When the F-22 assembly line was shut down, the U.S. Air Force had a solid ceiling on the best fighter to use in the air-to-air combat, and every year since then has made that ceiling seem like it is getting even lower.
The Raptor went into production in 2004 as the embodiment of a single concept; to take the airing and decisively and with very little warning to the other aircraft. That bet proved to be rather fruitful in terms of performance. The remaining cost has been structural. It was not just that the Air Force terminated an aircraft purchase; it was that it took a future in which a small fleet would have to ensure a set of problems worldwide, as well as absorb ordinary wear, and still be credible against the fleets which could expand.
An even greater F-22 inventory, in the 750 aircraft ambition that has been talked about most, would have transformed daily realities rather than rhetoric. It might have had more squadrons forward-based, had less punishing training and deployment cycles and have constructed its maintenance capacity not to scarcity but to steady-state scale. Even a small increase in the preparedness of hundreds of tails would have provided a deeper baseline on air dominance operations and a larger hedge against accidents and losses. The number of Raptors actually constructed equaled just 186, with at any given time a smaller combat-coded group of them, so the Air Force is running the Raptor as an heirloom: something it cannot afford to lose, but something it must preserve, and something it must ration. That scarcity also amplifies all tradeoffs of modernization, in that advances are not distributed across a large fleet; rather, they are concentrated in a small one.
There is no abstract scoreboard in air combat planning, and numbers do not make the difference between persistent and episodic coverage. It is there that the J-20 “secret weapon” is a bit less secretive. It is production. Estimates of the Chinese J-20 are in the mid-hundreds and growing (open-source), and contribute to the doctrine based on the idea of long-range presence and pressure in the Western Pacific. The J-20 has a larger air frame, which is more accommodating to fuel and internal volume, which is in line with an operational approach where reach, payload and threatening high-value support aircraft are valued. Even the analysts who judge the F-22 to be the better fighter continue to regard the declining margin as the news of the day: a small, aged force is confronted by a force able to repeat, grow, and pose in size.
The F-22 does not only have a few limits with fleet size. Its initial design was created in another epoch of networking, and the ability to act as a “quarterback” of the aircraft is limited by its data-sharing methods. Link 16 inputs can be accepted by the Raptor, however historically it has been using F-22-exclusive routes to broadcast its own information, one factor why the Air Force has considered upgrades and workarounds including Talon HATE gateway pods and other translation ideas. When a mix of fourth- and fifth-generation formations is put together in a force, little machine-to-machine sharing enhances voice traffic, increased friction, and increased reliance on airborne translators and gateways that must coexist in the shared contested airspace.
The sensor-fusion function of the F-35 would still not have been dispensed with even a hypothetical 750-Raptor force. Lightning II was designed as a premium node- it was created to gather, combine, and share a coherent image with other players. Raptor, in its turn, is the standard of stealthy air-to-air performance and kinematics, yet it was never intended to be the connector of a joint network.
Another opera on any F-22 heavy posture is range and refueling: this is of particular concern in the Indo-Pacific, where range becomes an operational liability because tanker demand. The greater the reliance of the Air Force on short-legged fighters as the means of creating presence, the greater the reliance on connectors that need to be secured, dispersed, or even eliminated with new ideas.
It is that environment which the Next Generation Air Dominance family, typified by the F-47, enters. It is not entering into a force which can once more indulge in the gorgeous parsimony; it is inheriting the results of it. The promised way ahead focuses on survivability and information superiority and manned-unmanned teaming the crewed fighter is a mission commander of Collaborative Combat Aircraft as opposed to a solitary duelist. As a matter of fact, winning the fight at the merge is no longer the sole problem of the Air Force in terms of the future air dominance issue. It is maintaining dominance of the battlefield when figures, networking, range and capability to replenish combat power all hold equal weight as the actual speed of the jet.
