history's most expensive fighter aircraft (F-22 fighter) has has not yet flown even one sortie in either Iraq or Afghanistan and probably won't ever since neither conflict involves air-to-air fighters. It might even fail "against the non-existent major conventional air force it is designed to fight"

At Counterpunch, Winslow Wheeler writes of a present day air force facing both intellectual and ethics challenges. Winslow writes that history's most expensive fighter aircraft (F-22 fighter) has has not yet flown even one sortie in either Iraq or Afghanistan and probably won't ever since neither conflict involves air-to-air fighters. It might even fail "against the non-existent major conventional air force it is designed to fight" because

The F-22 fighter:

At $355 million for each of the 184 purchased ... is history’s most expensive fighter aircraft, but it is yet to fly its first sortie in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it likely never will. As an air-to-air fighter, it is irrelevant to those conflicts. It may even be a gigantic flop x: too few are affordable to deal with such a foe; it is an aerodynamic performer that on close inspection is a huge disappointment; and it relies on a radar-based “beyond visual range” air-to-air combat hypothesis that has failed time and time again to deliver meaningfully effective results in real air combat. [emphasis mine]


... Despite the F-22’s irrelevance to real world wars, the Air Force’s leadership dedicated virtually the entire institution to advocating more of them than the Pentagon was willing to buy. Unauthorized Air Force lobbying for more F-22s had become ... commonplace on Capitol Hill and in oblique (and not-so-oblique) comments to the press


The Air Force engaged in equally extracurricular, behind-the-back cheer leading for C-17 cargo aircraft. Despite its non-optimal range, payload and size for either intercontinental or intra-theater transport, the Air Force blatantly winked, nodded and cheered as Congress bought C-17s above and beyond what Secretary Gates had approved.



Despite being the least involved American military service in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Air Force has been seeking the biggest of all unauthorized supplements to its already historically huge annual budget.



Nowhere has the Air Force’s sense of self-entitlement been more obvious than in the unending scandals surrounding the acquisition of new air refueling tankers. Its 2001 plan to “lease-purchase” Boeing 767 airliners as tankers at costs well above the price of just purchasing them came to a demise only after Sen. John McCain. R-Ariz., and the Justice Department found an Air Force official colluding with a Boeing corporate manager