Washington Post runs article today about maintenance costs on F-22 being so high that the viability of the plane is questionable for that reason alone. But then on an air defense website quotes from Mullen about how the Russian family of S-300 anti-air systems is a game changer and from an Israeli official saying that regardless of costs the F-22 is only platform capable of reliably negating the S-300 and is therefore worth the costs [it is believed Iran has a version of the S-300 system but Russia denies the sale]. Interesting.
There are so many highly placed advocates for and against the Raptor that it's hard to know where the truth lies, everyone has an agenda to spin - I continue to believe that you walk away from technology like this simply because of money at your own peril: if there are design issues that cannot be overcome, then that's a problem; but if this plane works and is sustainable then it really seems short sighted to deep six it. There seems to be plenty of evidence out there to suggest that countries like Russia and China, who lack the resources to match the F-22, will simply choose instead to counter air dominance through sophisticated ground based systems, ie the argument that there's no opposing air force for the F-22 to go up against seems increasingly irrelevant.
[true, there are other ways to jam anti-air radar - whether they can be as effective as a fully functioning squadron of F-22s, especially if the coming S-400 system represents a marked improvement over the S-300, I don't know - but it's possibly a convincing argument to suggest the Raptor is way too expensive if its only role is to jam or take out radar systems - although, I don't know about that since what other platform can do everything the F-22 can do, a stealth aircraft that can fly at mach 2 without using afterburners, can detect and eliminated radar systems, and can afterwards dominate the cleaned airspace with state of the art avionics and BVR targeting? It's not simply a case of jamming radar so a bunch of F-15s, 16s and 18s can rush in and start dropping JDAMs everywhere]
Still, no matter how vital to America's strength technological advancement is, if that technology is more show than substance then I suppose the money would be better spent somewhere else.
