Forum: General F-22A Raptor forum

HV, yep... your wording better describes the issue, i.e. a 'Prematurely' discontinued line.

Canceled is pretty ambiguous, sure.

But to delvo, if Dad told his family of 5 that he will be bringing home pizza for their dinner needs, but then decided against ordering pizza for dinner, that's indeed a cancellation of pizza... thus, if not pizza then dad better make sure he brings home at least something for dinner, even if mac and cheese! Lest his kids start to get thin and ill-prepared to work!

Yet, in truth.. regarding this specific issue of 'Romney' and his assertive message regarding boosting USAF TACAIR recapitalization needs... if he really wanted to support making an impact on reinforcing USAF's backbone in the near and medium-term, he should instead propose ordering a mix of late model operational F-16 and F-15E+ to fill the gap! That would communicate a far more robust intention to bolster USAF capabilities and deterrence in the medium term.

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geogen wrote:

Yet, in truth.. regarding this specific issue of 'Romney' and his assertive message regarding boosting USAF TACAIR recapitalization needs... if he really wanted to support making an impact on reinforcing USAF's backbone in the near and medium-term, he should instead propose ordering a mix of late model operational F-16 and F-15E+ to fill the gap! That would communicate a far more robust intention to bolster USAF capabilities and deterrence in the medium term.

Romney's advisers would veto this lest he appear to be soft on,defense.. here are your potential adversaries investing in 5G technology and the US will be stuck ordering 4G aircraft? No way..

Multimillion dollar mac and cheese. I await a taste of foolishness. As an interim, let's also build an AV-8+ upgrade for the Marines and a swing wing A-10 for the USAF as well since those need replacement as well.

cywolf32 wrote:

Multimillion dollar mac and cheese. I await a taste of foolishness. As an interim, let's also build an AV-8+ upgrade for the Marines and a swing wing A-10 for the USAF as well since those need replacement as well.

"Swing wing A-10"?
That's practically a contradiction in terms.

It's called sarcasm count.

cywolf32 wrote:

It's called sarcasm count.

Pardon. I've heard too many people say those kinds of things in Ernest.

And that's the truth cywolf. I've seen mention of people who, honest to God, support re-building a P-51 line for COIN duties...

There are some interesting folks out there.

WRT the F-22 I would sooner see the no doubt large sum of money that would be needed to reconstitute the line simply go towards upgrading the fleet to as high a standard as practicable. Perhaps invest in ways to maybe decrease the number of jets needed for training through more advanced simulators or just tweak the syllabus to see how many truly combat coded Raptors we can get out of the 180 some-odd we DO own. 180 Raptors is a lot of Air Dominance. Assuming only 100 are combat coded (I think that is conservative, and know the true number has been tossed around before-I am too busy to go look it up) and an equally conservative kill ratio of 4:1, who has 400 fighters just raring and ready to go? China, Russia, India...? Now add in the F-35, which while kinematically inferior in some respects, but possessing of similar magnitudes of stealth and SA< not to mention a robust A2G capability, and the business case for new Raptors becomes marginal and token at best.

HV

Good analysis HV. People seem to forget that just the NAVY alone has more acft available than almost any Air Force in the world let alone USAF assets. Granted, they are long in the legs, but see what country can continously put out our sortie rates on a daily basis. NONE. I agree, any F-22 today would be better off being upgraded than simply building more of them for the sake of numbers. its just too much of a niche acft at this point given its design philosophy. the F-35 approach, while arduous, follows a better path to providing whats needed at this point.

Related to the original subject here (Romney saying he wants to have the assembly line put back together and buy more Raptors): in the "debate" a couple of days ago, Obama was listing some ways that the government had saved money under his administration, and one of the items on it was a type of airplane "which the Air Force ordered but wasn't working very well". Is there anything else he could be talking about other than Raptors? If that was a Raptor reference, then it has a few lies built in (that it wasn't working very well, and that the reason production was discontinued had anything to do with performance, and that this decision was against the Air Force's will).

I know to expect fighter jets to be political subjects; the route by which I came to have any interest in them myself went through political debates first. But it's not usually BOTH sides getting it so thoroughly wrong!

While I'd be willing to bet that he was referring to the Raptor, I guess you could say that the RQ-4 Block 30 Global Hawk met a similar fate...

I'm guessing the rock-star president didn't even know, he was probably just having a vague recollection of some conversation he had with Gates a few years back. I doubt Romney is knowledgeable on the issue either, but at least he was able to name the aircraft.

1st503rdsgt wrote:

I doubt Romney is knowledgeable on the issue either, but at least he was able to name the aircraft.

Although he'd probably want to put in a vent window.

Lightndattic wrote:

1st503rdsgt wrote:

I doubt Romney is knowledgeable on the issue either, but at least he was able to name the aircraft.

Although he'd probably want to put in a vent window.

He'd probably not build anything. I don't really take Romney's F-22 comment very seriously, but it has created a rather amusing $hitstorm. Before his little campaign promise the F-22's price in the media was barely more than an LRIP F-35 (making the JSF look rather bad), afterword... it went all the way up to $700 mil. LMAO

HaveVoid wrote:

delvo wrote:

"Canceled" refers to the last order being smaller than previous orders and not followed by any more orders afterward. It's not accurate, any more than it's accurate to say I "canceled" my order for a pizza today by deciding not to order pizza, but it's the term the program's opponents coined in order to try to make the situation sound worse than it is.

I apologize for not being perfectly precise with my words.

The program was "prematurely curtailed"

Sad to say there are 185 F-22s extant as of 6:28 am central standard time, and no matter how we parse our words, from a strictly practical point of view, in an increasingly hostile world, it would be nice to have 485.

airframe wrote:

HaveVoid wrote:

delvo wrote:

"Canceled" refers to the last order being smaller than previous orders and not followed by any more orders afterward. It's not accurate, any more than it's accurate to say I "canceled" my order for a pizza today by deciding not to order pizza, but it's the term the program's opponents coined in order to try to make the situation sound worse than it is.

I apologize for not being perfectly precise with my words.

The program was "prematurely curtailed"

Sad to say there are 185 F-22s extant as of 6:28 am central standard time, and no matter how we parse our words, from a strictly practical point of view, in an increasingly hostile world, it would be nice to have 485.

Realistically, if the -22 line were reopened, I'd just like to see it continue on in low rate production, of say 12 copies per FY. That would offset attrition, and preserve the ability to ramp up production if requirements change. And it would also shore things up until 2030.

Let's face it, the Pak Fa is a long ways off. Same goes for the Chinese and their cheap ripoffs. The -35 is more than adequate for exisiting threats, so long as we get them in the quantities we need. Minus supercruise, which ain't fast enough to outrun any AAM/SAM, the -35 is more capable thanks to avionics and networking multiple airframes together. Supercruise is cool, because it lets a Raptor scoot from one place to the next quicker than anything else, but with "large" quantities of -35s, they WILL be in many places at the same time.

Also, the Chinese economy is going to crash within 10 years, so likely is as likely does, and I doubt they will have a large quantity of stealth fighters.

What worries me is all the chatter about cutting the -35 down to the levels of another silver bullet force, and modernizing 20+ year old Eagles and Vipers to keep em going for the next 18 years. That is simply insane. Never, ever, though I'd see US airpower in the state of affairs it's in thanks to liberal spending preferences.

Forum: General F-22A Raptor forum

Romney wants to buy more F-22s