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F-22 Raptor Cancelled
BayaWeaver writes "Slate reports that the F-22 Raptor has been cancelled by the Senate. At an estimated price tag of $339 million per aircraft, even the powerful military-industrial-congressional complex couldn't keep this Cold War program alive in these hard times. They look very cool though and have appeared in movies like Hulk and Transformers. But not to worry too much about the future of the military-industrial-congressional complex: the F-35 Lightning II begins production next year!
As a side note, in 2007 a squadron of Raptors became deaf, dumb and blind when they flew over the International Date Line."
What's amusing to me is that if you want to education or health care funded in the US, you have to lobby Congress like hell to fund it.
Conversely, if you are the head of the Department of Defense and don't need or want a pointless weapons program, you have to lobby Congress like hell not not fund it.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Only because the U.S. doctrine has been to have total air superiourity and the Air Force (and Navy) have been able to achieve it through superiour technology (and training) --- if 187 Raptors aren't sufficient to achieve that in some future conflict, a lot of soldiers are going to die, and that statement will cease to be true.
William
Yeah - or you could just stop invading countries. That's a good way of keeping your soldiers from dying.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Really? Do they take off and land from 25,000 feet, too?
Each one of these planes requires 44 hours of maintenance for every hour in the air, as someone has already mentioned. They are obsolete, and they have gone over budget by a factor of 3 or more.
The F-22 is now, and has always been, a boondoggle granted to military contractors by lawmakers who get large contributions from those contractors. As far as I know, no F-22 has ever flown a combat mission. They cost hundreds of millions of dollars and have never been used.
Meanwhile, we fight over whether a working family should have the god-given right to go bankrupt if one of their members gets sick.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The whole needing F-22s if we ever get into a conventional war with a Great Power thing is a canard. Great Powers have nuclear weapons, so conventional wars aren't possible; we send in F-22s and 8 hours later half the planet is glass.
Conventional fighting these days is done against guys hiding in caves in third-world countries, and the F-22 does precisely nothing to help in those scenarios.