Key Points and Summary – Talk of a “Super F-22” surged after President Trump’s comments, but the smart play isn’t reviving production—it’s disciplined, bounded upgrades to the fleet we have while funding the future.
-Deep modernization of legacy Raptors risks draining money and engineering talent from Next-Generation Air Dominance (F-47), Collaborative Combat Aircraft, munitions, and hardened networks.
U.S. Air Force Gen. Kevin B. Schneider, Pacific Air Forces commander, pilots the lead F-22 Raptor rendezvousing with a C-17 Globemaster III, both from Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, during a mission off the coast of O‘ahu, April 8, 2025. PACAF provides ready and lethal forces to ensure stability and security in the Indo-Pacific. (U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Emerson Nuñez)
-A restart would cost tens of billions and arrive late, while adversaries iterate faster. Keep F-22s lethal with targeted adds—IRST where practical, defensive suites, data links, and clean weapons carriage—then stop.
-Air dominance now comes from distribution, networking, and magazine depth, not a boutique fleet that eats the budget.
Super F-22 Myths Collide with Math, Missions, and Money
Resurrection myths make for great sound bites; they make for lousy force design.
After United States President Donald Trump floated a “Super” F-22—alongside a notional “F-55” and praise for the F-47—the internet lit up with concept art and nostalgia.
Enjoy the romance, then do the math: the Air Force must choose between fielding a small legacy fleet and funding the future—F-47, Collaborative Combat Aircraft, munitions, and hardened networks.
The smart play is discipline—keep the Raptor lethal with tightly bound upgrades while refusing an open-ended “Super” rebuild that would raid the very programs that win the next war.
Varying Definition of “Super”
Clarity first. “Super F-22” describes two paths. One is the deep modernization of the jets we already own—enhanced sensing, defensive systems, datalinks, and weapons integration—to keep the Raptor a formidable knife fighter within a larger kill web.
That can be smart if tightly scoped. The other is the museum-grade temptation: reviving production or creating a quasi-new variant. That path is a budgetary sand trap. The line is long closed; suppliers dispersed.
The Air Force’s own restart analysis estimated non-recurring costs at nearly $10 billion and total procurement on the order of $50 billion for fewer than 200 jets, years before the first combat-ready airframe was delivered. That isn’t strategy; that’s nostalgia with a price tag.
Time to Move Forward with Next Generation Aircraft
Meanwhile, the future is under contract. The F-47—the crewed centerpiece of Next-Generation Air Dominance—advanced this spring. It’s not just a new jet; it’s the quarterback of a network—sensors, gateways, resilient comms, and teamed unmanned systems—that pressures an adversary across the engagement sequence.
Starving that ecosystem to gold-plate a small legacy fleet would be the wrong kind of bold.
F-22 Raptor Elephant Walk. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
Those unmanned teammates—the CCA program—are the way back to affordable mass. Early blocks will scout, jam, carry weapons, and, when necessary, absorb risk in place of a $200 million jet and a uniquely trained pilot. Planning assumptions indicate a four-figure fleet, delivered in iterative spirals.
That only works if funding flows to production and software, not to bespoke, one-off upgrades that lock money and engineering talent into an older design. In a contest where opponents bet on volume and tempo, CCAs multiply the value of every crewed aircraft without bankrupting us.
Reinforcing the Fleet
What about the Raptors we have? Keep them mean. The fleet is small, and the training-only Block 20 jets are the awkward remainder.
But extending select sensor, electronic protection, and battle-management upgrades can bring more tails into the fight and buy time until the F-47/CCA team arrives in numbers.
That is the lane for discipline: harvest near-term, high-payoff improvements that plug the F-22 cleanly into the broader kill web and stop there.
Shown is a graphical artist rendering of the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) Platform. The rendering highlights the Air Force’s sixth generation fighter, the F-47. The NGAD Platform will bring lethal, next-generation technologies to ensure air superiority for the Joint Force in any conflict. (U.S. Air Force graphic)
Discipline matters because upgrade bills are sticky. Stretch the scope—new engines here, structural life extensions there—and the calendar and ledger run away. The risk is obvious: it’s the 2030s, a large share of the fleet is undergoing modification, and the rest of the portfolio is gasping for oxygen.
By contrast, a bounded upgrade line—IRST, where practical, defensive-suite improvements, JADC2-friendly data plumbing, and signature-respecting carriage—yields real combat power now without sabotaging tomorrow.
Advocates of a super-Raptor argue that adversaries are fielding more fifth-gen jets and sharper long-range sensors, so doubling down on our best air-to-air fighter is the quickest path to overmatch. Understandable—and wrong.
Against an opponent building mass, we win with distribution, networking, and magazine depth, not the most exquisite small fleet money can buy. “Numbers” in 2025 means connected shooters, decoys, autonomous wingmen, and missiles on the ramp.
Every dollar invested in reviving a bespoke line is a dollar not spent on weapons, not hardening command and control, and not scaling the CCA force that turns a handful of crewed aircraft into dilemmas across the battlespace.
Super F-22 and Time
Time argues the same way as money. Even if Washington green-lit an all-new “Super F-22” tomorrow, you’d still be years from the first truly combat-coded unit: reconstituting suppliers, rebuilding workforce, qualifying parts, integrating subsystems, and shaking out test fleets.
The pacing challenge (Russia and China) is iterating in 18–24-month cycles; a restart would take much longer than that. By the time a re-animated Raptor showed up in numbers, the threat and our own concept of operations would have moved.
This is not a call to neglect air dominance; it’s a call to buy it the way we fight now. Protect the F-47 timelines and the family-of-systems architecture around it. Accelerate CCA until the flight line looks less like a museum and more like a matrix—creweds as conductors, uncreweds as the orchestra, and magazines deep enough to play through the finale.
Fund software-centric sensor fusion, hardened networks, and the munitions lines that won’t run dry in week two.
Then measure every “Super” idea—F-22 included—against that standard: cost per effect, speed to field, contribution to the kill web.
Super F-22 or Super Mistake?
Political attention can help, provided it sharpens choices rather than blurs them. Celebrate the Raptor’s past; don’t let it dominate the future.
The Air Force can thread this needle with focused upgrades that keep the F-22 lethal while refusing a nostalgia-driven rebuild. Air superiority will not be won by the shiniest jet or the loudest promise.
It will be won by a portfolio that fuses sensors, saturates the fight with shooters, and does not run out of arrows. The F-22 can still hunt inside that team. It just shouldn’t eat the budget.
About the Author: Dr. Andrew Latham
Andrew Latham is a Senior Washington Fellow with the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities, and a professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. You can follow him on X: @aakatham. He writes a daily column for the National Security Journal.
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