COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

...It's not about now, it's about where the US will be in 20 years. And it's about where potential enemies will be in 20 years.

Right now, no sane air force would try and tangle with the USAF, let alone the US Navy and the Marine fliers. I think that this is a given, especially for the Chinese: they're not dumb, they saw what happend in GWI and GWII. They are also keen observers of what has been going on in Iraq, and from what I've heard - all unclassified - they have learned never to try to deal with us on our terms, as they know that means lots of dead soldiers, virtally all theirs.

But it's not about now: it's about 20 years from now. The job of the USAF is dominance of the aerospace environment to support US national security goals - duh - and while you can do that with the current hardware, in 15 years all of the current inventory will be very, very long in the tooth. Sure, a lot can be done with everyone's new darling, RPVs, but there is one area where that doesn't work: air combat. There is no situational awareness available for RPVs, especially when there is massive jamming and active interference on control channels: RPVs will replace ground attack and support, but to get air superiority using RPVs you have to introduce a massive improvement in AI/independent computing that simply isn't in the pipeline, as it will require some massive breakthroughs. Hence the need, a fundamental need, for fighter pilots: you may be able to replace them some day, but you can't today *and* for the foreseeable future.

That said, the F22 has two attributes that are killer attributes, pun intended: supercruise and relative stealth. They can be seen from the ground and AWACS under the right conditions, but they won't be seen by any of the fighter-born radars of the current or next generations, meaning that they won't be seen. Add to that supercruise and you have the following scenario: a plane that can fire its formidable missile load will outside of an enemy's ability to even detect them, and a plane that can break off combat at will by going faster than anyone else can for a sustained period. An enemy can match supercruise by going to afterburner, but they go bingo faster than they can get into range.

In other words, the F22 really is a dedication to air superiority without having to get involved in close air-to-air, where some of the contemporary challengers are very good indeed. But instead of building an even more manouverable F16 - remember, this has been tried with canards and the like - you simply change to terms of the conflict so as to avoid it where possible (and with that huge wing and supercruise speed, the F22 wouldn't be a slouch here either, with vast energy reserves and control surfaces to put them to use).

And we can afford them: we're fighting a war and spending like we're at peace. Bump the military budget back to where it was in the Cold War and we can buy all the F22s we need, as well as the F35 and all the RPV follow-ons...