XBradTC

So, there’s this:

The US House Armed Services subcommittee on tactical air and land forces wants to know how much it would cost to resume production of the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor air superiority fighter and it is even willing to consider export options and foreign partnerships as an offset.

The US Air Force has spent the past year denying it has any interest in restarting production of the fifth-generation stealth aircraft, which entered combat for the first time in September 2014 against the Islamic State terrorist group in Syria and Iraq. However, the subcommittee’s markup of the fiscal year 2017 defence policy bill this week notes “interest” within the US Air Force, Defense Department and Congress about “potentially restarting production of the F-22 aircraft”.

The Air Force would be delighted to have another 194 F-22s.

But they will never allow the line to be reopened.

Any restart for F-22 production would be pretty pricey, even under the best of circumstances. Finding the workforce, finding or rebuilding the jigs, reestablishing the subcontractor network, all those things cost time and money.

More importantly, any F-22 buy would almost by definition have to be paid for by undercutting the F-35A purchase. That is, money would come out of the JSF budget. And that would put JSF into a worse death spiral than it is already in, driving up unit costs and shifting the purchase dates to the right, which, in turn would further drive up unit costs.

And the Air Force realizes that while it can muddle through with 187 F-22s, it absolutely must have a large buy of F-35s, or it simply is out of the tactical airpower business. The huge fleet of F-16s is old and aging rapidly. Without replacement, the Air Force is toast.

And so, the Air Force will conduct the study as directed. And they will demonstrate to Congress that restarting the F-22 line will be a fiscal disaster. They will use worst case scenarios to demonstrate that buying the F-35 is a much more attractive option than restarting production of an airplane they really, really would like to have, but simply can’t afford at the cost of F=35s.