F-22 now critical to survival of USAF

[Vympel]

The different branches guard their share of the funding pie with fanatacism - if FCS was cancelled, the Air Force wouldn't see one cent of it.

[Ma Deuce]

Yeah, all budgets are zero sum, if you abide by them, so there is no point in crying about lack of F22's when there is rank incompetence in things like FCS. If the US congress has mandated a cut in the F22 programme budget/numbers to fund something else, I would have taken that as a cue for the pentagon/industry to get their shit together and bring projects in on time and on budget.

Well then maybe they could start by cutting the programs that actually are experiencing exhorborant overruns (like FCS, which has continually experienced double-digit percentile overruns from the start), because contrary to what some believe the F-22 program has actually stuck pretty close to it's budget, with development overruns being around 3.3%, for about a 1% overrun for the entire program with procurement funding at current levels.

I wonder, where can we find twenty billion dollars.

Yeah that's kind of the point I tried to make earlier: The money that's been spent on FCS so far could not only have funded the F-22's development, but purchased over a thousand aircraft.