Amazing the money spent on LOOKING GOOD.............. How about a border wall????????? DUMBASSES.........
By now, we've gotten accustomed to sticker shock when it comes to the cost of brand-new bombers and fighter jets (hello, F-35). But the plane that would replace both the F-22 Raptor and F-15 Eagle could reach a staggering cost of $300 million per plane.
That figure comes from a new study called “The Cost of Replacing Today’s Air Force Fleet," which was published by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and first reported by Defense News. The report attempted to calculate the future cost of Penetrating Counter Air (PCA), which is the current name of the U.S. Air Force’s next superiority fighter jet.
PCA is meant to replace the current fleet of F-22s and F-15s, taking its place as the service’s dedicated air-to-air fighter when it enters service in 2030. Unlike the Air Force's F-35A, which is meant to carry out both air-to-air and air-to-ground missions, PCA will be focused solely on the skies, optimized to fight and win against current and future aerial threats including the Russian Sukhoi Su-57 and China’s J-20 fighter.
The CBO estimated that the Air Force would require 414 new fighters in total. The office estimates the per-unit cost of the PCA fighter at $300 million. For comparison's sake, the F-35A Joint Strike Fighter costs $94 million apiece at the time of publication.
Why so expensive? For starters, the PCA will need capabilities far beyond the planes it replaces. For example, the next-gen fighter will need an even more powerful radar than the F-22’s AN/APG-77 active electronically scanned array radar in order to detect enemy stealth fighters. (When the F-22 was first fielded there were no enemy stealth fighters on the horizon). PCA will also need greater stealth, particularly against low frequency radars. One design characteristic that might make PCA more stealthy than her predecessors could be the lack of a vertical stabilizer, like the B-2 Spirit bomber (see Boeing's concept art at top.)
http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a25605878/air-force-pca-fighter-jet-cost/
Realist - Everybody in America is soft, and hates conflict. The cure for this, both in politics and social life, is the same -- hardihood. Give them raw truth.
| 
