The $369.5 Million Jet: Why the Air Force Can Never Build Another F-22
Whenever air superiority questions arise in congressional committee hearings, lawmakers inevitably ask whether the military could simply build 50 to 100 new F-22s. The Air Force examined that precise scenario in a formal study commissioned by Congress. The resulting report extinguished any hope of reopening the line.
When production halted in 2011, tooling and jigs were carefully packed away into 30,000 separate storage containers at Sierra Army Depot in California. Thousands of detailed instructional assembly videos were cataloged. Yet resurrecting an aerospace assembly line involves far more than unbolting steel jigs.
First, the subcontractor network collapsed. More than 1,000 suppliers scattered across 46 states made parts for the Raptor. Over the subsequent decade, hundreds of those specialized machine shops closed down, merged, or repurposed their factories for other contracts. Requalifying those suppliers would require clean-sheet vendor certifications.
Second, the jet's electronic brain is an obsolete relic of late-1990s computing architectures. Building a new batch would require redesigning mission software, cockpit processors, and secure avionics buses from scratch to accept modern silicon. The Air Force estimated that simply restarting the production line would cost over $10 billion in non-recurring startup costs before a single bolt was riveted. Each newly produced fighter would cost more than $200 million, consuming capital needed for sixth-generation development.
