Air Supremacy

I think the United States Air Force is far and away the best air force in the world. (Our Navy comes in second). Nobody else comes close. Our F-15 and F-16 aircraft are aging but they are still in the same league as the newest of anybody else's, and combined with command and control, training, targeting, electronics, and armament, are head and shoulders above the rest. The power of the Air Force is far greater than the sum of all its parts.

Which makes it difficult to see why the F-22 is needed. The high tech stealth fighter was supposed to fight the next generations of Soviet fighters and make them wet their pants at the thought of going up against Americans in the air. We're also building the F-35, the Joint Strike Fighter, which will be the low cost (relatively speaking) fighter-bomber that will have a world-wide appeal as other nations seek to replace F-16s. Now, I support the JSF. We'll build thousands of them. We need some new stuff. But the F-22? I'm not convinced we need it. Maybe in very limited numbers but even that is a hard sell for me. While the Air Force has been singing the praises of air power's ability to do it all, from Desert Storm through two campaigns in the Balkans, to Afghanistan, it has never faced more than token opposition in the air. If we need a high end fighter, why not reopen the F-15 line for the Air Force? That solves the aging airframe problem. Brand new F-15s. Shoot, the South Koreans just decided to buy them, they can't be that bad. It would sure undercut their accusations that they were unduly pressured to buy the F-15. With updated avionics and missiles, the F-15 will still be a hell of a fighter for another twenty years.

I suppose what really convinced me that the F-22 fighter is not desperately needed to own the skies is the article I read that said the prime contractors (Boeing and Lockheed Martin) argued they could configure the F-22 to carry bombs internally (so it won't mess up the stealth) so it can bomb stuff. First of all, this seems like an admission that air-to-air combat is not likely to be a strain on the F-22. Second, perhaps unfairly, I immediately recalled the Me-262 rolled out for Hitler, who was very impressed with this jet. He then said to make it a bomber. The world's first operational jet fighter was to be made a bomber. That would have been a waste had it been ultimately done (although to our benefit, it delayed the fighter) in World War II; and it would be a waste now to turn the latest fighter into a very expensive substitute for what our fifty-year-old B-52s are--bomb haulers. Plus, I hate to bank so much on stealth. It's been around a while and others claim to have built radar to detect it (and it still emits sound, who knows what you can do with that?). Maybe we've overcome that and are ahead in the game, but we no longer have the element of surprise with stealth. Shoot, in 1999 we inexplicably failed to bomb one into oblivion when it went down in Serbia. Who knows what we lost there? And what did they know that let them shoot it down? Was it just dumb luck? And if we are ahead in the stealth game, the F-22 is one plane that will not be sold to anybody else for a long time. It would be ridiculous to let that technology loose. So we're the only customer for it and it will be very expensive.

I do want an Air force second to none. Air power is indeed critical to success. But when we are head and shoulders more powerful than anybody else, why spend the money? Bottom line, as a hedge against the future I'd want some F-22s, but more than a couple wings would be a waste of resources. To be fair, here's the Air Force Association's arguments for these planes.

[NOTE: This is from the former Defense Issues category from my original blog. Also, all the links from the original post are dead so I didn't try to enable them.]