You know that we live in unusual times when Congress has seen the light and is resisting replacing the U.S.’s mainstay fighter jets with an incredibly expensive Cold War throwback and there are questions about whether the Air Force itself has outlived its usefulness.
The F-15 Eagle is the Air Force’s current all-weather tactical fighter. It entered service in 1974 and is slated to remain in service until 2025. There are some 688 F-15s flying with Air Force and Air National Guard units.
The F-15 is a terrific aircraft but is getting long in the tooth. It has been further strained because of counter-terrorism duty demands, and the entire fleet was grounded last week following a crash in Missouri that raised concerns about possible structural fatigue problems.
Filling in on routine combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan until the F-15 is airborne again is the F-16 Fighting Falcon, another terrific aircraft and the Air Force’s current multi-role fighter. There are 650 F-16s in Air Force service, although some 4,000 are flying worldwide in 23 other air forces, making it the most popular fighter jet. The Air Force’s F-16s also are slated to be phased out in 2025.
Enter the F-22 Raptor, the heir apparent to the F-15 and F-16 and one bad-ass looking aircraft.
The F-22 uses stealth technology to carry out the Cold War mission for which it was designed — attacking advanced enemy fighters. But that mission was redundant before it entered service in 2005 and it is coming on line an era when the enemy is low-tech insurgents.
F-22s are being produced at the rate of about 20 a year with about 100 currently in service. The Air Force originally planned to order 750, but congressional caps as a result of concerns over its suitability for modern-day missions and its cost have limited the number to 277, and the Pentagon now says it will buy a total of only 183. This has had the effect of raising the purchase price to a very dear $362 million per copy.
As Ed Morrissey notes at Captain’s Quarters, “Our entire military strategy relies on air supremacy — and if the F-15 can’t deliver that any more, then we have allowed that strategy to slide into obsolescence.”
Ed is right up to a point, but behind the times.
While air supremacy remains important since China and Iran have air forces (oh, and Putin’s Russia, too), it has taken a back seat to counterinsurgency. The F-22 is not a leap forward but a throwback, and Pentagon claims that recent design modifications to this high-tech behemoth now enable it to fly counterterrorism-support missions are unconvincing and unconfirmed.
This in turn begs the question of where – or even whether – the Air Force fits into a post-9/11 world in which strategic bombing is largely passé, incoming enemy fighters are far and few between, and supporting counterinsurgency missions is Job One.
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