China cannot fight the US until it has an F-22 equivalent

I am just curious to see if people agree with the above proposition or not.

The US has about 100 F-22, if I have my facts straight on that. I think that even if China had 1,000 Su-27, that's still inferior to 100 F-22's. With enough patience, the F-22's will eventually shoot down all the Flankers.

Therefore, China could not ever think about going down a path that would result in a confrontation with the United States until it could field an F-22 equivalent, and in my opinion given that the US is likely to maintain its technological edge over China for many decades (like 50 years) China would probably have to have at least a 2:1 numerical advantage with an F-22 class fighter before it could ever seriously think about going into a situation where it might have to fight the United States.

Do you agree with that?

The weakness of the argument is that one plane cannot be in two place at once, so while your superior F-22 is shooting down one aircraft, other aircrafts are raiding your air bases, shooting down your tanker, and blowing up your tank farm. Alternatively, while your aircraft used up your missiles, they will still have fresh uncommitted aircrafts with missiles to blow you out of the sky. There are ways to use quantitative superiority vs qualitative superiority.

Indeed, as all fighters even the F-22 is dependent on support infrastructure. Airbases, parking, refueling, control etc. Even if the plane itself cannot be beat in air combat, its support infrastructure is as vulnerable as ever. And of course the plane can still be destroyed while parked on an airbase. Plus, a large part of the F-22 fleet will be dedicated to other theatres, including defending the US mainland. It's doubtful the US will pull out everything from all other theatres to beat China in one. You don't put all your eggs in one basket.

Maggern said:

Indeed, as all fighters even the F-22 is dependent on support infrastructure. Airbases, parking, refueling, control etc. Even if the plane itself cannot be beat in air combat, its support infrastructure is as vulnerable as ever. And of course the plane can still be destroyed while parked on an airbase. Plus, a large part of the F-22 fleet will be dedicated to other theatres, including defending the US mainland. It's doubtful the US will pull out everything from all other theatres to beat China in one. You don't put all your eggs in one basket.

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I disagree with both of your points.

First, with inflight refueling the F-22 could be doing fighter sweeps based out of Hawaii, or possibly even Alaska and California. Those are not areas that China can reach with conventional weapons.

Secondly, even while the US fights two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, we have no need for our F-22's there. What other "theatre" would we need them in if we fought a war with China? Europe? To defend against Mexico or Canada? All 100 F-22's could be sent to fight against China and I don't think you necessarily have to base them out of Guam. Even if we did, we could set up ballistic missile defenses and air defenses there and China does not have the forces to hit Guam.

overrun, >>>> Mods delclarition. Although not specfically spelled out in the rules we as an unwritten rule do not allow comparison threads. We do have this statement in our rules;

Meaningless arguments and inappropriate provocation of other members

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And this discussion is meaningless and will end on the road to perdition.



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