.U weapons industry does not let them be stopped by the U.S. its just economics, china is a huge client that wants E.U weapons technology. and the E.U arms industry is happily to provide.  

we all know it was the French Excocet's that put serious hurt to the Brits during the Falkland war. can you imagine whatthe Chinese will do to the U.S with E.U weapon systems in a engagement?. Chinese Forces already employ european tech in their millitary's since '93.

everyone turns a blind eye to Chinese's modernising, or at least it goes unreported. China is making huge leaps in modernising its armed forces. that said, im not anti-chinese. im of opinion the chinese got the right to pursue their national interests as much as every sovereign nation does.

F-22ラプターのウェポンベイ (AIM-9/GBU-32) - F-22 Raptor Weapon Bay

Published on Jul 23, 2015
F-22 Raptor stealth fighter Weapon Bay (arsenal)
and the installation of air-to-air missile "AIM-9 Sidewinder", 1,000-pound bomb " Removing the GBU-32 JDAM "

USA Dropped a Safe Nuclear Bomb in Nevada - F-15 Launching a Brand New B-61 Bomb
Published on Jul 21, 2015

READ the description please: USA have dropped (from a F-15 strike eagle) a safe ( which means no nuclear and explosive warhead inside, a dummy bomb in other words) B61-12 nuclear bomb in the Nevada test and training range (Nellis AFB) during June 29 and July 1 2015 for testing the precision of this brand new nuclear bomb.

The nuclear bomb B61 was during two decades the most widely used nuclear weapons in the United States . It's as free-falling bomb design and was stationed in large numbers in Europe since 1968. The B61 is (with the exception of the model 7) considered as a " tactical nuclear weapon "bomb in the arsenal of the US Armed Forces .

The new model is the B61 Mod. 12 (B61-12) for the F-35 Lightning II in development because their inboard electronics than can not communicate with the existing versions of the B61 bomb. The new modification should be in proportion to the F-35 and largely based on the B61 Mod. 4, but also include components of other versions. The B61-12 will gradually replace the otherB61 models, with the exception of Mod. 11 that can be used by all nuclear carrier aircraft of the USAF and the NATO allies. The cost of the B61-12 program in 2012 is 6 billion USD and is 50% higher than the estimation in 2011.