The Air Force is Planning For a Future Without the F-22

The U.S. Air Force aims to pare its fighter fleet to just four types — and the F-22 Raptor won’t be among them, the service’s top general said Wednesday.

Those four will be the F-35, F-15EX, F-16, and the Next Generation Air Dominance, or NGAD, fighter, Gen. CQ Brown, Air Force chief of staff, said at a McAleese and Associates virtual conference.

“Right now we have seven fighter fleets,” Brown said. “My intent is to get down to about four, OK, and with that four, what is the right mix?”

Brown said the fighter makeup is “really a four-plus-one, because we’re going to have the A-10 for a while as we re-wing” the venerable Warthog to extend its service life into the 2030s.

The F-22 will be replaced by the NGAD jet, which will fly alongside the “F-35, which will be the cornerstone, [the] F-15EX as we come in, and then we’ll have F-16 for a while as well,” Brown said.

The Air Force currently has 186 F-22s, according to a Heritage Foundation count in November. They are just 12 years old on average, Heritage reported, making the type among the youngest in the fleet. But the F-22 has faced low mission capability rates, in part due to structural upgrades that often take multiple aircraft offline.

Last year, Air Force leaders hinted that they might buy the F-15EX not just to replace older F-15Cs but also the 218 newer F-15E Strike Eagles.

Brown said the Air Force is determining the right mix of fighters through an internal tactical air study that all of the services are participating in, to look “across the board, [at] all of our combat aircraft, our attack, our fighter portfolio.”

“I’m really looking for a window of options, because the facts and assumptions based on a threat will change over time,” he said. “But I want to get us shaped in a direction, because right now we have seven fighter fleets. Okay, my intent is to get down to about four.”