US Military News, Reports, Data, etc.
- Thread starter tphuang
- Start date
Lethe
Captain
Sure, it's really not a big deal. Burke III > Tico in most respects. USN will lose some numbers in the transition, but not many, and they could probably stand to lose a few anyway, with the inventory being so top-heavy.
But it's a big deal for the American public commentary scene. You have USN consistently pushing to retire ships "early" while simultaneously putting out papers calling for ever greater numbers of ships, Congress consistently opposing said retirements, while semi-informed commentators and interested laypersons fret about the loss of the mighty "cruisers", the rise of China, and the travails of the LCS/Zumwalt/CG(X) programs. Throw in some partisan politics and anti-woke sentiment and between all that there are an awful lot of bad takes on the cruiser retirements floating around, which is all very entertaining.
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TerraN_EmpirE
Tyrant King
The idiotic curtailing of F22 production led the USAF with 186 F22, of that number only 125 are “Combat coded” meaning actually fighters. The rest are kept for evaluation training and other missions so on. It’s much the same with any other new fighter. The oldest of the series tend to fall into a non mission category. These aircraft are normally retired early.
Are the non-combat coded aircraft capable of hot launching weapons?
Is it idiotic? Or is it that it never came to your mind your nation can't afford more than that? Though even then I doubt that number you had 180 to begin with.
Printing papers don't magically convert into goods & services.
Reducing the F-22 numbers was fine in my opinion. It was designed during the cold war, and when the USSR collapsed there was no need for them. If the US built 750 of them they would have been doing nothing. Maintaining F-22s is a lot more expensive than F-15s. I would have kept the ability to manufacture them if needed, not sure why they got rid of that.