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Posted
by David A. Fulghum at
7/23/2009 3:07 PM CDT
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Regardless of the vote in the Senate, “ The F-22 funding termination this week doesn't change a thing [about the tactical advantages offered by the stealth fighter’s advanced systems] and I think history will bear out the F-22 advocates' position when all the dust settles,” a senior U.S. Air Force intelligence officer tells Aviation Week. “ The F-35 [Joint Strike Fighter] is not an F-22 by a long shot,” he says. “There's no way it's going to penetrate Chinese Air Defenses if there's ever a clash.” The intelligence official was referring to the fact that penetrating the latest surface to air missile defenses is something only the F-22 can do. China and Russia have variants of the the S-300/400 family that includes the SA-20 which is being sold in Asia and the Middle East. The F-22 can stay ahead of SA-20 because it it flies about a half-mach faster, two-miles higher and has a smaller Radar Cross Section than the F-35.
What prompted this statement by him?
What drones? The ones that fly 120 kts and launch gbu-12's ?
The F-22 was designed to face high end threats.
Cruise missiles? Better look at the PK. And oh by the way the JASSM is on the dud list for the 3rd time. And.... has anyone ever seen a JASSM do nap-of-the earth? No? Shocking. It won't meet its price targets, and only depends on "stelath" at sub-sonic speed for survival. That is if the gold plated wonder hits its target. I'll take a Tomahawk Block IV thank you.
JDAM? Great weapon. Except for an S-300 or S-400 threat you will have to go deep because it is kinda short range. Guess what the only proven platform is that can take it that far into a high end threat. Ditto with SDB.
B-2. Yes to a point including the fact that it is broadband steatlh. Yet it is subsonic and will need some form of escort or pre-beatdown over a sustained campaign vs. a top threat. (As opposed to a one way nuke mission through wide open Soviet territory (design requirements and all that)
If there aren't F-22s around and if....IF the F-35 proves itself.... it will still have some work do to. If anyone else stands up a Chinese style of IADS over the next 30 years, (the proposed lifetime of the F-35) it won't be able to handle it.
Especially as it was never designed in the first place to handle that kind of threat. (F-22 and F-35 designed to work as a team.) USAF red force people looked at stealth and IADS a long time ago. Stealth by itself is not going to do it. Stealth (high quality stealth), supercruise and extreme altitude give a better chance. Something to think about when they start retiring the first F-22s in 20 years.
The rest is readable.
I also keep hearing that the F-22 line requires products from something like 46 states with some massive number of sub-contractors involved. Even if tooling is kept would it even be possible to restart production in a timely manner given the shear numbers of companies involved?
In regards to restarting assembly lines, it no longer is WWII where DoD can call up companies like Ford and GM and say build us a couple thousand B-24s or IBM and say make us some M1-carbines. It only worked back then because companies could manufacture a lot of the pieces in-house. It seems to me, that with something like a F-22, that any shut down of the line is equivalent to breaking tooling a la SR-71.
If a shooting match did occur the lag time just to get all the logistics together again would stifle any chance of having new units show up on a flight line in time to do battle.
Something to consider is that just short of 100,000 fighters were produced in the US in about a 5 year period in WWII. Does anyone actually think that even 1,000 F-22s could be produced in 5 years in all out manufacturing blitz?