The deadliest fighter on the planet has officially been retired,
and one of the biggest reasons why? It's completely obsolete.
The F-22 is without a doubt the scariest thing to ever prowl the skies. Its sophisticated sensor
suite can detect enemies passively at hundreds of miles away, and engage them with missiles long
before they even realize they've been targeted. Despite competition from China and Russia,
its stealth remains only second to its B2 stealth bomber cousin, targetable to most enemy platforms
only within two or three dozen miles. With the ability to supercruise without afterburner,
an F-22 can get into the fight fast, without even giving the enemy a chance to know it's coming.
But the F-22 is twenty five years old, and the air force is making like Leonardo Dicaprio and
giving the F-22 the boot. Despite the fact that it remains unrivaled anywhere in the world,
the US military is tossing this millenial airplane out because even it is no longer
technologically advanced for the best air force in the world.
The announcement came as a bit of a shock, yet was always inevitable. The F-22 was
a victim of its own success- designed during the waning years of the Cold War,
the F-22 was meant to be the decisive tool of western air combat against a future
Soviet Union. Yet the Soviet Union collapsed while the F-22 program was in development,
and too much had been invested to simply cancel it. When the plane made its first
official flight in 1997, the F-22 was a warplane with no war to fight.
The September 11th attacks of 2001 pit the United States into combat against a new enemy- small,
mobile, and highly irregular terrorist forces. For all its cutting edge technologies,
the F-22 was useless in this war. It had been designed to penetrate the Soviet Union's very
robust air defenses, providing air cover for the US' AirLand battle doctrine. This
revolutionary combat doctrine, which proved its worth in Desert Storm,
saw sophisticated US assets penetrate deep into enemy rear areas to sever lines of
communication and sow general chaos. The F-22's role in this was to be stealthy enough to evade
air defenses and knock out enemy fighters in the deep areas, far behind enemy lines.
But terrorists had no air forces or air defenses to speak of. Unable to support the global war on
terror and with no peer adversaries to worry about, the US military decided it was going to
cancel the 700+ aircraft fleet it had originally envisioned. A plane that would have flown in
numbers large enough to absolutely brown the pants of any adversary, the F-22 was now relegated to
a functional, but largely token fleet of 187 aircraft- only 150 of which were combat-coded.
When the US military finally awoke from its bender chasing terrorists all over the world,
it realized that China had grown to become a serious rival. But a war with China would be
fought primarily on the sea and in the air, and the US was suddenly short 500
of the most lethal air dominance fighter the world had ever seen.
Kickstarting production of the F-22 however would be impossible. The tools to manufacture
the aircraft had largely been discarded by then, and the specialized knowledge and
expertise was already put to work elsewhere, if not retired out of the workforce entirely.
Anything that could be was recycled directly into the production of the F-35, which the US had
ordered in massive quantities. It would take years and tens of millions of dollars just to reopen
a single assembly line. Thus the air force would turn to the Next Generation Air Dominance program,
while also investing heavily in upgrading its fleet of legacy F-15s in the meantime.
While a much older aircraft, the F-15 is also much cheaper to operate and upgrade given the
significant numbers produced driving costs down and making replacement parts widely available.
One of the biggest reasons the F-22 is simply being canceled is cost. The aircraft was an
expensive jewel in the air force's cap, costing $120 million per plane- that's a figure that only
the world's richest nation can afford, or is crazy enough to accept. The latest F-15EX by comparison
is a full $40 million dollars cheaper. When you factor in Research and Development costs, the
price tag inflates to a whopping $334 million per plane. And the queen bee of the US air force is a
true queen indeed, with a staggering operating cost of $68,322 per hour. Every hour that
this plane flies, it costs the US military the equivalent of an entire American's yearly salary.
With astronomical costs like that, it's no wonder that the US Air Force is putting the
F-22 out to pasture. The biggest reason the plane is so expensive though is not because
it is inherently a massively pricey gem of an aircraft, but because the US military made
such few acquisitions of the plane. Typically production runs will run in a few hundred air
frames, more if the aircraft is cleared for export. The more airframes that are acquired,
the cheaper that manufacturing costs become, resulting in some serious cost savings
at the end of a full acquisitions program- sometimes as much as 50%.
The F-22's kissin' cousin, the entire US fleet of B-2 stealth bomber, costs around half of what Elon
Musk is worth, which explains why no other nation flies similarly capable aircraft and why the US
only ever bought 20 of them. Yet it's 1 billion plus price tag would have been dramatically
reduced had the US stuck to its original plan to buy around 70 of them. But like the F-22,
the B-2 was a victim of its success and a fundamental shift in global geopolitics.
In 1992 the Soviet Union was history and President George Bush had just defeated the
only serious military threat the US was facing. There was no fight for the B-2,
and only enough to act as a nuclear deterrent and for very specialized missions were acquired.
With such few aircraft ever built, the F-22 can have great difficulty acquiring replacement parts,
which need to be manufactured in small batches thus increasing cost. As the plane ages,
there will be more and more extensive repairs that need to take place,
further driving up operational costs.
But the F-22 is also rapidly falling behind in the technology space.
There are multiple tech problems that plague the F-22 fleet. The first of these is the use
of obsolete radar absorbent materials. The F-35 is the F-22's younger brother,
and makes use of stealth materials and techniques that are more modern,
and make the aircraft much cheaper to maintain. Simply replacing the stealth paneling on the
F-22 isn't really an option either, as the jets have very different geometries requiring
extensive tooling of manufactured panels. The underlying structure is also different,
so re-paneling an F-22 would require going back to flight certification
and structural integrity checks. At that point, you're basically back at square one.
But it's not just its stealth that's quickly falling behind- the F-22 of today may not be
able to compete with the avionics of Chinese J-20s and whatever aircraft
Russia wants to pretend it can build in the near-future. The F-22 was built
right before a critical transition point in American weapons design.
In the mid-90s the US military began to identify a trend of greatly increased
technological breakthroughs. This presented a serious challenge for any military wanting to
stay relevant in a future battlefield. Because weapons acquisitions programs
can take up to two decades to go from design to a production model aircraft,
ship, or vehicle, that means that by the time the first model rolls of the assembly line,
it's already extremely obsolete. Thus the US military radically shifted its approach to
defense acquisitions and demanded that future combat vehicles and aircraft be designed
with open, modular architecture, allowing components to be swapped out and upgraded.
This is why the F-35 is able to hit the battlefield running with relatively modern
electronics, while the F-22 is stuck mostly with the same electronic brains it had when
Pokemon first made their debut. Upgrades have taken place, but have been very difficult,
expensive, and far from complete. The F-22 can't even talk with other aircraft in the American
fleet unless it has a dedicated translator. Due to the different programming languages,
F-22s can't share data with F-35s and other aircraft, prompting the US to
try different remedies- even flying a U2 aircraft with the F-22s to act as a relay.
The laundry list of necessary upgrades for the F-22 is extensive,
and includes basic things such as helmet mounted display and panoramic cockpit
displays- something that was out of the technological capabilities of the F-22's
design and manufacture period. The plane also needs updated electronic warfare systems to
help jam more modern radars and weapons, as well as long range infrared sensors to
aid in detection of enemy stealth aircraft- an increasing concern for the US air force.
The F-22 is simply too flawed to remain effective in a modern battlefield. The plane is a mix
between two different design philosophies- stealth versus close-in dogfighting. Its
thrust-vectoring engines make it an extremely agile dogfighter, while its stealth is superior
even to the F-35. Yet being good at both things, means the F-22 isn't truly excellent at either.
The F-35 is a better sniper than the F-22, its avionics are more advanced and its sensor
fusion and data management capabilities more advanced. It may not be as stealthy,
but the F-35 can also reliably hit targets from further away with less direct support. Plus,
it can actually talk to other planes, unlike the F-22 which needs a translator.
The F-22 may have great stealth characteristics, but it sacrifices true stealth for a perceived
need to dogfight. Multiple features of the aircraft are included in order to give the
plane dogfighting potential, but these same features severely limit its ability to remain
undetected. Its twin vertical tails for example may be great for maneuvering,
but provide a big, fat radar return from the right angles.
It's a controversial point, given the US's very bad experience in the opening days of
the air war over Vietnam, but the US Air Force has decided that the future of air to air combat is
once again, the missile. Modern missiles are far more capable and intelligent than early
Vietnam-era air to air missiles, which had serious deficiencies. This is why the F-22's replacement,
the Next Generation Air Dominance project, is believed to be fully tooled for stealth over
manueverability. It's likely that the NGAD will have no vertical surfaces whatsoever,
similar to the B-2 bomber, which would make it an easy target in a dog fight. However its
vastly improved stealth and sensors also mean that enemy air defense radars will have a hell
of a time even detecting it in the first place. Distance, stealth, and speed will
be the NGAD's best defense, not the ability to go toe to toe with highly manueverable fighters.
The NGAD will also have two big upgrades that the F-22 lacks and cannot acquire,
and why it's being replaced so early. The first of these upgrades is simply greater fuel capacity.
The F-22 was designed for a land war over eastern Europe, thus necessitating relatively moderate
fuel load. However, now the US's next probable war will be against China in the South Pacific,
where American aircraft will have to operate hundreds of miles from friendly aircraft carriers
and air bases. Thus the NGAD will feature a significantly larger fuel tank than the F-22,
all carried internally so as to preserve its stealth characteristics.
The second major upgrade will be the open architecture design of the NGAD.
As mentioned before, the F-22 is a product of a bygone design era, and it’s impossible as
well as prohibitively expensive to modernize F-22s as new technology rolls off the shelf.
Thus the NGAD's open architecture will allow for what the air force calls 'ongoing development',
meaning that the NGAD program will not end with the delivery of its first operational
fighter- the process of evolution, development, and adoption of new technology will continue in
perpetuity to ensure that a significant element of the US Air Force is always at the cutting edge.
The F-22's time in the sun is almost over, with retirement scheduled to begin in 2030.
It will go down in history as one of the deadliest aircraft ever created,
built for a war that thankfully never happened. We can only hope the same about the NGAD.
Now go check out Russian Su-57 vs F-22,
who would win? Or click this other video instead. Never touch a hot stove.