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A Nervous Air Force
by Dale Brown, 2009

ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED AT TheBigFiveOh.com Blog @ Yahoo.Com, 03/01/2009

Northrop-Grumman concept for the Air Force's Next Generation Bomber, or Bomber 2018, on display at the Air Force Association Air Warfare Symposium in Orlando, Feb. 2009.

I just returned from the Air Force Association's Air Warfare Symposium in Orlando.

Thanks to my good friend Lois O'Connor, director of development for AFA, I got the opportunity to fly Lockheed Martin's F-22 Raptor fighter simulator. Gone are the days of the "furball," the air combat maneuvers designed to get into the perfect firing position while keeping yourself out of the enemy's sights. The F-22 is so stealthy that you do little more than fly straight at the enemy at supersonic speed and fire missiles when in range--the nose-on radar cross-section of the F-22 is so small that your missile hits before the bad guy even detects your presence.

For fun I tried some slow-speed maneuvers, and the results were even more impressive. I slowed the F-22 to an astounding 80 knots--well below stall speed on any fighter--and with the nose at 30 degrees high and angle-of-attack almost 50, I was still in control of the airplane. The test pilot assured me he's done that maneuver for real and he was still able to turn the plane and fire guns or missiles!

Yet despite such high-tech gadgets now hitting the flight line, the speeches from the USAF leadership had a distinct nervous tone. Everyone knows budget cuts are coming--they just don't know how deep the cuts will be. Rumors are flying about entire programs disappearing. The production run for the F-22, which was supposed to replace the 34 year-old F-15 Eagle, has been cut from 700 copies to 300 to 180, and is feared to be cut even more. The F-35 fighter-bomber, which is supposed to replace the 29 year-old F-16 Fighting Falcon and AV-8 Harrier worldwide, might suffer even larger cuts or even cancellation.

The argument is that fighters are obsolete. The last American casualty on the ground from an enemy air attack was over 50 years ago in Korea, and the last time an enemy fighter challenged an American fighter was over 15 years ago over Serbia.

All that may be true, but that doesn't mean we can rely on such old airframes to retain air superiority. We may have well-trained pilots, but the airplanes themselves are just old and getting stressed. If the Russians and Chinese continue to build their fighter fleets and export sophisticated aircraft to more and more countries, we can lose our ability to defend our own skies, let alone achieve air superiority over an enemy's skies.

We're in tough economic times, and everyone will be asked to make sacrifices. But if it takes 5-10 years to roll out a new fighter, can we afford to risk battlefield domination on aging airframes?

The leaders I heard speak in Orlando know the hammer will fall--they are simply afraid of what the force will look like once the budget-slashing is done, and what the force will be able to do if asked to fight another Korean War or Persian Gulf War-like operation.

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