It doesn’t happen often that an airplane design boasts to be the most stealthy bomber ever and the fastest in the arsenal only to be dropped before it even makes its first prototype. The Lockheed Martin FB-22 “Strike Raptor” was just that: a radical concept in the early 2000s to transform the F-22 Raptor, the world’s greatest air superiority fighter, into a supersonic medium-range stealth bomber with a fifteen times greater payload capacity than its parent.
The engineering turning point involved changing the Raptor’s trapezoidal wings with a significantly larger elongated delta wing. Delta wings, with their triangular planform, provide great strength, much internal volume for fuel, and the capability to create lift at high angles of attack using stable leading-edge vortices. At supersonic speeds, they also reduce the drag-causing shock waves that afflict conventional wings, a characteristic that made them an obvious choice for a bomber that could cruise at Mach 1.5–1.9. FB-22’s delta wing, with approximately three times the surface area of the F-22’s, was intended to increase combat radius from 600 miles to as much as 1,800–2,000 miles, and to carry up to 30,000 pounds of ordnance.
Lockheed Martin’s design reused around 80 percent of the F-22’s avionics, sensors, and subsystems, including its radar-absorbing shaping and coatings. Fuselage length was held to 64.33 feet to reduce expense, but fuel and a second cockpit seat for a Weapon Systems Officer, essential in navigating complicated strike missions over long ranges, were accommodated by redistributing interior volume. The powerplants would be upgraded from the F-22’s Pratt & Whitney F119s to more powerful F135 turbofans, the same engines now used in the F-35 Lightning II, allowing the heavier airframe to maintain supersonic dash speeds without afterburner for longer times.
Its stealth-optimized version would have been capable of internally carrying 35 GBU-39 Small Diameter Bombs, two AIM-9 Sidewinders, and ten AIM-120 AMRAAMs. The expanded weapons bay also would have room for 5,000-pound-class bombs. External hardpoints 27 of them would support “bomb truck” loads comparable to a B-1B Lancer, but at the expense of radar cross-section. Lockheed suggested faceted, removable wing pods to maintain low observability even when carrying external stores, a feature designed to deal with one of the greatest challenges facing the integration of stealth technology into multi-role aircraft.
The aerodynamic compromises were steep. The increased wing and added weight lowered agility to the neighborhood of 6g limits of maneuver, and the exclusion of the F-22’s thrust-vectoring nozzles removed to trim weight and complexity meant that it would be bested in a close-range dogfight by agile opponents such as the Su-27 or MiG-29. This was a deliberate trade-off: the FB-22 was never meant to get down and dirty in visual-range battles, but to attack from beyond radar range and depart before being intercepted.
From a strategic point of view, the FB-22 was conceived as a “regional bomber” bridging the gap between fighter-supported strike packages and heavy bombers with deep penetration capabilities. It had the potential to replace the F-15E Strike Eagle in deep-penetrating missions, supplement the B-1B and B-2 in high-threat combat, and offer an survivable first-day-of-war strike capability. In 2003, then-Air Force Secretary James Roche publicly envisioned a force of 150 FB-22s flying alongside 381 F-22s, 60 B-1s, and 21 B-2s, observing that building the bomber version from an existing airframe would save costs by as much as 75 percent over a clean-sheet design.
But the timing of the program was fatal to it. By the mid-2000s, American combat operations were characterized by counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, where there were no advanced integrated air defenses and minimal demand for a stealthy supersonic bomber. The 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review directed attention back to a longer-range strategic bomber the B-21 Raider program that would arise from it capable of intercontinental missions from safe bases in the continental United States. The FB-22’s 2,000-mile range, while exceptional for a fighter-derived platform, was deemed insufficient for Pacific scenarios without vulnerable forward basing.
Technical factors were also against it. The F-22’s computing architecture of the 1990s and radar-absorbent coatings that are maintenance-heavy were already looking dated, and retrofitting them for a bomber force risked committing the Air Force to expensive sustainment nightmares. New stealth materials like the modular panels of the F-35 were not included in the FB-22’s baseline configuration.
When the axe finally fell, the FB-22 became part of the “what-if” fleet of aircraft to join the YF-23 and the XB-70 ideas that extended engineering limits but never entered operational use. As one of its contemporaries called it, the Strike Raptor was “a solution in search of a problem,” its combination of delta-wing design, supersonic speed, and stealth bombing range unmatched on paper, but out of phase with the geopolitical and budgetary realities then prevailing.
