Air Force F-22 Fighter Program

The F-22 Raptor was conceived to win a high-end air war against a peer adversary at the very moment that adversary, the Soviet Union, dissolved. That central irony frames every funding battle chronicled in Air Force F-22 Fighter Program: Background and Issues for Congress, the Congressional Research Service report by analyst Jeremiah Gertler. Prepared for Members and committees of Congress and current as of late November 2009, it captures the decisive year in which a two-decade procurement saga finally reached its end. Reproduced here in full, the report is a primary source on how the United States decided to stop building what its own Air Force called the most capable air-to-air combat aircraft in the world.

The story is one of relentlessly shrinking numbers. Born of the Advanced Tactical Fighter program of the early 1980s and won by Lockheed's YF-22 over Northrop's YF-23 in April 1991, the Raptor entered service as a weapon overdesigned for the strategic environment it actually met. The planned buy fell from an original 750 aircraft to 648, then 442, then 339, then 277, and at last to 187, a roughly 75 percent reduction that turned the 2009 debate from one over expansion into one over survival. With total acquisition cost for a 183-aircraft program estimated near $64.5 billion and a program acquisition unit cost of $350.8 million per jet, every additional aircraft became a conspicuous target in a constrained budget.

At its heart the report documents an unusually direct executive-legislative collision. The Obama Administration requested no FY2010 funds for more F-22s, Defense Secretary Robert Gates argued that 187 sufficed alongside the F-35, and the White House threatened to veto any bill that funded more. Congress initially resisted, with committee votes to add aircraft, before the Senate stripped its funding 58 to 40 in July 2009 and the House redirected its advance procurement money 269 to 165. Gertler, in classic CRS fashion, withholds his own verdict while marshaling a meticulously sourced record: the contested analytic basis for the 187 cap, the maintenance controversy, the question of foreign sales to Japan, the Obey amendment barring exports, and the industrial-base reckoning, including Section 133's mandate to preserve unique tooling so production could one day be restarted.

This Nimble Books edition faithfully reproduces the report and surrounds it with a full editorial apparatus newly prepared for this volume. A Historical Context essay traces the Raptor from its Cold War origins through the FY2010 veto confrontation, the reliability debate over its more-than-30-hours-of-maintenance-per-flight-hour record, the Japan export politics shaped by Article 9 and a rising China, and the careful mothballing of a production line. Two complementary plain-language abstracts open the material to every reader: an accessible explain-it-simply summary and an advanced analytical summary that dissects Gertler's tradecraft and the program's contested evidentiary footing. A Glossary defines the procurement, budget, and aviation terminology; Indexes of persons, places, and concepts make the text navigable; and an original computational RKHS knowledge-graph analysis situates the report among related works on defense acquisition and air power.

For defense analysts, students of the federal budget process and acquisition policy, aviation historians, congressional staff, librarians, and general readers who want to understand how a great power retires a flagship weapon, this edition transforms a dated briefing into a clear, fully contextualized account of the decision that capped the Raptor at 187 and the bureaucratic mechanics of how a production line is interred rather than merely stopped.