This article is about three years old, but somehow I'd missed it. Looks like the F-22 is a very high maintenance item.

These Images Of An F-22 Raptor’s Crumbling Radar Absorbent Skin Are Fascinating

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Release the Kraken

Probably doesn't help maintenance to station so many of them at the seashore. Wonder if that's why the former Tyndall birds are going away.

Air Force wants to send Tyndall’s F-22 jets to the boneyard

Sent from my motorola one 5G using Tapatalk

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Slava Ukraini!

$60K per hour of flight. Wow!

A few years ago, there was much talk about how future wars would be asymmetric, fought against terrorists, or cyber, so why do we need all these exotic and highly expensive weapon systems? China's military expansion, and now the Russian invasion of Ukraine, seem to have alleviated that doubt.

My last duty station before retirement was at Dobbins (1996-2000), which of course is co-located with Lockheed. We were flying the UC-35 and Lockheed was producing the F-22. I witnessed many take offs and landing of the Raptor during those years but the most amazing thing I saw was the new aircraft holding short of the runway while the factory test pilot did their flight control check (wipe out the cockpit). The control surfaces of that jet do things that make absolutely no sense to a pilot flying conventional airplanes, or helicopter. Even knowing a little about the flight characteristics of the F-22 one wonders, what the heck does that do??

As for the role of the F-22 in the grand scheme of things I think it does fill a niche, but the price tag is enormous.

It looks weird to see things like left & right elevators move in opposite directions. I suspect computers are calculating what control surfaces to move in what strange way given the pilot's inputs.

That's about what a new P-51 Mustang cost new in 1944.

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Is that what they use to clean the high tech coating?

I recall an F/A-18 Hornet driver telling me that his flight control inputs were just a vote to the flight control computer. The computer decided what the aircraft would do.

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"Your other right........."

Agreed, but also a nice niche to fill if we wind up going "toe-to-toe with the Rooskies,"in Slim Pickens' immortal words. Or the Chinese.

I'm no military strategist, but a few early skirmishes with the F-22 might lead the other side to de-escalate. Quickly establish air superiority, and the bad guys will hopefully reconsider their options.

And Air Superiority is that niche. it seems the Russians and/or Chinese may not be up to the task. The problem is the lack of real world testing.

We need F22 against the Russians and the Ukrainians do not?? The Russians have lost 77 aircraft so far to a country with 56 functioning fighter jets. The Ukraine spent 6 billion last year. We spent 731.75 billion. A F22 cost 350 million or 18 for 6 billion. We estimate Putin has committed 75% of his military there and he is getting his fanny handed to him. He is is supposed to have over 4000 fighter jets, where are they and what good would they be.

Yes, we have helped them and sent them some hardware and intell. We have not set them any F22s, B1s Aircraft carrier or other high t dollar hardware.

And just what makes anyone think the Chinese military is all that much better than the Russian military.?

We spent more money on our military that the other top 20 countries combine and 17 of those are our allies.

We have 14 strategic nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines each with 20 missiles. About 9-10 of them are on patrol at any one time. That is 200 war heads well hidden below the sea. Plus, we have about 656 land based ICBMs and about as may for our bombers etc. They are planning to enlarge most the silos around here


New research argues that 100 nuclear weapons is the “pragmatic limit” for any country to have in its arsenal. Any aggressor nation unleashing more than 100 nuclear weapons could ultimately devastate its own society, scientists warn.

The study was published in the journal Safety on Thursday; it was co-authored by Michigan Technological University professor Joshua Pearce and David Denkenberger, assistant professor at Tennessee State University and director of Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters.

“The results found that 100 nuclear warheads is adequate for nuclear deterrence in the worst case scenario, while using more than 100 nuclear weapons by any aggressor nation (including the best positioned strategically to handle the unintended consequences) even with optimistic assumptions (including no retaliation) would cause unacceptable damage to their own society,” the scientists wrote.

In other words if you want to mess up the "global supply chain" and cause some real chaos. Food, fuel, chip, wire, ammo, water etc 100 Nukes would do it, even if the other side does not pull their trigger. Which they most certainly will.

Even if they are wrong by a few hundred would somebody please explain why we need it all.




$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

I had a TDY to Tyndall in 2006 and had a chance to tour the new F22 facility there. Got right next to one of the jets on the flight line. Couldn't touch it or look in the cockpit, pictures were strictly verboten! Inside the pilots lounge they had copies of the DD250 receiving documents framed on the wall for each tail number. I think the cost for the first 10 was around 250 million (maybe 350 mil, it was a long time ago) each and the cost started to decrease with each and ended up around 150 or 175 million around tail number 20. They had a state of the art maintenance shop and the pilot giving the tour said they are very maintenance intensive but totally worth it for the capabilities in the air.

Yup, the pilot tells the jet what he wants to do and the jet moves different surfaces to make it happen. Move from a smart jet to a dumb jet, make the same control inputs in dynamic flight and you quickly find yourself executing Out of Control Flight Emergency Procedures.

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Need some of this!

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/..._AC_SX679_.jpg

As for nuclear deterrence, the old cold war term is MAD. Mutually Assured Destruction.

I call it stupid with a 100 multiplier. We, as a nation are wearing a explosive vest that makes a suicide bomber look like a kid with a firecracker.

What scares me about a ramp covered with hyper-expensive, ultra-capable fighter planes is they make a mighty attractive target for a preemptive missile strike. A few million dollars worth of missiles could take out $billions of dollars worth of airplanes.

Did not Ike warn us about the military/industrial complex? But more
than that, let a rumor circulate that some base or defense plant is going
to cut back a few percent and watch the local powers that be jump up
and down, cry and moan the blues.

You've got to park them somewhere.

And Patton warned us about the Russians.

IIRC the new Trident sub missile has 4 or more? warheads. Used to know a guy that inspected the guidance systems on them, only found out what he did few years ago. Very Strict Need to Know around sub bases.

I think it was Norm Augustine, CEO of Martin Marietta at the time, who said of the defense industry, to paraphrase, "We're the 'military industrial complex' in peacetime and the 'arsenal of democracy' in wartime."

But I agree that there is a lot of waste, inefficiency, and pork in the field.

Make no mistake I believe our troops should have the best equipment. But, the size, scope and some of the highly technical stuff has gotten way out of hand.. I would rather have the Ford plants be equipped to switch over to assault vehicles, S&W over to full blown assault arms, than have huge stock piles. In WWII were turned from Chivies to tanks, planes and ships in short order, Now we would have a much harder time when we SHOULD NOT. We can't even complete our Chevies without parts from a possible hostile nation

Right now we are so dependent on military spending if we cut out defense budget 10% our economy would probably crash. We have bases the military does not want or need that is kept going for the economy.

No new planes and Boeing crashes, no new ships Newport News and Ingalls collapses and they take their suppliers with them.

Meanwhile we have created out of thin air the equivalent of about 500 semi truck loads of $100 bills 17 years ago increasing to the current average of about 900 loads a year starting over 3 years ago to pay for our follies.

The average TAXPAYER has over a $1 invested in every military plane, $85 in each carrier and sub, and it cost each of us about $3.65 a year to keep each of them floating.

FWIW, the price of freedom vs being ripped off can be vague sometimes. Obvious cost over runs should be stopped. Engineering and design cost vs actual production cost for many weapons systems are just about criminal.

And then there's cost plus contracts.

Unavoidable, in same ways, in the sense that no sane business would undertake to build something risky, ambitious and never built before for a firm fixed price. But, at the same time, the guarantee of the cost plus is a disincentive to cost efficiency.

Watching the poor performance of the Russians makes me wonder if we can do much better.

Russia’s best fighter jet is being shot down by relatively inexpensive infantry weapons like the Striker and their MBT by the Javelin. Russians made a blunder by not having the infantry support the armor. This is a lesson they learned back in WWII and painfully are relearning.

Our Air Force Generals want to retire the A-10 Warthog and say the F-35 can do the same mission. So our bright Generals want to put a $110+ million airplane within range of a shoulder fired anti-aircraft missile such as the Striker which costs $200,000 (or whatever the Russian model is).

With the new Not-So-Cold War restarting hopefully NATO and United States training will improve and their ability to take on the Russians. Putin should not be underestimated. Finland and Sweden aren’t.

^ For Striker should we read Stinger?

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By striker he may mean Stykers, the self propelled armored 8×8 vehicles fitted with an autocannon and a missile launcher capable of firing Hellfires or Stingers.

Air superiority has never ever beat boots on the ground. The Russsian invasion of the Uktaine and our wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan are prime examples of how you can have overwhelming control of the air and no control of the ground. True we used restraint and never bombed areas with high of civilians populations like we did in WWII, but if you take those restrains off the board it is just a short step to just using nukes and getting the end of civilization over with.

We dropped 7,662,000 tons of bombs in Vietnam and a total of 1,625,000 in WII in both theaters. 4.7 to 1. In WWII we also did not have anywhere near the ground support aircraft we had during our more recent military escapades. Fighter strafing compared to helicopter gunships with multiple rotatory machine guns and A10s. Just what did that really accomplish??? True we could have made Hanoi a giant crater and killed most of the 600,000 people there, if we had wanted to. That may well have caused China to create some very large craters and it certainly would not have created a lot of world wide goodwill toward the US

Over the last twenty years, the UK Treasury push to drive down the costs of procuring defence equipment got so intense that the industry refused to send in proposals for quite a few projects. In their eyes the Treasury estimates were so far off that it wasn't worth the effort to prepare a proposal and try and negotiate a realistic price. Meanwhile, highly qualified and experienced workers were lost to the industry. How exactly did that improve the UK's defence posture?

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Release the Kraken

Why don't we attack Mexico and see.
The only question would be what to do with it. Give it to Texas or make some new states???

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I had the great pleasure of watching the F22's in Fla. doing maneuvers & mock dog fights in a restricted area were my warehouse was. 1 buzzed me @ about 200 ft. & went vertical out of sight after wagging his wings.
BTW it was an old air strip & the owner had to call Tyndall when he was going to fly his plane to le them know or get permission as it was a no -fly zone.

Politicians lost Vietnam, period. Many fail to remember hanoi was ready to “ sue for peace” during the mass B-52 raids.

The politicians and a lot of American anti war sentiment most certainly lost the Vietnam war. Politicians ALSO got us into it to. Stopping communist aggression, they said. Remind me again, just how much more of SE Asia did the commies take over after we left? None and even Vietnam went to war against China in 79 over Vietnam's actions against the Khmer Rouge in 1978, which ended the rule of the Chinese-backed Khmer Rouge.

But did we really needed 5 times as many bombs in Vietnam as we did in all of WWII. We could a bombed in moat and made it the island of south Vietnam with 7,662,000 tons of bombs and patrolled it with destroyers. The DMZ was 47 miles wide and the south border with Cambodia was about 700 miles for 750 miles total That is 10,000 tons a mile or just under 2 tons per ft of border. That would have made a nice deep wide ditch.

All of Vietnam north and south is only 128,000 sq miles. We needed 13 tons of explosives per square mile huh. That is 1# of high explosives for every 33x33 square of earth North and South. My rosy red rear. That is not counting bullets, artillery shells, grenades, motor rounds, laws, land mines.

What we really needed to to in Vietnam was to mind our own business. There were approximately 2 million Vietnamese civilians who died while we were "fixing their country"

How many died in Afghanistan and Iraq while we took care of the problems there and then left them, oh so much better off??

One of the problems with spending money on a whole bunch of really neat really expensive military toys is some one is going to want to sell you more of them and a great way to do that is to find a nifty little war to use them on and "Save America"

Question; are you referring to a specific campaign Eg;...ORT or OLB1&2?

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Never fly the "A" model

Hanoi had been stating that for years but failed to carry through. Hanoi would never have seriously come to the peace table had not the Buffs wiped out Main Street.

All this military complex talk . . . You don't need it until you do.

One has No Idea of what a BUFF strike feels like unless you’ve been close to one.
Perhaps ole Kissinger was telling a lie as well as the NVA general, both said the north was ready to “ talk”. Regardless their talks would have been same same as N. Korea.
Point is politicians actually started and ended the war, figure the $$$ made by defense contractors, $$$ made by “ civilian contractors” hired to work there. Oh BTW Lady Bird Johnson owned controlling interest in a Big one. Go figure.

I think that would be Bell Helicopters.

Civilian contractors, one being the PA&E. There were More civilian contractors there than GI’s in 72.