The Lockheed Booster Club Fact Sheet may impress those who can't divide $65B by 187, but others may not be so impressed. This is from a piece by Pierre Sprey and WT Wheeler
"The F-22 is outrageously expensive. The 187 now authorized are costing the nation just over $65 billion. That's almost $350 million for each one, counting all development and production costs.
Not a single F-22 has flown in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It would be foolish to deploy them. There is no enemy air force there. To send F-22s as yet another bomber - at what DOD data shows to be three times the operating cost of the F-16s that are already bombing too much over there - would be just another harmful drag on the real war effort.
Even more important is the question of whether the F-22 makes a good fighter, presumably against a competent enemy air force - if we are ever faced with one. The simple truth is that the F-22s make US air power weaker, not stronger.
Study after study - to say nothing of war itself - shows conclusively that pilot skill dominates all other factors in winning or losing air battles. Because of the F-22, the skill of our pilots has been seriously degraded. Due to its gigantic maintenance and support burden - over $3 million per fighter per year, again according to official DOD figures - the Air Force has slashed our in-air pilot training. In the 1970s, famously called the "hollow decade" because of low combat readiness, our fighter pilots were getting 20 to 30 hours a month of air combat training - half what the Israeli Air Force pilots found necessary to achieve their lopsided 15 to 1 victory ratio in 1973. Today, our F-22 pilots get an obviously inadequate 10 to 12 hours. High tech theorists claim flying training can be replaced by ground simulators. Experience teaches otherwise: simulators can be used for cockpit procedures training but, by misrepresenting in-air reality, they reinforce tactics that could get pilots killed in real combat.
Ignoring the combat-dominating human dimension, the Air Force, Lockheed, and their congressional boosters tout the F-22 as the magic silver bullet of air combat, a technological wonder weapon. It's likely to be the opposite.
The F-22's so-called "stealth" may hurt more than it helps. First of all, stealth imposes huge aerodynamic, weight and maintenance penalties, reducing both combat agility and numbers of fighters available in the air. The invisibility claimed is disingenuous. In truth, against small (that is, short wavelength) radars, the F-22 is hard to detect only over a very narrow band of possible viewing angles. Over the huge remaining span of viewing angles, it is very detectable. Worse, there are thousands of existing long range, long wavelength radars, particularly Russian and Chinese ones, that can detect the F-22 from several hundred miles away at all angles - simply because all long wavelength radars are immune to any kind of stealth shapings or coatings. Believers in stealth's cloak of invisibility should ask the pilots of the two - not one, as commonly believed - stealthy F-117 bombers taken out of action by antiquated Russian radar-directed defense systems in the 1999 Kosovo air war. Moreover, a new unfolding whistleblower scandal is presenting court evidence that the F-22's stealth skin has failed to meet its stealth requirements - limited as they are - because it has been badly fabricated and dishonestly tested.
Worse, the widely advertised 10:1 or even 30:1 kill ratios of the F-22 in Air Force-umpired mock air battles rest entirely on using its radar (without allowing enemy anti-radar measures) and on assigning wishfully inflated kill percentages to its radar missiles. Despite the Air Force's long standing dream, in every real war of the last 45 years, our radar-equipped fighters were simply unable to use beyond-visual-range radar missile shooting or, at best, fired off a handful of inconsequential pot-shots. These few actual firings produced kill rates far less impressive than the percentages the Air Force assigns in F-22 mock battles.
The vaunted invincibility of the F-22 founders on two incurable flaws:
First, the plane's so-called "low probability of intercept" radar may now be easily detected by simple, low cost electronics, thanks to the worldwide proliferation of spread spectrum technology in cell phones and laptops. That creates an environment where, if the F-22 pilot is foolish enough to turn on his radar, he announces his presence over hundreds of miles. Even better for the enemy, the radar makes an unmistakable beacon for home-on-radar missiles. Both the Russians and the Chinese specialize in - and sell - just such missiles. Despite that, our Air Force almost always bans these potentially devastating missiles and tactics from the F-22's mock battles, for reasons that are not hard to fathom.
Second, when actual combat forces our F-22 pilots to turn off their radars and forget the beyond-visual-range dream, they'll find themselves forced into a close-in, maneuvering fight. Compromised by the burden of complex stealth and heavy radar electronics in that dogfight regime, the plane's agility, short range missiles, and guns are nothing special - as one of us observed at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada when an F-16 "shot down" an F-22 in exercises.
As for the plane's advertised ability to cruise supersonically - indeed a desirable characteristic - unfortunately, the F-22's low fuel capacity (27 percent of takeoff weight, only two thirds of what's needed for combat-useful supersonic endurance in enemy airspace) reduces this to a brief airshow trick. Why the big fuel shortfall? Once again, to make room for combat-irrelevant tons of stealth technologies and radar electronics.
It's not as if it's technically hard to design and produce a truly great air-to-air fighter that can whip any other fighter in the world. The only hard part is enforcing the discipline needed to: 1) focus austerely on what has proven inescapably effective in the actual air combat our pilots have experienced and are likely to experience (as opposed to the imagined high tech air combat dreamed up by our arm chair theorists); 2) rigorously excise extraneous niceties and alluring but untested technologies; 3) build two competing combat-capable prototypes, then go with the winner of a brutally administered series of head-to-head dogfights and live weapons firings (even if the winner fails to evenly spread subcontracts across 40-plus states). The two most successful planes flying in today's Air Force were built just that way. There's no reason we can't do that again - and come up with a new, even better, world-beating fighter."
Link to full text to follow...
http://www.cdi.org/program/document.cfm?DocumentID=4527
