Tuesday is, quite literally, the end of the line for Lockheed Martin’s F-22 Raptor.After fourteen years in production, the final Raptor was set to roll off the company’s assembly line in Marietta, Ga., completing the truncated run of 187 jets — just a portion of the onetime program of 750 “Advanced Tactical Fighters/…/” With a service life of 30 years and a reputation as the deadliest airborne threat since Zeus, what could possibly happen to the Raptor fleet to force the Air Force to buy more?
Think back to September’s discussion about America’s industrial ‘surge’ weakness, when Barry Watts and Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments quoted a bleak scenario for the Air Force: The big balloon has gone up and it’s “Twelve O’Clock High” over the Taiwan Strait. American F-22s do all right against as many Chinese tactical fighters as possible, but there are so many of them they overwhelm and eliminate the Raptors’ tanker and AWACS support. So F-22s crash not because of enemy action but because they run out of fuel on the way back to their base at Guam.
Nightmares like these are one reason F-22 advocates have been saying all along it was a bad idea to truncate production — if China can get these kinds of free kills with Su-27s or Su-30s, just think what the J-20 might be able to do. That means the Air Force needs more, ever more F-22s, they say, to add a quantitative edge to the qualitative one the Raptor already has. It didn’t happen, but maintaining some of Lockheed’s tools may mean it could be theoretically possible to replace an F-22 — even though it would be neither cheap nor easy.