Obama moves remnants of F-22 program he gutted to South Korea

View Comments (20)

• But hey! Let's cut our defense spending a little more. Just a couple more and we can be back where we were when WWII was declared. Then the CHinese can come and claim all the property they have bought here, and confiscate the rest as collateral for unpaid loans.

• If we have a choice between an aging F-15 and F-16 fleet of planes, which were already becoming obsolete when I was in the Air Force 32 years ago, and the F-22, I say let's build the damned things! We can't keep using the old stuff forever.

  • The Chinese have a new fighters that can swat F-15s out of the air without breaking a sweat. Those confrontations they're always having over in the South China Sea? Our guys are going up in planes they know are inferior to China's J-20 and J-31. The F-22 is better than anything else built, but there are so few of them we can hardly count them as a strategic resource. China can create a confrontation in the South China Sea and have everything it owns available - we have to cover the whole damn world. With 187 built, a couple of them crashed, and the usual number out of service for maintenance, those F-22s are spread pretty thin.

    • Sounds like the Korean War. Russian MiGs vs. F-86 Sabre. The MiG was a better platform, our pilots were superior and kicked ass. I suspicion the same would happen now. Source: http://tinyurl.com/c5m5nz4

      • I don't think that's going to happen with this generation of fighters. We're close to a point where the pilot is a luxury. No doubt a superior pilot helps, and nobody else can afford to train like we do, but when planes are getting knocked out of the sky from distances so great they aren't even visible yet, there's not much help to be found in superior piloting. Pilots are almost playing video games in the cockpit. Don't forget, those F-15s getting knocked out of the game were being flown by Americans, too, and they didn't have a chance.

        • You gotta have faith dude.

    • Yeah this bugs me too.. its fascinating just looking at the enclosures provided in that region.. I remember a while back looking at globalfirepower.com and wondering why Thailand had a carrier and so many minelayers and its pretty clear how tense it could get, just based on the geography

• Good thing they got rid of any Clintons running things, or they would have already sold the plans to the Chinese.

• Why do all this? Just send a cruise missile though fat boy's bedroom window at about 3AM. Worked great when Reagan sent one thought Qaddafi's tent.

  • Well, he didn't get Qaddafi, so...

    • Qaddaffi got real polite after that, though.

      • True that.

• Black Alfalfa don't care. He is like the honey badger.

• http://blacktailfa.deviantart.com/journal/Lockheed-s-Falling-Star-The-F-22-Raptor-269919800

  If even Obama believes it isn´t good enough...

  • I think you and I have debated this before. You think F-22 problems are fatal flaws, I see a fighter that would allow my country to maintain air superiority. Of course they are having trouble keeping the pilots in the game - this is probably the last manned air superiority fighter we will ever develop (barring the invention of anti-gravity) and it's on the very edge of what a human body can withstand. What I see is a fighter so far superior to what we're using now it's almost a joke:

    "The F-22 is so good that during military exercises in 2006 12 F-22's fought as many as 40 opponents at a time in simulated combat - including everything else in the U.S. arsenal - and achieved a 108-to-zero kill ratio. That's 108-0. Think about it. Then they teamed the F-22's up with a mixed battle group and set the team against an opposing team led by F-15's and the team led by the F-22's amassed 241 kills against two losses, and neither of the two losses was an F-22. That's 241-2. Think about it."

    • Mind you, this is while delivering a much smaller number of aircrafts than planned.
      No, these defects are not fatal flaws in theselves but they show that behind the good PR and Contacts in the US militaary, Lockheed Martin have severely ***ed in the design and construction of the aircraft, despite all the time and money involved.

      Incompetent and corrupt policies bring about defective military equippement.
      Very incompetent and corrupt governements just won´t learn from even repeated military defeats, in which case only a complete overall at the top may bring lasting improvement.

      Obama is not that dumb hovewer, he intend to fight his war an ocean away from China and North Korea, one where predator drones would do just fine in maintaining air superiority.

      • Drones don't maintain air superiority. They work against stone-age savages but wouldn't last ten minutes in a fleet action between the U.S. and China. "Air superiority" fighter means whoever has the best one rules the skies. We should be willing to pay whatever it costs to have air superiority.

        The small number of F-22s bought by the U.S. is why the price per unit is so high. If we had gone ahead with the original order of about a thousand, the overhead would have been about a fifth of what shows up on the books now. That's how research and development works. Our congresscritters are so stupid they sat there in the hearings asking, "Why are these things so expensive?" and no matter how many times it was explained to them that the unit cost declines sharply as the overhead is spread over more units, they didn't get it. Now we're developing the F-35 and the unit cost keeps rising as they try to make the damn thing work, and when all is said and done they won't last five minutes against the F-22. Dumb.

        • Against US citizens and soldiers keeping their oaths to defend the US constitutions, drones would be about enough to maintain air superiority.

          http://www.breitbart.com/InstaBlog/2013/05/25/Walmart-Boeing-and-Lockheed-Help-Fund-the-Center-for-American-Progress

          This is the game Lockheed Martin is involved in, it isn´t just the politicians that are at fault.
          While the general US economy isn´t a free market anymore, it still has much more economic freedom than in the military-industrial complex today.
          It has been debased by the growth of cronyism, incompetence, corruption and political correctness.

          Turn California into a single-party state and you control a part of the country, do the same with the US military and you can control the entire continent.

        • You still need soldiers to operate the drones.

        • Of course the fact that our thrifty government has paid thousands for a toilet or a hammer. why should the cost of a complicated aircraft surprise them. I bet we could afford one of these for every member of congress if we could contol the waste in the government, including the military/