Having lost its battle to get 381 F-22 Raptors, the Air Force simply shrugged and moved on. In a joint press conference, new Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne and the new Chief of Staff, Gen. T. Michael Moseley, said they will live with the Administration’s imposed cap of 183 F-22As—even though the service had maintained for more than two years that 381 was the minimum number. “We’re going to have to take into account that the Air Force we had planned on a few years ago may not come to fruition,” Wynne said, “but I will tell you, that has been a fact of life in the [Pentagon] for some time now.”
The Air Force is on track to reach its annual goal of graduating 1,500 new pilots that had proved elusive to this point, one year after the service launched a sweeping overhaul of its undergraduate pilot training program, Air Education and Training Command said Sept. 14.
