Originally Posted by
Skroe
The "more traditional" look and features you're referring to are a lot more historically prejudicial than you might realize. In the early and mid 1980s as the ATF program was coming together (the program that would spawn the F-22 and F-35), the Air Force solicited RFP designs from all the major aerospace companies at the time, and they all submitted different proposals. The choice was with what the air force wanted to go with. The two that made it to being build, as I'm sure you're aware, are the YF-22 and the YF-23.
The thing about these aircraft though, is they represented entirely different approaches to what the air force thought the future of air combat would be. The YF-22 - in many ways took the F-15's lessons (more on that below), modernized it further with a stealthy configuration that could carry weapons internally. It was powered for most of its tests by the F-119 engine (a seperate program). But it was very much in the supermanuverable fighter mold. The YF-23 was conceptually referred to in the RFP was the "missiler" (before it was built as the YF-23). It would be manuverable and have thrust vectoring (though not to the degree of the YF-22), but it's advantage is that its shape would be far stealthier, and its larger size allow for a greater fuel and weapons load. While the YF-22 was informed by historic fighter experiences, particularly Israeli action in the 1960s and 1970s, the YF-23 saw a future where long range missiles made supermanuverability obsolete. Seperately, it also used the YF120 engine, which will be important to note later.
The F-22 represented a more conservative design in other words, but action in the Gulf War, during Operation Allied Force and global technological advancements have moreso validated the YF-23 design. Missiles have gotten better ranged at a smaller size, with better seekers (and now, AI) than was ever imagined in the 1980s. In the 1980s, for example, the long range US missile was the massive AIM-54 Phoenix. Today, the AIM-120D, which has less than a third the weight of the AIM-54, can reach just-shy of the Phoenix's range.
Presently the USAF is soliciting initial proposals for the F-22 successor. There is a good chance it'll look a lot like either the B-21 raider stealth bomber or something like the YF-23 (in an irony, Lockheeds CG for their propsal basically is the YF-23, which was designed by their rival Northrop). Range concerns and vulnerability of air refueling tankers are driving fuel requirements - the YF120 Variable Cycle Engine, revolutionary in its time, is providing the foundation for the ADVENT engine that will power it (and likely be retrofitted into late-build F-35s). And the theme of armaments the bast decade has been "make them smaller so that more can be carried". The B-21 raider, for example, will almost certainly be 1/3rd or more smaller than the B-21, and only with one bomb bay (as opposed to the B-2s two), because the B-2s capacity is just excessive in an age of small smart bombs.
All of this points to "the missiler" design finally coming of age as technology caught up with ambition. If, as anticipated, the next generation of long range missiles will be fired blind, with extreme ranges (250+km) and "lock on" and seek enemy aircraft on their own, then supermanuverability... indeed the entire basis of the F-22 design, becomes obsolete. You'll want your aircraft to be able to shoot of fifty of such missiles, not six to eight.
You mention countermeasures. No, largely they haven't kept up at all with missile technology, which is one reason the Air Force is speeding to integrate a solid state laser as a point defense weapon on the F-35A. The A has an empty area right behind the cockpit the size of an industrial refrigerator that could have a laser turret slotted right in. And it wouldn't have to even melt the entire missile, just damage the seeker. But in anticipation of this, China and Russia are preparing missiles that relying on multiple, non-optical, seeking solutions. It's a constant race.
It's worth looking at the history of Naval ship classes for seeing an analogy for how this is going to go. After World War II, through the 1990s, ships around the world were filled with weird ship classes based around function. And some were even re-classified as they gained new functions. But in the late 1990s, all that diversity coalesced into "Aircraft carrier" "Helicopter Carrier", "Amphibious Ship", "Cruiser", "Destroyer", "Frigate". And looking forward, due to miniturization in radar technology, "Cruiser" and "Destroyer" may be unified into one class of "Large Surface Combatant" (already a US Navy term).
The same could be said of the Air Force. The concept of "Low" and "High" fighter aircraft has only a handful of historic instances that just happened to last long. "Heavy bomber", and "medium bomber" gave way many years ago to "bomber" and "multirole strike fighter".
The F-35, undoubtedly, has years more life left in them than the F-22. The F-22 is roughly 40% the way through its life already, if you can believe it, and just due to the expense involved in keeping such a small number in service, you can count on an early retirement as soon as their successor starts being produced in serious numbers (similar to the F-117 and F-14D retirements). It doesn't make sense to be attached to what worked in the 1980s, when we're planning aircraft for the 2050s.
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It's so much more than that. The F-35 is the first production military aircraft with a fiberoptic and motor-based internal design, instead of cabling and hydralics. It is the first aircraft with the analog of the Star Trek Main Computer that can give you the real time "status" of the entirey of the aircraft (which is a very difficult problem). From a maitenence point of view, maintainers are able to ask, essentially "what is wrong with you?" and the F-35 will tell them.
Furthermore it's entire avionics suite is designed based on an open architecture. When Country X wanted to integrate their missiles into a F-16, it was a rather big deal that typically involved customized hardware. Not so with the F-35. Now, anything added onto it can (and MUST, except for the US and UK) be added on utilizing a API.
From concept to execution it is the first software driven military aircraft.
Internally, the F-22 is vastly inferior. Again, the F-22 is what it is due to it's size, second engine and aerodynamic shape. Internally, it is far more primitive than the F-35 which incorporated lessons from the F-22 (and also the Gripen). Even interms of Software this would not be possible. The F-22 Avionics suite is written in Ada, and is notorious for being poorly documented and filled with security holes. One of the reasons the US did not want to export the F-22 is because of concern about those security holes being vulnerable to cyberattack (and it didn't want to put it in foreign hands to make gaining access to an F-22 computer easier).
Last year Congress ordered the Pentagon to inquire what it would take to restart F-22 production. The largest problem is that ever since production terminated in 2011, the manufactuer suplier base moved on, and reconstituting it in "F-22A" form, would be extremely difficult. So most focus, it is believed, is on seeing how much F-35 tech could be integrated into the F-22. But that's a much bigger process than it sounds. If they started tomorrow, it would be 2022 before "F-22Cs" started rolling off the production line, at the very earliest. And considering what I wrote above on the nature of air combat ahead, it would probably be worth just doing a clean sheet design.
Another alternative would be to go the "Super Hornet" rout, and ask Lockheed to produce an "F-35E" that is 35% larger (which would require having a second engine) and modified aerodynamics. While a second series of F-35s is very likely beyond 2025 (it's not like they'll be producing 2007-vintage F-35As in 2035, anymore than they were making 1970s F-16As in 1996), such a dramatic redesign as the Super Hornet would be an entirely different matter. The 1990s Super Hornet was largely an entirely new aircraft that superficially resembles the 1980s-era Hornet in order to hide it form the budget cut axe that slew it's predecessor, the A-12 Avenger.
Frankly, just thinking about it, much of what you would do if you wanted to do "the F-22 modernized", such as eliminating thrust vectoring, adding the F-35 computer and sensor suite, adding F-35 stealth coating, and so forth, is better characterized by just creating an Larger Air-Superiority variant of the F-35 than modernizing the F-22. But this just gets back to what I said before: the most important part of the F-35 program is the technology development, which is being used on everything from aircraft to surface ships.
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