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Major
Another product being tested to address the com link is Freedom 550.
F-22 Raptor Thread
- Thread starter Jeff Head
- Start date
Another product being tested to address the com link is Freedom 550.
Bernard
Junior Member
I am sorry AirForce Brat
Halting production at just 187 F-22 Raptors , and now, nobody is really hiding that fact. This includes Air Force Secretary Deborah James.
As if they suddenly came to an epiphany, the United States Air Force brass is now admitting what…
During a Center for Strategic and International Studies event called “Smart Women, Smart Power,” the Secretary was asked if she thought having built just 187 F-22s was enough. Here is the exchange:
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For those who cannot access the video, here is the Secretary’s response:
If you were to ask General Welsh or any of the uniformed officers in the Air Force, they would probably tell you they would love to have more F-22s, and the original plan was to have quite a few more additional F-22s. It was a regrettable set of circumstances, a combination of budget overruns and taking way longer than originally projected, that actually caused what became an early termination for the F-22 program. The line, the manufacturing line, is now shut down, so the very prospect of re-opening that is just pretty much a non-starter. So we’ve got what we’ve got. We’ve got the F-35 coming, approaching initial operating capability. It’s not the same, but they will complement one another and we’ll have to go forward as is.
“We’ve got what we’ve got” is not exactly the most encouraging endorsement of the Air Force’s combat capability without more F-22s. Nor is it the same old line that the USAF has been selling for years, that the F-35 will be able to fill-in the F-22 gap to a large degree.
Hearing such a frank answer coming from Secretary James is not a surprise, as she has proven to be an incredibly straight shooter since coming on board as the civilian chief of the USAF in late 2013.
All of the . These videos were shot during the construction of the final F-22s under contract and represent the best practices learned over the life of the program.
All this would make restarting the F-22 line much easier than similar restarts in the past. But putting the jet back into production is a non-starter, at least under the Obama Administration who has double-downed on the F-35.
TerraN_EmpirE
Tyrant King
What he is saying is that Unless there was a major push through The Two Branches Executive, Legislative and the Defsec It's a no Go.
Legislative would need to allocate the money.
Defsec would need to push the mission as necessary and the Executive would have to be Open to defence.
Legislative would need to allocate the money.
Defsec would need to push the mission as necessary and the Executive would have to be Open to defence.
With the right admin, supported by the right congress...it could happen fairly straight forwardly.
Those stars may line up after 2016.
TerraN_EmpirE
Tyrant King
Then figure it would be maybe 2 years for production start and add a year to build the line maybe make changes to catch up specs wise for production so 2019 before the first new units.
The USAF didn't kill the F-22 production, the combined ijits, Rummy, Cheney, Shinseki, and Robert Gates convinced Pres Bush that the F-22 was extraneous, in light of the threats??? and Obama finalized the Death Sentence?? Plenty of stupidity here to go around. In one sense they were right, the Chinese nor the Russians had a fifth gen up and running to challenge, that's true, but what they did not take into acct was how superior the Raptor was/is.
In fact the Air Force Chief of Staff, lost his job trying to save the Raptor, and Norton Schwartz didn't have the stones to put it all out there, and she was gone, just like that, a victim in large part of the "political winds" that lifted the "porky" ThunderHogge II, and I'm talking about political gain pork, not weight. The Raptor was tapped out, and down to the bare bones costing, production was just reaching an optimal point as development expenses were being reduced and amortized?
It would honestly be much more practical to restart the Raptor line, than to push ahead with a 6 gen that nobody really has a real vision of the end product. In fact I would aim to 5.5 the Raptor, simplifying as I went?
Equation
Lieutenant General
NEVER say never. The Brat's Honey Badger can and WILL make a come back (production wise).
Raptors in Japan.
Raptors in Japan.
R we expecting trouble??