Carryng what payload ??

Who said anything about used? We’re getting new Leopard 2A6E’s. Not sure of the exact number yet… But it will be quite alot because they are to replace our Type 59’s and we have 570 of them…. Minus the 150 Type 59’s which will be upgraded by China.

Yeah sure. :diablo:

With supercruise capability, missions shouldn’t take 8 hours…

They will, I´m sure about that. It will become a B-1 replacement and will be global strike tasked. Given the fact that it might be faster then the B-1, which is still questionable as we don´t know how much of the proposed range is to be flown in supercruise, it will have less range, which means more refuelling, which will eat up the advantage it gains from the higher speed. As a theatre strike to replace the F-15E it is just not worth the effort. Give a normal vanilla F-22 some drop tanks and it will have enough range. Those drop tanks could be dropped before entering enemy denfeses.

Furthermore people forget the range that comes from the heigt and speed of the raptor. Flying a 60.000ft and Mach 1,5+ you can cover a much longer distance with 1000lbs of fuel remaining, the when flying at Mach 0.8 and at 35.000ft.

He is not totally wrong however. Ideas like RAH-66 and even Apache in soe repsects are wrong. A attack helicopter needs to be affordable, as numbers matter. The european Tiger is a borderline case in that respect.

The AH-1 however was and still is a very good solution, as it still is capable of all the things a attack helicopter needs to do, yet it is small and relative cheap.

On the russian side things are different. The Mil-28 is another approach. It is os armord that it can slug it out with the enemy.

There is one saying : “The next war will never be like the last war.”

Unfortunately the US is behaving in a way as if it expects all coming conflichts to be like OIF or Afghanistan. This will be a fault.

The funny thing is that the F-22 program is nearly paid for. The development has been paid, much of the tesing has been paid. Even the unit price can be taken seriously now. So the only thing they will save is the purchase of the planes´. The savings however will be cut by the costs of keeping F-15s flying longer.
JSF however is at the start of the development. It can (and will) get more expensive.

Apart from that it should be easier to teach the F-22 to do AG, then to teach the aardpiglet to do air dominance.

Cutting the C-130s is also a possible fault. Yes the C-130J is nit optimal for carrying the Striker. However the legacy C-130s need replacement and you can´t replace them with C-17. There will remain an need for a tactical transport. Now a good idea (but unlikely) would be to join the european A400 programm. But I bet the US will pay the development of a Boeing A400M.