I sure hope the US can buy enough F-22s... Without it's capabilities, the first couple of weeks of any real shooting war would probably result in us losing half our aircraft to the air defenses. US warfighting power is based almost entirely on finding and exploiting assymetric advantages, and our current (pre F-22 and B-2) technology no longer gives us any assymetric advantage. Everything we have short of the B-2 is directly countered by in-use adversary weapons and tactics, meaning that any future war is going to turn in to a bloodbath. I'm part of the crowd that says that answer is unacceptable, and although it's expensive, the F-22 is potentially the biggest cost save we have if you consider how damned expensive it would be to restart and ramp up F-15/F-16 production after suffering the inevitable losses we'd have if we had to go into any modern IADS or even into Korea.
And restarting bomber production to replace combat losses... Don't even think about it. 100 mil each is a bargain compared to replacing even a single B-2, and the triple digit Russian SAMs have been specifically designed to go against our CURRENT capabilities, not just our aging fighter fleet.
But of course those with no military aviation experience, and those of the previous generation who still think the F-4 is "good enough", will continue to trash the F-22, because they're not the ones who would have to fly into combat. If we ever need the F-22, we'll probably need it quite badly. If we ever use it, we'll wish we had more. If we don't have it when we need it, we'll suffer the consequences and they will be expensive in both lost aircraft and crews.
As for the JSF... It's a stealthy F-16 with every one of the inherent weaknesses that the F-16 has. We still have ZERO deep strike stealthy aircraft capable of self-defense even on the planning board, and the UAV program that was supposed to address that mission was recently fragmented because the Navy and USAF have completely different capability requirements. The only thing that would make me say "this is better and should be made instead of an F-22" would be the stretch version of the F-22 or F-23, basically a stealthy fighter-bomber.
Some day some general is going to wake up and wonder why the only aircraft he has that is capable of making it to the opposing general's HQ is a fighter that carries only 500lb bombs and doesn't have the range to make it back home... We're already near that point but congress and civilian pentagon leadership has the military chasing it's tail so bad that we can't even properly express how bad a hole we're digging ourselves.
