That is $190,000 each. It would buy you something that is completely useless against an enemy who can match your numbers and technology. Preds cost a lot more than that and Reapers cost rather more than Preds. And both of those are completely useless against an enemy who can match your technology.
Acquiring more F-22s may be costly, as may be hardening the bases to put them on, but if the only thing that will be able to stop the J-20 from killing any old thing it wants to is an F-22. Once those 187 or so are used up, so are we.
I am guessing an airbase can be hardened. Underground aircraft hangers, underground facilities, runways spread wide apart, copious amounts of engineers and repair materials; all these things might make it hard to knock out a base. You could also do what the Swedes do, use specially hardened road sections and spread your airplanes around the countryside. All these things would make it hard for a handful of new bombers to take out enough bases for long enough to make any difference. We won't have anything more than a handful of new bombers and I doubt we would get this handful prior to...oh say, 2030.
The Chinese will perfect the J-20 and if they build them in large numbers we will be faced with an extremely serious problem. There will be no inexpensive way around that problem and once the F-22s run out there may be no way around it at all.
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