WHY????

WHY???

Well, those questions must be answered by the US Government and the Us tax payer. In my humble opinion its a “bit” (a bloody big “bit”) of an overkill.

Cheers

Equally equipped enemy is anyone who owns sufficient assets to attack the forward bases where F-22s would be deployed. It would be plain stupid to concentrate effort on targeting the F-22s while they are flying whern you can comfortably blow them to pieces while on the ground.

And who´s that?
Tell me who has enough capability to, without resorting to nuclear weapons, blow into the sky a dozen airfields while at the same time penetrate the defenses of the biggest military power in the planet?
China could give a go in a very narrow scenario, the Taiwan straights, anyone else forget it.

Vipers, Eagles and SuperHornets go in to do something useful: drop 10+ tons of ordnance on the enemy. How is the f-22 going to do that while maintaining VLO?

Send Viper´s/Hornet´s/Eagle´s with ten tons of ordnance into a place with evolved Flankers (being used by an adversary that knows what he´s doing) without convenient ATA escort and they are dead, send those same Viper´s/Hornet´s/Eagle´s with ten tons of ordnance into a place with evolved Flankers (being used by an adversary that knows what he´s doing) with a convenient ATA escort composed of Viper´s/Hornet´s/Eagle´s and (with luck) you are going to trade one fighter for each adversary that you bring down.
Send those Viper´s/Hornet´s/Eagle´s with ten tons of ordnance into a place with evolved Flankers escorted by Raptors and the chances losing fighters to enemy CAP decrease dramaticaly.
Same story for Double Digit Sam´s.
A small force of VLO supercruise fighters is a force multiplier by himself

Read up on Package Q for an idea of what an all VLO force could do vs what a 4th gen force did. Considering PQ was not against SAMs (and no modern double-digit ones at that) and fighters, an all VLO force would have an even greater impact against a SAM/Fighter combo.

SpudmanWP

Nice. That particular story is a graphic description why you dont send manned strike assets to visually bomb highly defended fixed targets. But there are several ways to skin that particular cat, other than an entirely VLO force, i mean.
Send something with a 400kg high explosive warhead, 400 km´s away, that will do the trick…
Moving targets and evolved Flankers, well thats another story (and another Cat, now where´s that Sqn of Raptor´s?).

Cheers

187 F-22 seem barely enough to protect US borders, and seem completely insufficient to make a real difference during a full blown war with an equally equiped enemy.

Two questions:
Why anyone in his right mind would use the Raptor to “protect US borders” with thousands of Vipers in the USAF inventory?
An “equally” equiped enemy? Who´s “that”?
At least for the next decade, something like four sqn´s of F-22 would probably be more than enough to tilt an Air Battle over any potential clash point with any existing “near peer” threat, that includes China.

Anybody read or heard anything about whether the F-22’s ALR-94 ESM can detect another F-22’s APG-77 LPI radar at long ranges?

If an ESM that can defeat the APG-77’s LPI feature already exists, what would be tactical implications in a scenario where four non-stealthy fighters with such a capable ESM are pitted against two F-22s?

You are not going to get that kind of answers in a public forum.

If the F-35C doesn’t happen – 50/50 at the moment? – here’s another option: buy MiG-29Ks, but with EJ200 engines and Western radar, avionics and weapons. STOBAR aircraft, so no need for expensive catapults.

No marinisation required, as that job has already been done.

And next, Iran is invited to enter the Eurofighter consortium? 😀

Not a snowball in hell chances of that happening.

Do you think that “Bright Adder” is something which the UK would take over to India for the other competitors to see? I thought it focused on the electronic attack potential of the Typhoon AESA programme for the RAF, rather than being a general technology demonstrator for the radar…..?

No, i dont think that a prototype would be sent to India, but i do believe that some sort of hardware was shown to the IAF (probably in GB).
Well, about “Bright Ader”, there´s not much in the public domain, but for the litle i´ve gathered it seems that its much more than an EW focused program, its a “son of ARTS” with the potential to deliver an entire radar program in case the consortium efforts goes “**** up”.