The Air Force wants to divest most of its aircraft in order to spend on advanced aircraft R&D. I wonder if anyone has published a good analysis of this strategy, because it sounds crazy to me.
Sounds like it was mostly a boondoggle all along. Seems smart to focus on smaller/cheaper drones. Life-cycle cost per F-22 looks to be $678 million/plane. For 32, that's $20 billion. What kinds of payloads and capabilities can you have with a swarm of 1 million $20,000 mass-produced drones? How would you defend against something like that? Or maybe a mix of 10 million $1,000 drones, and half a million $20,000 drones. Whether the Air Force would actually do something like that is another story through...
1M drones might last 100 days in Ukraine, who is looking to use 2M just this year. (napkin math based on 10k shells per day, which is about what Russia uses when supplies are available)
The f22 led to the f35 and cemented American dominance in the export market for 5th gen planes. A lot of money will be paid and support further developments of 6th gen.
They are definitely thinking broadly about UAV systems. CSIS YouTube channel is a great resource to hear military leadership talk candidly about their thoughts on these matters
