1) We didn’t start it. Recall 9/11? And we helped many of these same Taliban leaders after Soviets killed 25,000 in Herat ON PURPOSE during their invasion. Are motives and intentional actions are pure.

2) Pashtunwali and the Durand Line that split 40 million Pashtuns between two countries explains a lot. Personally, don’t understand why we don’t convince AfPak leaders to redraw the borders, let the Pashtuns show they can or cannot stay within said borders, and bomb the heck out of them if they can’t.

3) Many folks we are fighting are not Taliban. They are foreign fighters, local warlords, criminals, and drug runners. Karzai is the mayor of Kabul and everyone else wants their own provincial powerbase and resulting money source. Even Karzai’s brother is reputed to be a drug dealer, and the whole country…federal down to local government is corrupt…because many would starve if they weren’t.

4) We try to help, try to clear-hold-build, but have not had enough troops up until now. Locals don’t trust that we will stick around. We build…Taliban destroys, and kills any NGO and foreign workers trying to help, and Afghans who collaborate.

5) The sole answer is to build a credible Police and Army force so they can do it on their own. But Afghan police are corrupt and Afghan Army troops aren’t there yet. Some allies are responsible for some of this problem but how do you criticize when we need them?

6) Finally, the reason we are there is we cannot risk Taliban/foreing fighter radicalism converting the Pakistan Pujabi majority who have control of nukes. A terrorist with nukes is a container ship nuke blowing up in our port city. Who do we nuke in retaliation??

LOL.

Play what ever fuzzy math game you want but the F-22 cost $19,750 an hour to operate (vs $17,465 an hour for the F-15C) so despite the purposefully negative impression the Washington Post tried to make of the F-22 it is NOT that much more expensive (~13%) to operate than the F-15C. It isn’t a calculation based on arbitrary values. It is the PAYED operational costs per hour flown.

You havn’t been paying attention. F-35 production for FY2010-FY2015 is to be accelerated to 513 airframes (up from the previous plan for 362 during that time). That’s 151 ADDITIONAL F-35s from FY2010-FY2015. A similar amount of money could procure 120 F-22s (20 a year) during that same time. JUST TAKE THE MONEY BEING BUDGETED FOR ACCELERATED LRIP F-35 PROCUREMENT (again, thats ADDITIONAL procurement) & USE IT FOR WHAT IT SHOULD/WOULD HAVE BEEN USED FOR & PROCURE ADDITIONAL F-22s.

I can keep a straight face because I know full well that the number of F-22s procured will have ZERO effect on the number of F-35Bs &/or F-35Cs procured (even IF the USAF were allowed to alter its F-22 vs F-35A mix & procure more F-22s at the expense of fewer F-35As).

Information from a Georgia Senator Chambliss site (where F-22s are built) is quoted below. Pay attention to the last line of the quote where it spells out the OPERATIONAL cost per flying hour:
========================================
“The total variable cost per flying hour includes: aircraft part repairs (depot level repairs [DRLs]), replenishment spares, consumables, engine parts and aviation fuel. The F-22 FY08 total variable cost per flying hour (17,711 total hours flown) was $19K and the F-15 FY08 total variable cost per flying hour (122,762 total hours flown) was $17K.

Costs included in the VARIABLE cost per flying hour are a SUBSET of total OPERATIONAL cost per flying hour. For the F-22, contractor support is included in both the variable cost per flying hour and the operational cost per flying hour. Contractor costs which meet the definition of a variable cost are included in the $19,750 Variable CPFH, along with appropriate government costs. Other contractor support costs are added in, along with appropriate government costs, to obtain the total $49,808 Operational CPFH.“
=======================================
I also highly doubt they used Ashton Carter’s quoted $42 per gallon for aerial refueling in their calculation of variable cost per flying hour. If a F-22 has 20,650 gallons of internal fuel and the F-35 about 18,000 gals… and one engine…and far less weight, one conclusion is apparent. The F-35 is more easily supported by aerial tankers to fly from more distant airfields that are harder to target with TBM.

How can you keep a straight face and nitpick the F-35A reference when you know full well that the F-35B and C models CAN fly from carriers and forward sites?

Finally, regarding your first paragraph, if you want to spend the same amount of DoD money in FY10, you have two choices:

1) Continue F-35 LRIP as planned/budgeted

or

2) Buy more F-22s

You cannot do both and spend the same amount. The decision was made that door #1 was the preferable DoD option. Congress wants both doors which will mean taking money from somewhere else.

THERE IS NO POSTPONING OT SLOWING OF F-35 LRIP!!! It is being ACCELLERATED & with money that woulld/should be used to continue to buy more F-22 AT NEARLY THE SAME COST!

The DOD doesn’t say the F-22 cost $50,000 annhour. You SHOULD know better than to trust the Washington Post on sugh things. BOTH the USAF & the US DOD have issued rebuttles debunking just about every single ‘fact’ in that piece. INCLUDING the fact that the F-22 costs ‘just’ $19,750 dollars per hour.

And stop the BS that we should not buy F-22 because airfields are vulnerable to attack. With that kind of BS thinking we would not have ANY military whatsoever. Anfd the F-22 is no more vulnerable to “airfield attack” than the F-35 or any other ‘tactical’ aircraft.

And sorry but no USAF F-35A will even operate from USN carriers so your BS about the F-35 “splits up our air superiority force between airfield-based, forward sits or small carrier (STOL), and carrier based”.

North Korea has virtually no high quality air defense or airpower so it would be bombs away for F-35s from nearly day one.

Not certain, but believe tanks would not have helped enormously in 1950s Korea with lots of mountains and marshy terrain in many valleys where crops are planted. Have a buddy who was a tanker in Korea.

But agree, that means we need to maintain our ground forces…instead of thinking nukes, Navy, and airpower can do it all.

You’re right, we should eliminate short-range combat aircraft entirely. Anything that can’t fly out of CONUS is just too vulnerable. Oh wait, you’re arguing that we need F-35, but don’t those still need airbases? Won’t they be vulnerable to the same TBM that you say will do for the F-22? Oh dear, I’ve gone cross-eyed…

“Remember back in 2000 when the PAK FA was just around the corner and the cost of gas was going to be perpetually high to fund Russian defense spending?”

Yeah, and I remember how back then the North Koreans would never have nuclear weapons and would never have long-range missiles.

Oh, and for another technology analogy: Imagine if someone had said “Nah, we don’t need to build those Pershings, they’re too expensive and we’ll never fight another significant tank-using army anyway, it’s capability we’ll never use, we’ll do fine with the late-model Shermans”. Whoops, then we get into Korea.

Recommend that Colin ban. In one post he/she bragged that he had posted on military.com and that it had not been erased. He appears to be from Germany, and made some seemingly anti-semitic comments in a few diffferent forums, and literally leftist revolutionary comments in others (3 nations should fly to Canada and invade US, plant fake bombs in Germany).

He attributes the Israeli attack of the USS Liberty to U.S. Generals recommending said attack. He also said Al Quaeda might be a CIA plot. In one site, his/her true name is Johanna Schafft who was a communist resistance fighter from Holland who was killed near the end of the war at age 24…guess she must be a heroine to him/her…he/she also went on a feminist site.

The decision was correctly made to rapidly field 5th generation fighters and the EA-18G to support all 3 services rather than just one aircraft for one service that we already had in large numbers with no comparable threat in sight.

The current budget constraints for F-22 should illustrate that no guarantees exists the USAF will field 1763 F-35A eventually. There is truth to the “quantity having a quality all its own” argument. You don’t postpone or slow LRIP which effectively delays F-35 full rate production to squeeze out a few more F-22s.

Why does DoD say it costs nearly $50K instead of $20K? Brief research shows that F-22s burn 20,650 lbs (about 3,000 gals) of internal fuel which according to Ashton Carter costs about $42/gallon when aerial refueled. That is $126,000 for subsequent fuel loads after the initial fuel is expended in supercruise! And of course the maintenance costs are the real expense. What else is DoD including in their cost estimate that you and yours are blowing off?

DD,

Heh remember when you couldn’t take out airfields with TBMs? Where are we gonna park all these additional costly F-22s where they won’t get blown up on the ground? Guess we can always spend $10 billion upgrading Guam…oh wait, what about Kadena?

Remember back in 2000 when the PAK FA was just around the corner and the cost of gas was going to be perpetually high to fund Russian defense spending? And don’t forget the one about UAS will never replace pilots and high speed computers are the size of rooms.

F-35 Flyaway Unit Cost
FY2011: $124.580 million (24)

F-22 Flyaway Unit Cost
FY2007: $136.826 million (20)

F-22 would seem to be more bang for the buck.

The total program average can be $083.131 million if the FY2013 (NOIT the lowest) cost FY2013 is $091.223 million because the cost continues to drop even after FY2013 & a LOT more will be procured each year in later years making the higher cost of comparatively few LRIP airframes less significant.

***

Cole,

No, it also shows that buying more LRIP F-35s costs about the same as buying more F-22s. For ~$130 million (FY2010-2012 average) I’d rather buy additional F-22s & wait to buy the ‘additional’ F-35s later on when they are less expensive (note that it is not buying more F-35s just buying a larger portion of them during LRIP rather than later during full rate production).

It isn’t accelerated F-35 procurement AND continued F-22 production. “They” are using the funds that would/should otherwise go towards additional F-22s & using it to accelerated F-35 procurement. Get it?

F-22s don’t cost 50K per hour. They cost $19,750 per hour (which ain’t bad given that the F-15C, you know the legacy air-superiority fighter in which the last one we bought was in 1986 the F-22 is supposed to replace, cost $17,465 per hour).

You & DA can dream all you want but the F-22 isn’t & hasn’t taken one dime away from the WOT. Quite the opposite in fact. Programs like the F-22 have been “getting the short end of the straw” in order to fund the WOT.

But maybe you meant through 2015 when we will have well over 300 fifth generation aircraft (climbing rapidly) and thousands of 4th-4.5 as they field their initial non-stealth 5th gen and still have 4.5 gen in the low hundreds?

I’m confused, where is this near to mid-term threat and fighter gap you boys are contriving?