No debating that the F-22 is a great plane, I just don't buy into its cost-effectiveness. No matter how high a quality it may be, there is a certain minimum number of air superiority aircraft the USAF needs to cover all its bases. There were never enough Eagles. Now they will be replaced by even fewer Raptors.
The Raptor will have a hard time beating the Eagle's kill ratio (100+ kills to no Air-to-Air losses = infinity
).
Based on my experience with submarine exercises, I would take the results of any exercise with a grain of salt. Exercises usually have a desired outcome and are tailored to get that outcome one way or another. It just wouldn't do to show that a handful of subsonic bombers flying on the deck could get past a Raptor while a handful of conventional fighters escorting them could potentially ambush and kill the Raptor. It makes a much better show to fly high in clear blue skies and show how well the radar and missiles work when the targets are co-operating
Early tests showed that F-4s would score about 50% with their Sparrows and render dogfighting a thing of the past just prior to Vietnam. It took over 20 years for the technology to mature enough for the real world results to catch up to the exercises.
I was on AGSS-555 USS Dolphin helping to test Mk50 torpedoes that were supposed to be able to hit diesel submarines running silent in shallow water. In our tests, the Mk50 found us and hit us (passing about 50 feet above our sail) about 1 out of 3 shots... not bad considering the conditions. The exercise required us to do the by-the-book response: put the torpedo on our stern quarter and run. However, one of the torpedo engineers riding us asked what I would really do as a sonar supervisor if I was faced with a torpedo coming at me. I told him that I would give it my beam to kill the doppler shift and either skim the sea bottom at a low speed or if the weather was stormy, stay just beneath the waves to mask my passive and active signature with surface and/or bottom clutter. He said there was no way he could modify the search and track programs to handle that. The tests proved that the torpedo was more successful than any weapon before it, but if we were permitted to take the correct evasive action, the torpedo would never have detected us much less hit us. The test also neglected one very important consideration: if a diesel submarine was running on the battery in these conditions, how would they ever find it to drop a torpedo in the first place
On the range, they got the equivalent of a data link giving our exact position so that they could drop the torpedo on a line to guarantee it would intercept us and have a chance to detect us.
I can only imagine the constraints placed on the exercise that leaves the Eagles who have never been shot down in combat getting stomped by the F-22. To fire AIM-120's, something has to have a good track on the Eagle and the Eagle should be able to detect and spoof whatever is trying to track it. Submarines have had special stealthy active pulses that were classified, but the acoustic intercept equipment carried on every US submarine could reliably detect them. The US military would be foolish if they didn't expect the enemy to use similar radar technology to the F-22 and provide our ESM/ECM systems with the capability to defeat it.
