Pentagon Sends F-22s to Poland

Video Above: Air War in 2050 – Air Force Research Lab Commander on Golden Horde

By Kris Osborn – President & Editor-In-Chief, Warrior Maven

While the Air Force’s fast-emerging 6th-gen stealth fighter continues to inspire massive interest and the global F-35 customer base is expanding like wildfire, it might be easy to forget about the aircraft many say is the single best “air supremacy” air-to-air fighter in the world … the F-22.

F-22

With the highly secretive 6th-generation aircraft already airborne and large numbers of F-35s showing up on NATO’s Eastern Flank, it makes sense that F-22s could easily be overlooked. Not so fast, however, as the Pentagon is sending 12 Air Force F-22 Raptors to support NATO Allied Air Command at the 32nd Tactical Air Base in Lask, Poland, according to an Air Force report.

Air policing will be the primary mission of the F-22s, the service report says, adding that the aircraft will be moving to Europe from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska. The F-22 has certainly established its ability to deploy in recent years, particularly in light of the Air Force’s Rapid Raptor program now in place for several years. The Rapid Raptor program, focused on speed, maintenance, readiness and deployability, stipulates that F-22s operate with an ability to deploy anywhere in the world within 24hours. The program prepares four F-22s and crew members with C-17 support, fuel and weapons with the specific purpose of enabling a “first-strike” capability in remote or austere places around the world.

Readiness for the F-22, Air Force officials explain, hinges upon a new software delivery strategy which sees incremental improvements less as “products” for pre-planned, spread apart adjustments — but rather a steady continuous “pipeline” of upgrades.

This modernization approach, firmly oriented toward sustained readiness for combat, has been in place with the F-22 for many years now. Several years back, the Air Force and Lockheed Martin put a fleet-wide, F-22 upgrade in place called 3.2b which added new software to several of its cutting edge weapons systems. The idea, as explained by senior Air Force weapons developers many years ago, is to enable a continuous and ongoing “stream” of upgrades and avoid having to wait for software “blocks” or “increments” which can take several years to develop.