So state Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) in an op-ed decrying the “misinformation being disseminated about the F-22 Raptor” that ran in the July 14 Deseret News. The veteran lawmakers cite the F-22’s “unique ability to penetrate hostile airspace” in which “relatively inexpensive advanced integrated air defense systems would make it “extremely difficult, if not deadly, for those aircraft lacking the F-22’s advanced stealth technology and sustained supersonic cruise.” That stealth technology, they note, is not vulnerable to rain as some news reports have recently claimed—much like critics claimed of the B-2 bomber. Hatch and Inhofe write, “The F-22 requires far less work to maintain its stealthy characteristics than its predecessors, the F-117 and B-2.” And, although they acknowledge that maintaining that stealth capability does take a lot of maintenance hours, but they say, “In the end, it costs far less to maintain a war-winning stealth aircraft than to buy a replacement for a non-stealthy aircraft, such as the F-15, F-16, and F-18, which has been shot down because it was unable to penetrate hostile airspace.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth this week released strategies meant to focus the Pentagon’s “alphabet soup” of innovation organizations and proliferate artificial intelligence—moves that experts say could provide the structure needed to make the military’s efforts to integrate and field new technology more effective.
