Wednesday, August 12, 2009

The F-22 Program Needs To Go Forward

Ran across this last night by Gen. McPeak (ret.), Air Force chief of staff from 1990 to 1994, was a national co-chair of Obama for President.

Notice the bolding there at the end of his credentials.

Why We Need the F-22

It’s been more than half a century since American soldiers were killed by hostile aircraft. Let's keep it that way.


That is a sentiment I can get behind.

The United States relies on the Air Force, and the Air Force has never been the decisive factor in the history of war.

—Saddam Hussein,
before Desert Storm

High-end conventional war is characterized by the clash of industrial forces. It’s armored, mechanized and increasingly air-power centric. Few are equipped by training or temperament to understand the phenomenon, especially as it concerns air warfare, a relatively recent aspect of the human experience. (In this regard, Saddam Hussein had plenty of company.) But the bottom line is that in high-end conventional war, neither our Army nor Navy can be defeated unless someone first defeats our Air Force.

For high-end conventional war we’ve built an Air Force that, for now, is virtually unbeatable. Anyone looking at our air-power capabilities knows there is little hope they can concentrate conventional forces for decisive engagement of our Army or Navy. We will track them and pick them to pieces. When Saddam Hussein tried us on for size in the early-1990s, the ground war was a four-day walkover that followed the initial 39 days of aerial combat.


Any conflict comes down to "boots on the ground", but to protect those "boots", the job is a hell of a lot easier when they aren't having to keep looking up to see if something is falling from the sky on them.

I pointed out earlier that we have Air Superiority right now, but those days may be getting short.

We have forced anyone with a bone to pick with us to find an alternative to high-end, conventional war. We’ve had to invent a vocabulary for this low end: “asymmetrical” conflict, it being another poorly understood activity. But it seems clear that in this sort of war our existence is not threatened, that we can regulate the resource input. It can be expensive in men and material, but we cannot be defeated militarily.

When the enemy succeeds, it is because we do not defeat him and then weary of the fight. This is not a good outcome, but it is better—and much cheaper for us in lives and treasure—than losing a high-end, conventional conflict.


I make no excuses that we don't want a "fair" fight. I want our military to go in, kick ass, take control and then we can consider being magnanimous after our victory.

I have a stake in this and so do a lot of the people I know. Sons, daughters...if not themselves that are on the front lines around the globe, that we would like to come home safely.

You got a Su-27, well we can see you, but you can't see us...but that's not going to last very long.

The future air combat capabilities we should build are based on the F-22, a stealthy, fast, maneuverable fighter that is unmatched by any known or projected combat aircraft. But the F-22’s production run may soon come to an end at just 187 planes, well short of establishing the fleet size we need. After all, it’s expensive, and getting more so as the number contemplated has been repeatedly reduced. In an argument they seem to think makes sense, critics say the aircraft has no worthy opponent—as if we want to create forces that do have peer competitors.


Get that? The fewer we produce, the more expensive each plane is, the more we produce, the less cost per unit. Yeah they still cost a butt-load of money, but when the Russian counterpart gets out, we'll need more that 187 F-22's spread out or sitting in the wrong place is almost as useless as not having them to begin with.

It’s been more than half a century since any American soldier or Marine has been killed, or even wounded, by hostile aircraft, a period roughly coincident with the existence of the Air Force as a separate service. Even during the Korean War—the Air Force’s first engagement wearing new, blue uniforms—enemy air attack was primitive and rare. The main air battle was fought along the Yalu River, just as in Vietnam it was fought over Hanoi, and in Desert Storm, over Baghdad. Our guys on the ground had hard work to do, but when they looked up, they saw only friendly skies.

For the life of me, I can’t understand why we should wish to change this.


We've lost a lot of pilots in those fifty years, but it was always our fighters ruling the sky. Our troops on the ground were left to deal only with their troops on the ground. I'd like to keep it that way.

Bonus Stuff:

I needed another F-22 video to close this off and I found a cool one:



Also, if you are close to L.A. and you've never been to an Air Show I would recommend the Edwards Show Oct. 17 and 18. They WILL have a F-15 and F-22 there so you can marvel both their capabilities and compare something that first flew when I was graduating High School (1972) and what they can do now 36 years on.

I'll be at the Air Show on Saturday, the 17th and I'll wear my Rottie T-shirt. If you see me say hi!

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