Quote Originally Posted by carl View Post
The primary problem is the aircraft are old, very old. Old airplanes are difficult to maintain, hard to update and the operators always live in fear that a major problem, due to problems inherent with aging aircraft, will ground an entire fleet tomorrow. Or if the airplane isn't grounded you ask the crews to roll the dice every time they take off.

Regardless of whose fault it is, the Air Force is faced with having to replace most of its fighters, transports and tankers within a relatively short period of time. They need to be replaced, but whether the will be or not... The things are just flat wearing out. This will cost a LOT of money, and there isn't any easy way around it, not if we want to continue to enjoy the benefits a strong Air Force has given us over the past 65 years.

The secondary problem is it is hard for old manned airplanes to operate against good air defense systems without suffering prohibitive losses. The new ones are quite remarkable in their capabilities and can go where F-15E's fear to tread. Another benefit is a potential opponent is more likely to be "psyched out" by the prospect of having to face F-22's than F-16's.

40 year old Iranian fighters are no problem for 40 year old American fighter designs. They probably wouldn't even take off. But those pesky modern missiles are a different story. The Air Force has to plan to defeat other than the Iranian Air Force too.

People, including me, view the Air Force with great suspicion, a suspicion that the Air Force has done a lot to bring upon it self. But this is a big, real problem that isn't going away and can't be worked around. The only real, and painful, solution is to throw money at it.
What I'm getting at is that if the strategic and operational objective is a strike capability and manned aircraft have problems with AD systems, perhaps the answer is something other than buying another bunch of hugely expensive manned fighter aircraft. Phrased differently, do we need another generation of manned air superiority fighters for strategic reasons or because that's what we've always had and change is hard (particularly for a service largely led by people who flew manned fighters)? I'm certainly open to the argument that we need a new generation of manned fighters but would like to see the strategic rationale.