This article is little old.

Analysts liken fighter plane to a WWII Messerschmidt, saying it is a technological marvel with the latest weapons but that it will be poor in combat.
Q. Can the Raptor see the enemy first, outnumber it, outmaneuver it, and kill it quickly?
Q. How does the Raptor stack up against the F-16?
Q. Why did Congress cap production of the Raptor at half the number sought by the Air Force?
It was the most impressive fighter aircraft seen to date.
Designed around a breakthrough technology, it was heavily armed with the latest air-to-air weapons and was capable of flying faster than its enemies and destroying previously invulnerable enemy aircraft.
One British pilot called it “the most formidable fighter” that the world had seen to date. Its pilots said it was a delight to fly.
Yet military historians today say the German Messerschmidt 262 fighter had little effect on the air war over Europe during World War II, and two military aviation experts last week warned that the U.S. Air Force has likely set itself up to repeat the harsh lesson of the Me-262 “Stormbird” in a future conflict against an adversary with a modern air force.
Simply put, said Pierre Sprey and James P. Stevenson, the F-22 Raptor is shaping up to be the Sturmvogel of the 21st century: a dazzling piece of technology that fatally ignores some of the unbending realities of aerial combat.
On surface, the Raptor debate ended six months ago. After years of controversy, the Air Force and Defense Department reached a final agreement on the Raptor program, with DoD and Congress approving full production of the stealth fighter while capping the program at 183 aircraft, a 50-percent reduction of the 381 planes that the service had long said it needed at a minimum.
(For Tyndall Air Force Base, where the Raptor pilot training program is located, this has meant a reduction in training squadrons from two to one, with 29 of the sleek fighters to be used in preparing pilots for combat units.)
But to Sprey, a founding member of the so-called “fighter mafia” group that during the 1960s and 1970s ramrodded the F-15, F-16 and A-10 programs into being despite fierce internal opposition, and military author Stevenson, who has written extensively on the Navy’s F/A-18 and A-12 fighters, the Air Force has created a major crisis in its future combat capability by sticking to the Raptor program.
The two analysts presented their stark findings to a symposium at the nonprofit Center for Defense Information on Friday in Washington, D.C. The two analysts provided their findings to The News Herald, and Sprey elaborated on the issues in a telephone interview.
Sprey said his briefing focused on the time-tested factors that define an effective fighter plane:
(1) See the enemy first;
(2) outnumber the enemy;
(3) outmaneuver the enemy to fire, and
(4) kill the enemy quickly.
“The Raptor is a horrible failure on almost every one of those criteria,” Sprey said.
The stellar attribute of the F-22 —
its invisibility on enemy radar due to a computer-aided stealth design — is a “myth,” Sprey said. That is because in order to locate the enemy beyond visual range, the Raptor (like every other fighter) must turn on its own radar, immediately betraying its location.
Nor is the aircraft design effective simply because its advocates insist so, Sprey said. The 1980s-era F-117 stealth fighter was supposed to be invisible too, but post-Gulf War studies showed that the aircraft had been spotted by Iraq’s ground-based radars, he said.
And in the 77-day aerial campaign against Serbia in 1999, the adversary’s “1950s-era radar” managed to locate and shoot down two F-117s, Stevenson pointed out in his presentation. The situation is actually worse today, he said, because many nations have acquired advanced missiles that can home in on radar emissions.
“Who do you want in a dark alley?” Stevenson asked.
“The cop with the flashlight, or the crook with a gun that fires light-homing bullets?”
Because the Raptor ultimately ballooned into a weapon that costs $361 million per copy, even Congress could not stomach the total program cost exceeding $65 billion, Sprey said.
As a result, the Air Force is now committed to fielding a fighter program that lacks sufficient numbers to prevail in a major conflict, however effective the individual aircraft may be.
“Hitler had 70 Me-262s in combat,” Sprey said. “They were crushed by the force of 2,000 inferior P-51s that the United States had in the air.”
Early reports from mock deployments of the Raptor also show a major shortfall in the fighter’s sustainability in combat, Sprey said.
“The F-16 costs one-tenth of the F-22 and flies three times as often due to the issues of stealth, complexity and maintenance affecting the Raptor,” Sprey said.
Sustainability and the number of aircraft available to fight on any given day, he added, are “vastly more important” than the quality of the F-22. “You have to have numerical superiority to win.”
On the last two points, maneuverability and capability for a “quick kill,” the two analysts assert that the Raptor is inferior to the F-16 and several allied fighter designs in the crucible of “energy-maneuverability.”
“Some (experts) assert that in the next air war,” all of the radars will be off and the air war will merge to air combat maneuvering,” Stevenson observed.
The Raptor’s performance in that mode will be “disastrous,” Sprey added.
“The only thing that will bail the U.S. Air Force out of this mess is the fact that they still have a lot of F-16s in service,” Sprey said, “The day they send the F-16s to the ‘boneyard’ is the day the service becomes a non-Air Force.”

・・・・From his word,US should buy cheap air craft?

Stealth ability is less important than mobility?
In the future,Dog fight is the key of Air superiority?
Mass can defeat quality?
Human wave tactics is the best?
http://www.cdi.org/friendlyversion/p...ocumentID=3503

Sandy, can you please post a source for that article? Thanks.

F-22 Test Team Perform Supersonic High-Altitude JDAM Drop

Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor.by Staff Writers
St Louis MO (SPX) Jun 14, 2006
The U.S. Air Force F-22 Combined Test Force team of Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Air Force pilots successfully demonstrated the F-22 Raptor's ability to release a munition at supersonic speed, high altitude and standoff range during a recent joint developmental and operational test at White Sands Missile Range, N.M.


More at http://www.spacewar.com/reports/F_22...JDAM_Drop.html

Several comments from my perspective:

1. The comparisons to the Me-262 are unfair. The Me-262 was introduced into WWII late in the war, when the Luftwaffe was short of experienced pilots and short on supplies (i.e., gas, ammunition, etc.). Had the Me-262 been introduced early in the war, in numerous quantities, and flown by experienced pilots, it might have made a tremendous impact in the aerial war; however, that's pure speculation and something we'll never know.

2. There will ALWAYS be a flaw in a fighter design; nothing will be perfect. The F/A-22 represents a compromise in design, based on today's realities. It's not as stealthy as the F-117A or the B-2A; it's probably not quite as maneuverable as the F-15C or the F-16C. It's a reality based on the fact that the United States has decided to stake its airpower on multi-role aircraft (whether or not this is a correct policy decision is an entirely separate discussion). The way you make up for that is in pilot training; currently, the US (as a whole) trains some of the best pilots in the world. I don't remember who said it (it might have been von Richthofen): "It's not the crate, but the man inside the crate that matters."

3. Where were these Fighter Mafia guys during the first Gulf War? Granted, the planes they pushed so hard for had their successes during the first Gulf War, but so did the F-117A -- if I'm not mistaken, I thought the Iraqis had superior radars and anti-aircraft defenses then the Serbs, and even if the Iraqis did spot the F-117A, none were shot down. For me, the results speak for themselves.

4. The F-117A that was shot down over Serbia was hit by a radar-guided SA-3, according to the colonel in charge of the AA battery. He declines to specify how his battery tracked the F-117A, but my guess is that he figured out a radar frequency that the F-117A is vulnerable to, or pushed the frequency closer to gamma rays.

Any new technlogical marvel will have a period where all the hiccups happen.
give it time.

The stellar attribute of the F-22 —
its invisibility on enemy radar due to a computer-aided stealth design — is a “myth,” Sprey said. That is because in order to locate the enemy beyond visual range, the Raptor (like every other fighter) must turn on its own radar, immediately betraying its location.

So where does AWACS fit into the grand scheme of things if the above is accurate? It was my understanding that "all" fighters these days were directed onto a target and didn't have to use their radar until the last moment.

From what I have heard, Congress and the Bush White House are forcing the Air Force to cut back on the F-22 program and instead buy the F-35A, which the Air Force has little to no interest in. Why could this be? Could it be because the F-35 will be filling a role currently being taken up by the F-16 which means the Air Force really doesn't see a need for the F-35? I think economics is coming into play here, the F-35 is an expensive program and in order to break even Boeing or Lockheed (Can't remember who is producing the F-35) needs to sell these aircraft to the Navy, Marines and Air Force, even though the Marines are the ones who need it the most with the Navy also having a need for it while the Air Force, from most of the stories I have heard, want next to nothing to do with this thing. In order to turn a profit the producers need to fill foreign orders too, it would look awfully odd to foreign militaries if the US Air Force didn't buy any of these aircraft.

The F-117A that was shot down over Serbia was hit by a radar-guided SA-3, according to the colonel in charge of the AA battery. He declines to specify how his battery tracked the F-117A, but my guess is that he figured out a radar frequency that the F-117A is vulnerable to, or pushed the frequency closer to gamma rays.

From what I've heard the way it was tracked was by looking at where it wasn't.... so to speak. The radar was getting atmospheric bounce from everywhere, except where the plane was because it trapped to radar waves. Hence you aim it at the black hole.

I thought the Serbs used some sort of Pulse/Doppler radar to track it? Every now and then when the radar waves hit just right a slight return would be sent back, the radar operators tracked these pings, figured out the flight path, and basically threw a missile in the general vicinity hoping it would make contact, obviously there would be more to it, but like I said, that's just what I had been hearing.

The person interviewed, Pierre C. Sprey, was one of the leading men in the aerospace field back in the 70s and 80s, dealing with the Pentagon on fighters. His criticisms are known as the "Pierre Sprey Buzzsaw", and the man worked extensively with John R. Boyd in the Energy-Maneuverability theory. He knows his material, and I have a great deal of respect for him, but I'll look further into the matter before forming an opinion on this.