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Remarketing the F-22

For 10 years, the Air Force has argued that the F-22’s incredible dogfighting capabilities will ensure the U.S. remains dominant for decades. And for 10 years, critics who say the fighter is an overpriced Cold War relic have steadily whittled down the service’s Raptor budget.

It’s time for a new argument.

The F-22’s superior dogfighting capabilities are barely relevant. Yes, formidable new fighters are being fielded by potential adversaries, notably the Russian-built Su-37 and MiG-31 and the Chinese F-11. The F-22 is far superior to these older-technology, nonstealthy aircraft, but the F-35 would also far outperform any of these models. As a consequence, the dogfighting rationale for the F-22 has never gained much traction outside the Air Force.

Air Force leaders need to regroup and posit a rationale that the administration, Congress, the services and the American people can understand and support. The dogfighting gambit has not worked, but the need for maintaining air superiority is very real. The F-22 should become our chief asset for taking down enemy air defenses.

Air superiority has two aspects: We prevent the enemy from using air power to attack our forces and facilities, but he cannot prevent us from attacking his. This second element is the most challenging.

Since World War II, the Air Force has lost more than 2,700 aircraft in combat. Of those, fewer than 200 have been shot down in air-to-air engagements — and none since Vietnam. The other 93 percent have been either destroyed on the ground, or downed by anti-aircraft artillery and surface-to-air missiles.

Now Russia has built new SAMs that are far more dangerous to our aircraft than anything we have yet faced. The S-400 system has an impressive range of up to 200 miles and would devastate nonstealthy fighter aircraft. Large and less maneuverable aircraft — tankers, airlifters and C2ISR platforms — would not stand a chance. These new SAM systems are proliferating, and we can expect that they will soon be in the arsenals of China, Iran, North Korea and Syria — if they are not already there.

To employ our assets near the combat zone, we would have to take out the enemy SAM belt. Our current Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses assets could not do this — our anti-radiation missiles, carried by nonstealthy F-16s, are far outranged by the SAMs. It would be the classic case of taking a knife to a gun fight.

But the F-22 could.

With its superstealth and high speed, the F-22 could penetrate the enemy SAM belt, use its advanced radar and sensors to locate the enemy SAMs, and employ its internal ordnance of small-diameter bombs to destroy those sites. Removing these lethal missiles will then allow the thousands of other U.S. and allied aircraft to operate in the combat zone.

Air superiority should remain the key mission of the F-22, but the threat is not the nonstealthy aircraft of potential adversaries. The threat is from the ground. Only a stealthy fighter with the capabilities of the F-22 can accomplish this crucial SEAD mission.

The Air Force needs to remarket the Raptor. The old arguments about the need for a superior dogfighter are not credible. A SEAD asset is, however, essential. That is the vital mission the Raptor can perform peerlessly and for which it should be adapted.

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Phillip S. Meilinger is a retired Air Force colonel and command pilot with a doctorate in military history. He is a freelance writer in the Chicago area.