F-16 Replacement

[carl]

Aviation Week said that F-35A engine costs are down to about $19 million. A current General was quoted saying he could buy 100 UAS for the price of an F-35 engine.

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.

The F-22A line is mostly closed anyway. RAND's 2010 study titled "Ending F-22A Production," paid for by the USAF, estimates that Shutdown and Restart costs for 75 more F-22s would result in average unit costs of $227 million. The total cost in then year dollars to produce 75 more would be $19.2 billion ($17 billion in FY 2008 constant dollars).

In any event, you can't fly an F-22A off a carrier. Guam will be a pretty crowded place. Japan would be a dangerous place to park an F-22A or F-35A given the missile and massed air attack threat.

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.

But those massed aircraft also need to land if they survive. The decision to move forward on a new bomber seems to make sense with its longer legs and ability to bomb airfields so that threat quantity and quality are largely irrelevant. Just can't picture a 75,000 lb J-20 or J-10/11 taking off on three points of contact on wet grass thousands of meters long and probably not all that smooth. Don't think loading heavy jet munitions or using large fuel trucks on wet grass would work too well either.

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.