F-22A in a spot of bother (major report)

[Vympel]

Link

Premier U.S. Fighter Jet Has Major Shortcomings

F-22's Maintenance Demands Growing

By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 10, 2009

The United States' top fighter jet, the Lockheed Martin F-22, has recently required more than 30 hours of maintenance for every hour in the skies, pushing its hourly cost of flying to more than $44,000, a far higher figure than for the warplane it replaces, confidential Pentagon test results show.

The aircraft's radar-absorbing metallic skin is the principal cause of its maintenance troubles, with unexpected shortcomings -- such as vulnerability to rain and other abrasion -- challenging Air Force and contractor technicians since the mid-1990s, according to Pentagon officials, internal documents and a former engineer.

While most aircraft fleets become easier and less costly to repair as they mature, key maintenance trends for the F-22 have been negative in recent years, and on average from October last year to this May, just 55 percent of the deployed F-22 fleet has been available to fulfill missions guarding U.S. airspace, the Defense Department acknowledged this week. The F-22 has never been flown over Iraq or Afghanistan.

Sensitive information about troubles with the nation's foremost air-defense fighter is emerging in the midst of a fight between the Obama administration and the Democrat-controlled Congress over whether the program should be halted next year at 187 planes, far short of what the Air Force and the F-22's contractors around the country had anticipated.

"It is a disgrace that you can fly a plane [an average of] only 1.7 hours before it gets a critical failure" that jeopardizes success of the aircraft's mission, said a Defense Department critic of the plane who is not authorized to speak on the record. Other skeptics inside the Pentagon note that the planes, designed 30 years ago to combat a Cold War adversary, have cost an average of $350 million apiece and say they are not a priority in the age of small wars and terrorist threats.

But other defense officials -- reflecting sharp divisions inside the Pentagon about the wisdom of ending one of the largest arms programs in U.S. history -- emphasize the plane's unsurpassed flying abilities, express renewed optimism that the troubles will abate and say the plane is worth the unexpected costs.

Votes by the House and Senate armed services committees last month to spend $369 million to $1.75 billion more to keep the F-22 production line open were propelled by mixed messages from the Air Force -- including a quiet campaign for the plane that includes snazzy new Lockheed videos for key lawmakers -- and intense political support from states where the F-22's components are made. The full House ratified the vote on June 25, and the Senate is scheduled to begin consideration of F-22 spending Monday.

After deciding to cancel the program, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates called the $65 billion fleet a "niche silver-bullet solution" to a major aerial war threat that remains distant. He described the House's decision as "a big problem" and has promised to urge President Obama to veto the military spending bill if the full Senate retains F-22 funding.

The administration's position is supported by military reform groups that have long criticized what they consider to be poor procurement practices surrounding the F-22, and by former senior Pentagon officials such as Thomas Christie, the top weapons testing expert from 2001 to 2005. Christie says that because of the plane's huge costs, the Air Force lacks money to modernize its other forces adequately and has "embarked on what we used to call unilateral disarmament."

David G. Ahern, a senior Pentagon procurement official who helps oversee the F-22 program, said in an interview that "I think we've executed very well," and attributed its troubles mostly to the challenge of meeting ambitious goals with unstable funding.

A spokeswoman for Lockheed added that the F-22 has "unmatched capabilities, sustainability and affordability" and that any problems are being resolved in close coordination with the Air Force.

'Cancellation-Proof'

Designed during the early 1980s to ensure long-term American military dominance of the skies, the F-22 was conceived to win dogfights with advanced Soviet fighters that Russia is still trying to develop.

Lt. Gen. Harry M. Wyatt III, director of the Air National Guard, said in a letter this week to Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) that he likes the F-22 because its speed and electronics enable it to handle "a full spectrum of threats" that current defensive aircraft "are not capable of addressing."

"There is really no comparison to the F-22," said Air Force Maj. David Skalicky, a 32-year-old former F-15 pilot who now shows off the F-22's impressive maneuverability at air shows. Citing the critical help provided by its computers in flying radical angles of attack and tight turns, he said "it is one of the easiest planes to fly, from the pilot's perspective."

Its troubles have been detailed in dozens of Government Accountability Office reports and Pentagon audits. But Pierre Sprey, a key designer in the 1970s and 1980s of the F-16 and A-10 warplanes, said that from the beginning, the Air Force designed it to be "too big to fail, that is, to be cancellation-proof."

Lockheed farmed out more than 1,000 subcontracts to vendors in more than 40 states, and Sprey -- now a prominent critic of the plane -- said that by the time skeptics "could point out the failed tests, the combat flaws, and the exploding costs, most congressmen were already defending their subcontractors' " revenues.

John Hamre, the Pentagon's comptroller from 1993 to 1997, says the department approved the plane with a budget it knew was too low because projecting the real costs would have been politically unpalatable on Capitol Hill.

"We knew that the F-22 was going to cost more than the Air Force thought it was going to cost and we budgeted the lower number, and I was there," Hamre told the Senate Armed Services Committee in April. "I'm not proud of it," Hamre added in a recent interview.

When limited production began in 2001, the plane was "substantially behind its plan to achieve reliability goals," the GAO said in a report the following year. Structural problems that turned up in subsequent testing forced retrofits to the frame and changes in the fuel flow. Computer flaws, combined with defective software diagnostics, forced the frequent retesting of millions of lines of code, said two Defense officials with access to internal reports.

Skin problems -- often requiring re-gluing small surfaces that can take more than a day to dry -- helped force more frequent and time-consuming repairs, according to the confidential data drawn from tests conducted by the Pentagon's independent Office of Operational Test and Evaluation between 2004 and 2008.

Over the four-year period, the F-22's average maintenance time per hour of flight grew from 20 hours to 34, with skin repairs accounting for more than half of that time -- and more than half the hourly flying costs -- last year, according to the test and evaluation office.

The Air Force says the F-22 cost $44,259 per flying hour in 2008; the Office of the Secretary of Defense said the figure was $49,808. The F-15, the F-22's predecessor, has a fleet average cost of $30,818.

'Compromises'

Darrol Olsen, a specialist in stealth coatings who worked at Lockheed's testing laboratory in Marietta, Ga., from 1995 to 1999, said the current troubles are unsurprising. In a lawsuit filed under seal in 2007, he charged the company with violating the False Claims Act for ordering and using coatings that it knew were defective while hiding the failings from the Air Force.

He has cited a July 1998 report that said test results "yield the same problems as documented previously" in the skin's quality and durability, and another in December that year saying, "Baseline coatings failed." A Lockheed briefing that September assured the Air Force that the effort was "meeting requirements with optimized products."

"When I got into this thing . . . I could not believe the compromises" made by Lockheed to meet the Air Force's request for quick results, said Olsen, who had a top-secret clearance. "I suggested we go to the Air Force and tell them we had some difficulties . . . and they would not do that. I was squashed. I knew from the get-go that this material was bad, that this correcting it in the field was never going to work."

Olsen, who said Lockheed fired him over a medical leave, heard from colleagues as recently as 2005 that problems persisted with coatings and radar absorbing materials in the plane's skin, including what one described as vulnerability to rain. Invited to join his lawsuit, the Justice Department filed a court notice last month saying it was not doing so "at this time" -- a term that means it is still investigating the matter, according to a department spokesman.

Ahern said the Pentagon could not comment on the allegations. Lockheed spokeswoman Mary Jo Polidore said that "the issues raised in the complaint are at least 10 years old," and that the plane meets or exceeds requirements established by the Air Force. "We deny Mr. Olsen's allegations and will vigorously defend this matter."

There have been other legal complications. In late 2005, Boeing learned of defects in titanium booms connecting the wings to the plane, which the company, in a subsequent lawsuit against its supplier, said posed the risk of "catastrophic loss of the aircraft." But rather than shut down the production line -- an act that would have incurred large Air Force penalties -- Boeing reached an accord with the Air Force to resolve the problem through increased inspections over the life of the fleet, with expenses to be mostly paid by the Air Force.

Sprey said engineers who worked on it told him that because of Lockheed's use of hundreds of subcontractors, quality control was so poor that workers had to create a "shim line" at the Georgia plant where they retooled badly designed or poorly manufactured components. "Each plane wound up with all these hand-fitted parts that caused huge fits in maintenance," he said. "They were not interchangeable."

Polidore confirmed that some early parts required modifications but denied that such a shim line existed and said "our supplier base is the best in the industry."

The plane's million-dollar radar-absorbing canopy has also caused problems, with a stuck hatch imprisoning a pilot for hours in 2006 and engineers unable to extend the canopy's lifespan beyond about 18 months of flying time. It delaminates, "loses its strength and finish," said an official privy to Air Force data.

In the interview, Ahern and Air Force Gen. C.D. Moore confirmed that canopy visibility has been declining more rapidly than expected, with brown spots and peeling forcing $120,000 refurbishments at 331 hours of flying time, on average, instead of the stipulated 800 hours.

There has been some gradual progress. At the plane's first operational flight test in September 2004, it fully met two of 22 key requirements and had a total of 351 deficiencies; in 2006, it fully met five; in 2008, when squadrons were deployed at six U.S. bases, it fully met seven.

"It flunked on suitability measures -- availability, reliability, and maintenance," said Christie about the first of those tests. "There was no consequence. It did not faze anybody who was in the decision loop" for approving the plane's full production. This outcome was hardly unique, Christie adds. During his tenure in the job from 2001 to 2005, "16 or 17 major weapons systems flunked" during initial operational tests, and "not one was stopped as a result."

"I don't accept that this is still early in the program," Christie said, explaining that he does not recall a plane with such a low capability to fulfill its mission due to maintenance problems at this point in its tenure as the F-22. The Pentagon said 64 percent of the fleet is currently "mission capable." After four years of rigorous testing and operations, "the trends are not good," he added.

Pentagon officials respond that measuring hourly flying costs for aircraft fleets that have not reached 100,000 flying hours is problematic, because sorties become more frequent after that point; Ahern also said some improvements have been made since the 2008 testing, and added: "We're going to get better." He said the F-22s are on track to meet all of what the Air Force calls its KPP -- key performance parameters -- by next year.

But last Nov. 20, John J. Young Jr., who was then undersecretary of defense and Ahern's boss, said that officials continue to struggle with the F-22's skin. "There's clearly work that needs to be done there to make that airplane both capable and affordable to operate," he said.

When Gates decided this spring to spend $785 million on four more planes and then end production of the F-22, he also kept alive an $8 billion improvement effort. It will, among other things, give F-22 pilots the ability to communicate with other types of warplanes; it currently is the only such warplane to lack that capability.

The cancellation decision got public support from the Air Force's top two civilian and military leaders, who said the F-22 was not a top priority in a constrained budget. But the leaders' message was muddied in a June 9 letter from Air Combat Cmdr. John D.W. Corley to Chambliss that said halting production would put "execution of our current national military strategy at high risk in the near to mid-term." The right size for the fleet, he said, is 381.

Fatal Test Flight

One of the last four planes Gates supported buying is meant to replace an F-22 that crashed during a test flight north of Los Angeles on March 25, during his review of the program. The Air Force has declined to discuss the cause, but a classified internal accident report completed the following month states that the plane flew into the ground after poorly executing a high-speed run with its weapons-bay doors open, according to three government officials familiar with its contents. The Lockheed test pilot died.

Several sources said the flight was part of a bid to make the F-22 relevant to current conflicts by giving it a capability to conduct precision bombing raids, not just aerial dogfights. The Air Force is still probing who should be held accountable for the accident.

Staff writer Ellen Nakashima contributed to this report.

Hrmmmm. Not a good time for the F-22A to smell a bit mangy, given the wrangling in Washington.

[Darth Wong]

Gotta love that military-industrial complex

Seriously, I can't help but wonder why they don't design an F-22 variant with a normal skin instead of the fancy stealth exterior. They don't need stealth in most situations anyway, and if the skin alone is contributing to more than half its maintenance costs, that's just crazy. They can keep working on the stealth in the meantime, until such time as they have to fight the Firefox over the North Pole.

[Starglider]

Are these stealth-related problems going to affect the F-35 as well? If not, could a redesign create an F-22B that fixes these issues by using the same materials as the F-35 (and possibly upgrade performance, e.g. put the IRST back in, as well)? It seems to me that a production holiday of a say five years followed by a second run of a few hundred improved planes (with retrofits to existing aircraft where possible) would be the best outcome. That's a layman impression though, and even if I'm right it's probably not politically possible.

This does confirm that stealth is even more horribly expensive than the acquisition costs suggest, despite claimed improvements in materials since the B-2. How much airframe performance could the F-22 have had if the development resources consumed and design compromises forced by all-aspect stealth hadn't been mandated?

[Vympel]

Gotta love that military-industrial complex

Seriously, I can't help but wonder why they don't design an F-22 variant with a normal skin instead of the fancy stealth exterior. They don't need stealth in most situations anyway, and if the skin alone is contributing to more than half its maintenance costs, that's just crazy.

I wonder about that - it couldn't cost more than the money they've been bleeding out lately, that's for sure.

They can keep working on the stealth in the meantime, until such time as they have to fight the Firefox over the North Pole.

What Lockheed Martin should do is outright bribe Sukhoi to show their 5th-Gen fighter prototype at the MAKS 09 airshow in August, then they can go rushing off to Capital Hill at supersonic speed (heh) and declare that the USAF obviously needs more F-22s

[Darth Wong]

It's interesting how this kind of outright defrauding of the government does not bother right-wingers, even as they go apoplectic over relatively small sums of money being spent on other priorities such as environmental monitoring or the arts. No one is ever going to be charged with fraud here.

[MKSheppard]

Not too surprising. Do I have to post the revelant figures for the F-15A/B from 1977-1980?

The F-22A is a very new platform, and because only 180~ were built, it's going to be kind of rare in terms of maintenance knowledge.

[Stark]

Well, they also don't think there's anything wrong with institutionalised lying to civilian government for funding (ie, 'lol we rebuilt xyz ship by keeping the bell and building a new one'). If it makes AMERICA STRONG, who cares how corrupt and abused it is?

Do we really need civilian control of military spending anyway? What would Shep say?

[Darth Wong]

Not too surprising. Do I have to post the revelant figures for the F-15A/B from 1977-1980?

Did they show the problems getting worse over the first decade of use, not better?

The F-22A is a very new platform, and because only 180~ were built, it's going to be kind of rare in terms of maintenance knowledge.

If it's a problem of maintenance knowledge, this would imply that certain elite maintenance crews with more experience and ability would be doing much better on these maintenance costs and down-times. Is this the case?

[MKSheppard]

Did they show the problems getting worse over the first decade of use, not better?

It was pretty bad the first couple of years in terms of overall mission readiness; this became a rallying cry of anti military people like CDI -- they said -- "look how unreliable the F-15 is, and how expensive it is; when we could just have bought more F-4 Phantoms!"

If it's a problem of maintenance knowledge, this would imply that certain elite maintenance crews with more experience and ability would be doing much better on these maintenance costs and down-times. Is this the case?

A lot of the F-22 is pretty damn groundbreaking in it's use of composites in a front line fighter on this scale -- one of the first YF-22 prototypes was lost after a fire, because nobody knew how to fight an engine fire in an aircraft made of composites -- drills that worked fine with metallic alloys were defeated by the YF-22's composites.

[Starglider]

Not too surprising. Do I have to post the revelant figures for the F-15A/B from 1977-1980?

Or the F-14, great plane, but it didn't work properly until the engines were completely replaced.

What Lockheed Martin should do is outright bribe Sukhoi to show their 5th-Gen fighter prototype at the MAKS 09 airshow in August, then they can go rushing off to Capital Hill at supersonic speed (heh) and declare that the USAF obviously needs more F-22s

This is the US Congress you're talking about. They'd be better off breaking the Berkut out of storage, gluing electroluminescant panels all over it, welding some surplus photo-recon lenses to the front of the drop tanks, and claiming that it is the SU-99-FREEDOM-DESTROYER WITH PLASMA STEALTH AND TACTICAL LASER CANNONS.

[Akkleptos]

As suspected...

There goes the US' super stealth fighter... Oh, and thousands of millions (or "billions" for the Americans) of taxpayers' dollars. News like this may not sit well with said taxpayers, I think. Or with prospective foreign buyers, if that was ever the plan, for that matter.

Seriously, I can't help but wonder why they don't design an F-22 variant with a normal skin instead of the fancy stealth exterior.

I second that.

[Vympel]

I just remembered why I underlined the part talking about advanced Soviet fighters. It's the first time in the many, many, many F-22A articles I've read that they said "Russia is still trying to develop" as opposed to "which never materialised".

Anyway, I imagine in terms of cost if they really want to avoid 'unilateral disarmament' they'd buy those fancy new F-15SE 'Stealth Eagles' to make up the numbers.

[Darth Wong]

It was pretty bad the first couple of years in terms of overall mission readiness; this became a rallying cry of anti military people like CDI -- they said -- "look how unreliable the F-15 is, and how expensive it is; when we could just have bought more F-4 Phantoms!"

Were its problems as severe as those of the F-22?

A lot of the F-22 is pretty damn groundbreaking in it's use of composites in a front line fighter on this scale -- one of the first YF-22 prototypes was lost after a fire, because nobody knew how to fight an engine fire in an aircraft made of composites -- drills that worked fine with metallic alloys were defeated by the YF-22's composites.

Fair enough, but why are we assuming that just because the F-15 eventually overcame its problems, the F-22 will inevitably do so as well? Composites are fundamentally different from metals, and no amount of tweaking will make them behave like metals. How do we know that the F-22 will not be a permanently ultra high-maintenance aircraft?

[Starglider]

Composites are fundamentally different from metals, and no amount of tweaking will make them behave like metals. How do we know that the F-22 will not be a permanently ultra high-maintenance aircraft?

If the use of composite materials is in fact an inherent, unsolvable issue, then the F-35 program is also screwed (along with the Boeing 787 and assorted other aircraft, though they are not directly comparable). Regardless of to what extent that is true, I imagine that a major justification for continuing to spend so much on trying to fix the F-22 issues (at least in Gates mind) is that many of the results should be applicable to the F-35 and other future aircraft.

[Darth Wong]

Not necessarily; not all composites are the same, after all. If the composites in the F-35 are much stronger, then the fact that they can't be maintained like metal is less of a problem. I'm assuming that the particular composites in the F-22 are weaker and more prone to breakdown as a result of some particular stealth formulation.

[Sea Skimmer]

Gotta love that military-industrial complex

Seriously, I can't help but wonder why they don't design an F-22 variant with a normal skin instead of the fancy stealth exterior. They don't need stealth in most situations anyway, and if the skin alone is contributing to more than half its maintenance costs, that's just crazy. They can keep working on the stealth in the meantime, until such time as they have to fight the Firefox over the North Pole.

It’d be pointless to do that when you could still buy a new version of F-15E off the production line for somewhat less money, and with greater range and bombing payload. Plus a second guy in back to aim all the PGMs. The F-22 is all about stealth and we paid 40 billion in R&D to get that to work at all. No one else is even close. The USAF does not want to be crippled and screwed for the next 30 years by being forced to guy an upgraded version of a 30 year old plane, and a non stealthy F-22 doesn't cut it either.

As for all the composites, think about this.

The F-22 sustains supersonic speeds approaching mach 2. The fact that its stealth bubble canopy and skin can work at all is actually very impressive, most planes which sustain supersonic speeds don’t have bubble canopies for a reason. Even then the planes top speed is entirely limited by those materials heat tolerance.

F-35 meanwhile does not supercruise, and it has a fundamentally lower top speed it can reach on afterburner. That makes the whole design process much easier out of hand and maintainability is sure to benefit from it. The lower stealth standard is also critical, since it means less insanity then all the cracks in access hatches on F-22 and B-2 which must be resealed and painted every single time they get opened.

[Darth Wong]

Does that not imply that the F-22 was doomed from the get-go to be a special plane which would be incredibly expensive to operate in large numbers, and that Congress should have been warned about that?

[Sea Skimmer]

Nope, the requirements for Advanced Technology Fighter changed substantially with regard to stealth after development already began. This also meant it got slower. Then the Gulf War occurred and confirmed that stealth worked absurdly well. Everyone wanted as much as possible and F-22 delivers on even more then what was promised in that respect.

If we actually produced a serious run of the aircraft, we’d almost surely have gotten major product improvements that would reduce maintenance. It’d also knock a big chunk off the cost of each F-22, something which already dropped about 30 million dollars over the course of about 130 planes. Many of the materials being used on the F-35 just didn't exist for the F-22 for example, I'm sure more then one would be useful for an F-22B. But now we've ensured we will never ever have a chance to go do that. The line will shut and that's the end as it would cost billions and be nearly impossible to train a new workforce in the future to build them.

We we did go on with building them, the older planes could then go to reserve units that don’t fly much, and some would just go into war stocks. That is exactly what we did with all the F-15As and F-16As which barely had any functional systems, and yet themselves cost more then twice as much as the Phantoms they replaced. Look at almost any successful military aircraft and that’s what you’re going to find. They had to be evolved to become really good. Heck the classic P-51 Mustang… great fighter… actually started life as the A-36 dive bomber with the highest accident rate of any plane in the Air Force and wings that kept breaking off.

[Ma Deuce]

I'm most surprised Shep hasn't pointed out that the article prominently cites not one but two members of the "fighter mafia", given his (not entirely undeserved) seething hatred of them.

But yeah, it does make sense these problems would be related to the F-22's high operating speeds, so the only short-term solution I could see to keep costs down would be to impose limits on the aircraft's use of "supercruise".

[MKSheppard]

So I managed to read a copy in this morning's Post with my breakfast, and found some real glaring corkers.

The United States' top fighter jet, the Lockheed Martin F-22, has recently required more than 30 hours of maintenance for every hour in the skies, pushing its hourly cost of flying to more than $44,000, a far higher figure than for the warplane it replaces, confidential Pentagon test results show.

According to the Pentagon Paradox -- I know, biased biased -- the maintenance man hours required for each hour of flight were:

F-14
Spec: 20 Hrs
1981: 20
1986: 97

F-15
Spec: 11.3
1981: 19
1986: 33

Oh, and later; they say the cost of flying a F-15 in 1980 dollars is $3,305; versus $1,733 for a F-4E.

They cite official USAF publications, but I'm not sure about their credibility; since these guys lie lie lie lie.

just 55 percent of the deployed F-22 fleet has been available to fulfill missions guarding U.S. airspace

Link. In 2005; the readiness rate of a F-15 unit in Japan was 62.5%. Of course, the next year they raised it to 81.1%

But Pierre Sprey, a key designer in the 1970s and 1980s of the F-16 and A-10 warplanes, said that from the beginning, the Air Force designed it to be "too big to fail, that is, to be cancellation-proof."

Like we should listen to a notorious fraud.

Link to CDI brief on what the USAF should have

Stuart said it best:
"This whole presentation is pretty much CDI standard. They suggest that the optimum is a hopelessly impossible target (in this case an aircraft with the range, payload, speed, agility etc of an F-22/F-15 in an airframe that's the size and cost of an F-5E. Then they demand that anything that doesn't match that target should be cancelled.

They are hopelessly ill-informed - note that they suggest that a Mirage III with a J-79 would have been the best fighter ever built - have they never heard of the Kfir?"

Over the four-year period, the F-22's average maintenance time per hour of flight grew from 20 hours to 34, with skin repairs accounting for more than half of that time -- and more than half the hourly flying costs -- last year, according to the test and evaluation office.

The Air Force says the F-22 cost $44,259 per flying hour in 2008; the Office of the Secretary of Defense said the figure was $49,808. The F-15, the F-22's predecessor, has a fleet average cost of $30,818.

Oh noes!

The F-22 costs a mere 1.6x times more per hour to fly than the F-15!

Clearly we should kill it!

Wait, didn't the same people in the late 70s and early 80s say that because the F-15 cost 1.9x times more to fly than the F-4E, we should buy more F-4s instead!

[erik_t]

Those historical parallels are of course not bulletproof, but it's probably the best thing to go off of for predicting the F-22's future service troubles. At least, the best we can do with publicly available information.

[Alyeska]

What is the cost per flying hour of the F15? While the F22 might be more expensive, does this article consider that the base cost of the F22 is far higher and so is its capability? If the F22 is 4 times as expensive to fly as the F15, but is effectively worth 12 of them in combat, the F22 isn't exactly a bad deal.

[MKSheppard]

What is the cost per flying hour of the F15?

It's in original post, one of little reading skills.

[Starglider]

If the F22 is 4 times as expensive to fly as the F15, but is effectively worth 12 of them in combat, the F22 isn't exactly a bad deal.

The problem is, that isn't true in any current or likely near future combat. The F-22 is less capable at ground attack than an F-15E, and against air forces as primitive as Iraq's or Iran's the USAF would suffer negligable losses even without the F-22s. The F-22 is helpful for air defense penetration and suppression in the opening days of a campaign, but there are other options for that; B-2s, cruise missiles, semi-expendable UAVs etc. The F-22 would be vastly more useful than an F-15 only in hypothetical future conflicts against opponents with strong air defences, decent pilots and fighters of late fourth generation quality or better. Of course the US should absolutely be planning ahead for such conflicts, as should everyone else, but as usual long-term planning is anthema to Congress (and it seems, Secretary Gates).

[Darth Wong]

Wait, didn't the same people in the late 70s and early 80s say that because the F-15 cost 1.9x times more to fly than the F-4E, we should buy more F-4s instead!

What makes you think it's the same people, apart from your habit of lumping the entire world into two sides on every issue? Someone who was prominent in the media and posting political commentary in the 1970s would be >30 years older today, and probably retired.

In any case, people generally accepted that we needed higher-performance fighter aircraft because of the Cold War. Today, when we fight robed weirdoes living in caves armed with RPGs and roadside bombs, it's harder to justify spending vast amounts of money on an airplane solely designed to defeat imaginary Russian super-planes. That money could have been spent in other ways.