quote:

Originally posted by 16625089:
RE: http://www.military.com/features/0,15240,179504,00.html

please. I hope I pray , that yes why oh why, don't we put our money in Fighter Planes like the Raptor? We need a Leader to this for we all know America has Air Superiority, we need a Leader to have the Balls to use it.
This in turn will also save the "Tax Payers" money not to mention "Our Boy's & Girls" Lives! Oh and by the way shorten the War itself. Bombs Over Baghdad! Get this war over and come on home! No Country in the World has the Air Superiority "We" do and we need to use it to it's fullest extent to put the fear of "God" into them and any other want-to-be Country that wants to mess with us! Hey , Desert Storm 3 days verses how many years now? The proof is in the pudding. Great Article by the way .

quote:

Originally posted by outlaws93:
will not happen in case you didnt know but obama wants to crap can all new military projects and stop with all weapon advancements... sooo sorry... i guess we the people should of elected someone that wanted to keep these projects...but we didnt...again sorry....

quote:

Originally posted by 11946413:
Well, with all do respects sirs, Hollywood is not going to support the war effort for a couple reasons:
1) The current Iraqi and Afghanistan conflicts are unpopular, to say the least. Especially among younger americans, and yuonger americans (16-35ish) are among Hollywoods main money making squeeze. No one wants to make a movie that is not going to make any money...
2) There was a clear, defineable enemy in WWII, The Japanese and Hitler. Now we are fighting a lot of insurgents. Who the **** are insurgents? Most of the public doesn't care, and even if they did, its hard to class insurgents as inherently evil. Though certain branches of the media have tried at times. If you would notice Sirs, it was easy to start Afghanistan, since we could put up a picture of Osama and say "Thats the guy that hurt us, we need to go hurt him." And much like in WWII, Americans jumped on the chance to do some killing. Then Hitler was attacking our friends, the Brits, easy to get Americans to tag on along with that one after what the Japs did.
Who was Saddam ever killing? His own people? We dont give a **** about that here, look at Darfur for example. The majority of Americans dont really care. So it was harder to paint Saddam as some evil ******* who we HAD to kill, but we still got away with it, AT FIRST.

So then Saddam is dead, Osama is gone, and now its insurgents. We dont have a face, a name, a chant. If you want to rally people for a cause, you need a name, a face, a chant, and crimes that person committed against humanity. So you would need a figurehead of the Insurgents, and then we would need to paint him up as Satan Incarnate. Do that effectively, have a few embassies get bombed, and BOOM, we might have support again for this war. You would not even have to have an actual figurehead, make one up. And Don't make the mistake of turning him into a martyr. Make him some rich sheik who just convinces young kids with a lot of ideals to go get killed. And thats Mil PR 101 folks.

As for funding, its going to get cut. Wouldnt matter if its Obama or McCain. We just dont have the funds right now... I have been more a fan of revamping some older aircraft with more modern improvements myself, it would save money and still give us competent fighters. For instance, an F-20 with avionics upgrades, a GE F414 engine, and a thrust vectoring nozzle might be a decent start. I worry that eventually F-22/As stealth is ultimately going to be rendered useless with continually improving RADAR, GPS, and various other technologies. I would rather have a large amount of cheap, easily servicable aircraft that pilots can be trained on quickly. But then again, maybe thats why Im not advising the USAF on what contracts to buy :P.

quote:

Originally posted by 16625089:
RE: http://www.military.com/features/0,15240,179504,00.html

please. I hope I pray , that yes why oh why, don't we put our money in Fighter Planes like the Raptor? We need a Leader to this for we all know America has Air Superiority, we need a Leader to have the Balls to use it.
This in turn will also save the "Tax Payers" money not to mention "Our Boy's & Girls" Lives! Oh and by the way shorten the War itself. Bombs Over Baghdad! Get this war over and come on home! No Country in the World has the Air Superiority "We" do and we need to use it to it's fullest extent to put the fear of "God" into them and any other want-to-be Country that wants to mess with us! Hey , Desert Storm 3 days verses how many years now? The proof is in the pudding. Great Article by the way .

quote:

the F-22 did perform well enough in its operational tests to go into production—10 years behind schedule. Even so, the Pentagon further reduced the order to 183 planes in 2006 to save money. The cost of each F-22 (the total cost of its development and production divided by the number of aircraft procured) is now over $300 million. To help pay for its F‑22s, the Air Force has scaled back on upgrades to the F‑15 and other aircraft and also cut personnel. And it continues to argue that it needs at least 381 F-22s to meet its mission requirements.

Others are less enamored of the fighter. The late Edward Hirsch, a leading proponent of reforming the acquisitions process, considered the aircraft a failure, because in not meeting its cost and schedule objectives, it drained off funding from other worthwhile programs. “The warfighter expects to have a platform capable of supporting his mission and the mission of the Department of Defense,” Hirsch said in an interview shortly before his death last year. “If that program is so costly as to jeopardize all other platforms, you can’t consider it to be an outstanding success.”

Even Defense Secretary Robert Gates has questioned the plane’s necessity, pointing out that “the F-22 has not performed a single mission” in either Iraq or Afghanistan.

The F-22’s troubled procurement hasn’t stopped the Air Force from planning for a “sixth generation” aircraft to be built in the 2020s.

quote:

Originally posted by rayld2:

quote:

Originally posted by 16625089:
RE: http://www.military.com/features/0,15240,179504,00.html

please. I hope I pray , that yes why oh why, don't we put our money in Fighter Planes like the Raptor? We need a Leader to this for we all know America has Air Superiority, we need a Leader to have the Balls to use it.
This in turn will also save the "Tax Payers" money not to mention "Our Boy's & Girls" Lives! Oh and by the way shorten the War itself. Bombs Over Baghdad! Get this war over and come on home! No Country in the World has the Air Superiority "We" do and we need to use it to it's fullest extent to put the fear of "God" into them and any other want-to-be Country that wants to mess with us! Hey , Desert Storm 3 days verses how many years now? The proof is in the pudding. Great Article by the way .

YOu may want to read the Nov 2008 IEEE Spectrum mag series "WHAT'S WRONG WITH WEAPONS ACQUISITIONS?"
"http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/nov08/6931/weapsb1"

quote:

the F-22 did perform well enough in its operational tests to go into production—10 years behind schedule. Even so, the Pentagon further reduced the order to 183 planes in 2006 to save money. The cost of each F-22 (the total cost of its development and production divided by the number of aircraft procured) is now over $300 million. To help pay for its F‑22s, the Air Force has scaled back on upgrades to the F‑15 and other aircraft and also cut personnel. And it continues to argue that it needs at least 381 F-22s to meet its mission requirements.

Others are less enamored of the fighter. The late Edward Hirsch, a leading proponent of reforming the acquisitions process, considered the aircraft a failure, because in not meeting its cost and schedule objectives, it drained off funding from other worthwhile programs. “The warfighter expects to have a platform capable of supporting his mission and the mission of the Department of Defense,” Hirsch said in an interview shortly before his death last year. “If that program is so costly as to jeopardize all other platforms, you can’t consider it to be an outstanding success.”

Even Defense Secretary Robert Gates has questioned the plane’s necessity, pointing out that “the F-22 has not performed a single mission” in either Iraq or Afghanistan.

The F-22’s troubled procurement hasn’t stopped the Air Force from planning for a “sixth generation” aircraft to be built in the 2020s.

quote:

Originally posted by 18403850:
So what it comes down to is that the F-22 program has beem screwed with so much and original buy cut by 75% (from the 750 at the beginning) it costs are now too high. Circular reasoning; you cut the program so unit costs increased, but now that unit costs are too high, we need to cut the program. The only thing wrong with the F-22 is the continual "reshaping" of the program by different DoD and administration officials over the last 20+ years. Same situation as the B-2, cut from 300 to 132 and so on until we only bought 21 since unit costs were too high. If we had bought nothing then the $20 billion R&D would have led to zero acft on the ramp. Let procurement specialists quantify that.

What SecDef Gates doesn't say is that the reason the F-22A has not flown over Iraq is that his office vetoed its deployment to SWA. The USAF wanted to deploy it to see how well its sensors, infrastructure, etc. worked under real world conditions.
=========================
Oh good. No mission requirement other than extended IOT&E so we should risk airframes so we can "learn" in the wrong environment. "If the shoe don't fit - make it fit anyway." I was part of the same game in Thailand and Vietnam in the 1960s and we learned a lot and dropped few bombs along the way and lost pilots dodging SAMS and AAA. This is all so silly, this entire dialog. You don't expect the AF to say they don't need more Raptors do you, does anyone? Look, Gordon England knows more than the people who comment here, so does Gates, so does Young. Accept it. If you can't bear it, get elected or appointed to a position where you can contribute more than by just sounding off. I know, this is America but this is just ranting. There will soon be a new Dep Sec. If we really know as much as some pretend to, I'm sure there's a job open.