War military.
ADVENT OF THE RAPTOR
The FA-22 is bound to become a landmark aircraft, and not only for its technological sophistication. At this writing, the Raptor and its stablemate, the F-35, could well be the last manned fighters in Air Force history.
As they say in Hollywood, lapse-dissolve. Fade to day. The Raptor, proposed in 1986 with a 1994 operational date, is now expected to enter service in 2005, for a nineteen-year development cycle. The Air Force Joint Strike Fighter, the F-35A, comes close at eighteen years between 1993 and the expected IOC of 2011.
Stealth does amazing things to development times, most of them bad. For instance, depending on how they're reckoned, the design to operational period for recent jet fighters has been seven to eight years. The landmark F-15 took longer, 1965 to 1976, but the F-16 and Navy FA-18 both ran around seven. Lockheed's storied Skunk Works produced the F-117 Nighthawk in eight (1975-83).
With two Pratt & Whitney F-119s producing 35,000 pounds of thrust in a 30,000-pound airframe, the Raptor is an aerial drag racer, if necessary. The thrust-weight ratio combined with thrust vectoring nozzles presents an awesome package: fast, agile, stealthy, and lethal. Additionally, high angle of attack profiles enable the FA-22 pilot to point and shoot in almost any flight regime.
The Raptor's talons are two Sidewinders, six AMRAAM, and a 20mm Gatling with 480 rounds. The FA-22 also will (eventually) deliver two precision bombs, though how often that option will be employed remains to be seen. For better or worse, the Air Force decided that the Raptor needed the capability in order to convince Congress to continue funding the program.
The FA-22 and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter constitute two of the Pentagon's most expensive programs. The Raptor was the last American fighter designed during the Cold War, and consequently the cost was extraordinarily high. The 2004 budget allocated $226.5 billion to JSF and $69.7 billion for the FA-22; the Navy's Virginia Class submarine joins them in the top three. The funding represented 2,866 JSFs and 295 FA-22s, for an average program cost of $236 million per Raptor and $79 million per JSF, the latter including models for three services. Raptor flyaway cost (excluding program 'start-up' plus R&D) is likely in the $90 million range. However, the numbers keep changing, sometimes almost monthly.
RAPTOR ORIGINS
In 1985 the Air Force issued a request for proposal for the next-generation Advanced Tactical Fighter. Pratt & Whitney's YF-119 already had been identified as the likely engine, and P&W began producing the first parts that year. Meanwhile, stealth requirements were firmed up with Lockheed, Boeing, and General Dynamics signing a team memorandum.
Two years later the original YF-22 was declared unacceptable for a variety of technical and engineering reasons, and a new design was selected, leading to the final configuration. From that point the new fighter progressed well, and it was unveiled at Palmdale, California, in August 1990. Christened Raptor, it was flown by test pilot Dave Ferguson the next month and demonstrated supersonic cruise in November. By year-end, thrust vectoring and Mach 2 performance had been demonstrated. Shortly thereafter, an extensive wind tunnel program of nearly 17,000 hours began.
While technical progress met successive milestones, the Raptor's cost came under the budget axe. In early 1994 the 'buy' was sliced from 648 to 422. Later reductions further chopped the type's acquisition process.
The Raptor also drew close attention abroad. In January 1999 the MiG consortium announced its new design, tentatively called Project 1.42. The Russians claimed that Project 1.42 would outperform the FA-22, when part of the Raptor's sales appeal was its technological superiority over anything flying. The Russian project, which became the MiG-35, featured many Raptor capabilities, including stealth and thrust vectoring, but was never built: it was unaffordable. Nevertheless, the Raptor must contend with its potential opponents as well as those currently flying around the world.
As with any advanced aircraft, the Raptor program has experienced its full share of embarrassments.
In the summer of 2002 another reduction was proposed, from 295 to 180 aircraft in comparison to the 750 previously planned. By then, some $26 billion of a budgeted $69 billion had already been spent. Yearly acquisition was ten Raptors in 2002 and twenty-three more (costing $4.6 billion) in 2003. In November 2002 the Air Force conceded an overrun of up to $690 million in engineering, manufacturing, and development costs, adding that neither technology nor performance figured in the equation. The overruns led to 'replacement' of three senior overseers (people are not 'fired' anymore) and the T&E folks were reprimanded for indulging in tactics development before the test program was completed.
As of 2003, Lockheed Martin had $43 billion to produce some 276 Raptors through 2013. However, the Air Force wants 381 for a minimum of ten air expeditionary squadrons with twenty-four planes each, with 105 attrition and force expansion airframes. Full-rate production is expected to reach thirty-six per year, with a goal of $75 million per Raptor. With a purchase of 760 or so FA-22s, the Air Force could field two squadrons per wing. First delivery is still expected in 2004, with the first squadron operational in 2005.
Later-production FA-22s are expected to carry small diameter bombs (SDBs) from 2007, a relatively simple process of moving some internal plumbing.
Discussion of the FB-22 fighter-bomber version continues, but much remains speculative. Structural changes over the FA version would include a larger wing, bigger bomb bay, and two-seat cockpit. Foreign sales appear to be authorized, and at least one nation has expressed serious interest. With its multiple sensors, additional possible uses of the FB include reconnaissance and ELINT gathering as well as defense suppression.
JSF TO F-35
The entire issue of force reduction—'downsizing' or 'right sizing' became the buzzwords — is a separate issue, but clearly the first Bush and both Clinton administrations got it wrong. The professional optimists in Washington committed an old error: They made the wrong assumption. They assumed that with the demise of the Soviet Union, the need for a large military establishment would vanish. Quite the contrary: In the decade following Desert Storm, the Air Force was tasked with 450 % more missions with less than half of its previous assets. Few people anticipated the eruption of brush fires all over the planet: Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Afghanistan, not to mention Iraq.
