The Raptor is, quite simply, the most capable, most advanced and most deadly fighter jet ever built. It commands the skies and has the ability to knock other fighters out of the sky before they have even crossed the horizon, i.e., before they even realize the Raptors are there. It is a plane designed to sweep the skies of enemy aircraft and thereby make the battlefield a safer place for the infantry far below.
Unfortunately, the Raptor’s high cost made it a fat target for the Obama administration and many in Congress. And they have pulled the plug on the program after only 195 of the initially expected 1,300 copies were manufactured. The end of the Cold War meant, for many in Washington, that there was no need for such a plane, so they steadily began whittling away at the program year after year. And because so much of the plane’s built-in cost was accrued on the front end during the R&D phase, that meant that the average cost of each plane rose each time the overall number to be purchased was cut.
The final F-22 rolled out of the plant last December, and will be “delivered” to the Air Force in a ceremony at the plant on Tuesday. It then will be deployed to Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson near Anchorage, Alaska, joining an F-22 squadron.
The F-22 program created thousands of well-paying jobs and put food on plenty of local tables for two decades. It also drew to Marietta hundreds of highly educated and superbly skilled engineers and technicians, and gave Lockheed an impetus to spend millions of dollars upgrading the vintage-World War II plant. Those upgrades, and the sterling performance by all involved in the F-22, were a big reason that Lockheed chose the plant to help build portions of its newest fighter, the F-35 Lightning II.
Raptors will still be seen overhead occasionally as they are returned to the plant for upgrades and repairs. But the F-22 line has been shut down and packed away.
IT’S IRONIC — and short-sighted in the extreme — for the U.S. to be closing the door on construction of the world’s best fighter jet at a time when the Chinese and Russians have each produced jets that look just like the Raptor and which likely are almost as capable. But that’s part and parcel of a White House hell-bent on downsizing our stock of nuclear weapons to next to nothing. One hopes that the next “big” war does not find us with a military as ill-equipped and undersized as the one with which we were forced to go to war in 1941. We paid in brave men’s blood in the early 1940s for the penny-pinching politics of the 1930s.
Will we ever learn from our mistakes?
The "world's best jet fighter" asphyxiates it's own pilots with a faulty oxygen problem that hasn't even been identified yet! The F-35 is an absolute catastrophe, now costing as much as the yearly GDP of Spain.
Lockheed Martin has done nothing but loot the nation on a trumped-up weapon system that pilots are afraid to fly. This is nothing new in Lockheed's history of bribery scandals - West Germany lost nearly half its F-104 fleet when it turned out the plane was faulty and Lockheed had bribed German politicians into purchasing the dangerous jet.
The article mentions future confrontations with Russia and China, but it sounds more like a desperate attempt to justify the trillions wasted on these programs. I can count on one hand the number of countries in which Russia and China have performed military actions since 1993. I need more than two hands for the United States.
The US was behind not just at the beginning of WW2 but during it as well. It was not until 1945, thanks to German scientists and engineers, that US military technology advanced in leaps and bounds.
As to the article's scathing remarks on the United States' nuclear arsenal, it seems only fitting that the country that first used nuclear weapons on the civilians of another nation should be the first to remove those weapons.
In the end, this would not be such an issue if these aircraft were on-budget and actually worked. The American people are being taken for a long ride on this one. Well played Lockheed, well played.