Budget constraints and short-term threat assessments sidelined the world’s premier air superiority fighter. Now, surging global rivalries reveal the strategic cost of truncating the Raptor’s production line.
by Kris Osborn, Warrior Maven
Cost was the main factor cited years ago when the Air Force made the decision “not” to restart the F-22 production line, yet many have come to regret this decision given the combat performance and overall capabilities of the Raptor. Perhaps the decision to truncate the F-22 program years ago, and the subsequent decision not to restart the production line, were informed by “short-term” thinking as there was not a “great power” threat focus at either of these times. The arrival of the F-22 coincided with the end of the Cold War and the decision “not” to restart the production line happened at the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; at both of these times, there was not an immediate pressing concern or focus upon great power threats from Russia and China …..but perhaps there should have been.
Short-term Threat Assessments
It seems on several occasions that the Pentagon suffered from what could be referred to as a “short-term” view of the threat, given that there was at these times sufficient evidence to indicate fast-growing great power threats from Russia and China. By contrast, there was not only growing evidence of China’s rapid emergence as a global threat, but also financial reasons why it would have made sense to re-start F-22 production, despite the fact that budget concerns were cited as a reason not to do it. However upon reflection, a massive increase in production scale for the F-22 would have massively reduced the per-aircraft price of the jet, something which could both expand the fleet and lower costs for individual fighters.
Even if senior weapons developers were aware of early plans for a 6th-generation fighter at the time of the discussions about resurrecting F-22 discussions, there were still strong reasons to expand and increase the Air Force fleet of F-22s. F-22s were being engineered with networking technologies sufficient to enable 5th-to-6th-generation connectivity, something of great tactical and strategic value for a force surging into the future. A fleet of hundreds of F-22s would have greatly improved the U.S. Air Force’s ability to “mass” and sustain air superiority across a wider combat envelope. Therefore, even if senior Air Force decision-makers anticipated a large fleet of next-generation 6th-generation high-speed stealth jets to follow-on or “replace” the F-22, there would still have been great value in greatly expanding the F-22 fleet itself.
What if the Air Force Had Hundreds of F-22s?
There is little debate that a large-scale expansion of the F-22 fleet would have been extremely helpful to the Air Force and the Pentagon for strategic, tactical and security reasons, yet the financial reasons are also quite compelling. The truncated small size of the F-22 fleet of 187 airframes meant that the research, development and manufacturing costs of a single F-22 is calculated at $356 million per plane. Overall, the Air Force invested $66 billion in the F-22 program, and the return on investment for the research and development funds would have been exponentially higher were the fleet size to have remained aligned with the initial plan to acquire hundreds of F-22s. The upgradeability of the F-22 is yet another reason why the service should have stayed with its original plan to build a large fleet of hundreds of Raptors, given that the aircraft has in recent years massively improved its lethality, sensing, targeting and computing.
Surely the threat landscape as it pertains to U.S. military capability, particularly in the realm of air superiority and deterrence, would be entirely different today if the F-22 program had stayed on course with the original Air Force plan for a large fleet of Raptors.
Kris Osborn is the Military Technology Editor of 1945. Osborn is also President of Warrior Maven – Center for Military Modernization. Osborn previously served at the Pentagon as a highly qualified expert in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army—Acquisition, Logistics & Technology. Osborn has also worked as an anchor and on-air military specialist at national TV networks. He has appeared as a guest military expert on Fox News, MSNBC, The Military Channel, and The History Channel. He also has a Masters Degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University