Buried inside all the PR puffery in this piece about the F/A-22 reaching operational status, is the quote
“In any air-to-air fight out there, it is a hopeless mismatch,” Krumm said. “What we are more concerned with are countries that want to deny us air space by purchasing surface-to-air missiles and that kind of stuff. Those are very lethal to the way the U.S. deploys.”
This kind of skips over the fact the US already has such an overwhelming advantage in the air that the only possible ground-to-air threat would have to come from small mobile units… the kind of units that don’t actually work very well in real-world conditions.
There’s also the fact that the article fails to mention things like range, effective loiter time, and other factors that are somewhat more important in real combat situations…
Not me, I don't get a hard-on for Amerika's technologies of mass destruction. Very unsweeeeeeeeeeet. Think of how many starving kids could be fed with the mega bucks just one of those fascist tools costs.
I think that I may have been a bit too subtle in trying to get my point across: the F-22, while an awesome piece of technology and a nifty airplane, is very much a technology in search of a mission. There is, to put it frankly, not only no air force in the world right now capable of being a match for the current US inventory, but there are no nations in the world (both now and in the forseeable future) that would be able to field an air force capable of putting up a fight against the USAF.