More info on the F22

A Yahoo News article outlines that there is a significant delay on the readiness of the "darling" f35. Hat tip to a friend on the story.

An internal Pentagon oversight board has reported that the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program is two years behind schedule, according to multiple congressional aides familiar with the findings...

The White House and some lawmakers who favor halting the production of any new F-22 warplanes say the F-35 will fill the gap and meet the nation's combat aircraft needs.

Senators and aides now lament that the Pentagon oversight panel's more pessimistic view on the F-35 program was not publicly released during the F-22 debate. They are calling for more open disclosure of the problems with the development of the F-35.

The Pentagon's Joint Estimate Team (JET), which was established to independently evaluate the F-35 program, is at odds with the Joint Program Office, which runs the F-35 program, the aides said. The oversight panel's calculations determined that the fighter won't be able to move out of the development phase and into full production until 2016, rather than 2014, as the program office has said.

That's assuming there are no further problems with the program, which has already faced cost overruns and schedule delays. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) said the delay could cost as much as $7.4 billion. The discrepancy between the Joint Estimate Team and the Joint Program Office was noted in a March report by the GAO, but it received little attention at the time.

So we are axing the F22 without a clear outlook on when the replacement will be done? Oh, I think our opponents won't lament the delay until 2016. The f22 is available NOW, and is significantly more capable than the F35.

This from Aviation Week.

Regardless of the vote in the Senate, “ The F-22 funding termination this week doesn't change a thing [about the tactical advantages offered by the stealth fighter’s advanced systems] and I think history will bear out the F-22 advocates' position when all the dust settles,” a senior U.S. Air Force intelligence officer tells Aviation Week. “ The F-35 [Joint Strike Fighter] is not an F-22 by a long shot,” he says. “There's no way it's going to penetrate Chinese Air Defenses if there's ever a clash.”

The intelligence official was referring to the fact that penetrating the latest surface to air missile defenses is something only the F-22 can do. China and Russia have variants of the the S-300/400 family that includes the SA-20 which is being sold in Asia and the Middle East. The F-22 can stay ahead of SA-20 because it it flies about a half-mach faster, two-miles higher and has a smaller Radar Cross Section than the F-35.

and this

“I’m still planning on getting those airplanes,” says Brig. Gen. Peter Pawling, who earlier this year was commander of the Hawaii ANG’s 154th Wing and has now moved to the staff of U.S. Pacific Command. “I’ve been assured that [despite a smaller fleet] they are still coming to Hawaii.

“It’s just that the F-35 and F-22 are such different airplanes,” Pawling says. “There are those who think you can simply build more F-35s [to compensate for a smaller Raptor fleet]. But the F-22 is one of those once-in-a-lifetime airplanes. There is nothing out there that can fly against it. If we had a major conflict [against someone with advanced air defenses], I can’t imagine going in there with anything but an F-22.”

The congress, our secdef, and our president are making a HUGE mistake.