New U.S. Air Force Leaders Recast F-22 Retirement Plans

With no replacement in sight and a $14 billion pipeline of upgrades in progress, the U.S. Air Force’s niche fleet of Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptors is suddenly enjoying a long, bright future.

After being marked three years ago for retirement by the end of this decade by a former Air Force chief of staff, the stealthy fighter now appears poised to survive well into the 2030s, at least.

• New USAF Air Combat Command chief champions the F-22
• Block 20 fleet retirement request challenged

The long-term outlook for the program, confirmed by newly appointed head of Air Combat Command (ACC) Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, upends perceptions of the F-22 fleet’s planned upgrades as a stopgap until the Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) platform arrives. The change of fortune also raises questions about the value of adding more capabilities, such as AI-driven features and links to future autonomous systems.

Breaking from the Air Force’s official stance, Wilsbach, who became ACC commander on Feb. 29, bluntly champions an indefinite operational future for the entire Raptor inventory and the preservation of a subfleet of 32 F-22 Block 20s capable of training and testing missions only.

“We’re actually planning several upgrades to the jet as we speak, and there is no official replacement to the F-22 right now,” he said during a July 11 webinar hosted by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

The pipeline of upgrades is intended to markedly increase the distances at which the roughly 15-30-year-old fighter fleet can fly, sense and shoot.

The Air Force’s 2025 fiscal budget proposal explicitly calls out several key upgrades. A wing-mounted infrared search-and-track pod, for example, is now participating in the Epic demonstration. If that demo is successful, the new pod could be released to the fleet within a few years. A set of low-drag external fuel tanks and pylons also is in development to extend the F-22’s range considerably at minimal cost to the aircraft’s stealthy signature on radar.

Other upgrades do not appear in official documents but are known to be in the works, including the integration of Lockheed Martin AIM-260 Joint Advanced Tactical Missiles, which the Air Force ordered to offset the range advantage posed by China’s PL-15 air-to-air missile.

Still others are known only in general terms. Project Keystone funds the prototypes and technology maturation of a new advanced threat warning receiver, a key component at the heart of the F-22’s BAE Systems ALR-74 electronic warfare suite. The budget proposal lists another possible upgrade as Project Geyser but describes its “flight demonstrations” and “integration studies” vaguely as involving an “advanced capability.”

Along with other communications, maintenance, classified and undisclosed upgrades, the F-22 pipeline accounts for plans to spend $4.34 billion in research and development plus another $9.89 billion in procurement through at least 2030, according to Air Force budget documents.

The F-22’s future appears to be growing rosier as plans for NGAD have become less clear under new Air Force leadership.

In March 2021, then-Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Q. Brown, Jr., announced that the F-22 was not among the five fighters—NGAD, Lockheed Martin’s F-35, Boeing’s F-15, Lockheed’s F-16 and the A-10—in the service’s long-term inventory. The Air Force subsequently received congressional approval to retire the A-10 fleet by the end of the decade. The F-22’s fate appeared to be sealed, albeit without a specific timetable.

With the youngest of 183 F-22s set to pass 20 years of service by 2030, Brown—now chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—said in 2021 that he expected the cost of maintaining and upgrading the small fleet to become more burdensome. At the time, the Air Force planned to introduce the NGAD family of systems, ushering in a new generation of technology for the F-22’s air superiority mission.

At times, Air Force officials pushed back when journalists attempted to narrow the scope of NGAD to developing a crewed sixth-generation fighter. But other official statements explicitly acknowledged such a goal.

When the service released a request for proposals for the engineering and manufacturing development phase of the NGAD program in May 2023, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall issued a statement describing the platform as “a vital element of the Air Dominance family of systems which represents a generational leap in technology over the F-22, which it will replace.”

Kendall also warned about the risk of delaying the contract, which was planned by the end of June 2024.

“NGAD will include attributes such as enhanced lethality and the ability to survive, persist, interoperate and adapt in the air domain, all within highly contested operational environments,” Kendall said. “No one does this better than the U.S. Air Force, but we will lose that edge if we don’t move forward now.”

The solicitation drew responses from Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Boeing revealed in June that it had broken ground on a $1.8 billion Advanced Combat Aircraft Facility in St. Louis. The investment represents a financial gamble for the company’s defense business, which acknowledges that it is still competing for the contract such a site would support.

As the Air Force’s self-imposed deadline drew near, the service’s top generals started backpedaling on their commitment to the NGAD platform. The Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program is still moving forward as planned, but top Air Force officials are reviewing the timing and requirements for NGAD. Kendall told Aviation Week in June that the service was “open-minded right now on the things that we’re looking at.” Gen. David Allvin, Brown’s successor as Air Force chief of staff, warned about the impact of budgetary pressures, especially starting in fiscal 2026.

The impact on the engineering and manufacturing development contract for NGAD still is uncertain, but the F-22 is a clear beneficiary. Although Kendall called NGAD the replacement for the F-22 a year ago, Wilsbach rejected that idea in the July 11 webinar.

“Frankly, there isn’t an F-22 replacement, and the F-22 is a fantastic aircraft,” said Wilsbach, a Raptor pilot.

An Air Force spokesperson later stated that service leaders continue to regard upgrades to the F-22 fleet as a “bridge to the NGAD family of systems.”

Wilsbach also contradicted the Air Force’s policy on the fate of the F-22 Block 20 fleet. Unlike the 142 combat-coded F-22 Block 30/35 aircraft, the 32 Block 20s are reserved for training and test units. In 2022, Lockheed Martin estimated that upgrading the Block 20 fleet to the combat-coded configuration would cost $2.7-2.9 billion, or $84-91 million per jet, according to a Government Accountability Office report in June.

Such costs drove Air Force leaders repeatedly to seek the early retirement of the Block 20 fleet, as they asserted that those training and test jets were not capable of flying combat missions without extensive upgrades to raise them to the Block 30/35 standard.

But Wilsbach wants as many F-22s as possible. “I’m in favor of keeping the Block 20s,” he said. “They give us a lot of training value, and even if we had to—in an emergency—use the Block 20s in a combat situation, they’re very capable.”

Thanks to a retooled development approach, the upgrade pipeline for the F-22 Block 30/35 fleet is already in progress. In 2022, Lockheed fielded the first in an annual series of planned software and hardware updates with Release 1. Most important, this added a new processor with an open systems architecture (OSA), allowing the Air Force to integrate software applications from third parties.

Two years later, Lockheed is in the process of fielding Release 3. The combination of the new processor and annual release cadence transforms how upgrades are fielded in combat aircraft, OJ Sanchez, who leads Lockheed’s Integrated Fighter Group, told Aviation Week on June 20. Instead of releasing updates in decadelong, block-style upgrade programs, the Air Force now has more flexibility to adapt the aircraft as needed.

“We work with the Air Force and go, ‘Hey, maybe Release 5, Release 6, Release 7 needs to look a little different. Let’s adjust that pipeline,’” Sanchez said.

The Air Force crafted the current upgrade release road map before plans for the CCA solidified, but the service can tweak the schedule.

“The OSA pipeline is giving us the opportunities . . . to look at each one of these activities as an opportunity,” Sanchez said. “Where can we enhance the CCA opportunity? It is giving us the opportunity to look at autonomy. Where can we overlay AI? Where can we work with third-party apps?”