U.S. Air Force grounds F-35 fighters over cooling line problems

[benEzra]

19. F-22 production *was* ended on the premise that the F-35 could also handle the air-superiority role.

In retrospect, that was a very, very ill-informed decision, based on now-falsified assumptions about when near-peers might deploy their own supercruising fifth-gen air superiority fighters The F-35 is a neat aircraft, but calling it the A-35 (or even F/A-35, with the emphasis on the A) would be more accurate; it is not and was never intended to be an air-superiority fighter, and the USAF now admits that. Capping F-22 production just as the production kinks had been worked out and the unit cost had fallen precipitously will likely go down as the worst decision Gates made during his tenure, and that's saying something.

The F-22 could certainly have been reconfigured for an A2G role like the F-15 was (prior to the F-15E, the F-15 was strictly an A2A platform); that wasn't the issue. It's that the F-35 was supposed to be a cheap, low-end, mass-produced, mostly-stealthy bomb truck with decent self-defense capability, so there was ostensibly no need to configure the F-22 as F/A. Now that the F-22 has been canceled, we will either be flying geriatric F-15's in the air superiority role, or else trying to make the F-35 fit that slot, because we don't have enough F-22's to cover our needs.