Despite the fact that the US has been at constant war against a variety of opponents during the plane's entire existence, its only air to air kill have been a slow moving high altitude balloon. For every other theather, opponent, from low tech to high, from small to big, the US has elected to use a different platform. That signals to me, that there's nothing that the F-22 does the best or in the most cost effective manner.
In one of my previous jobs, I had to drill holes in houses' walls to install stuff.
I had several different kind of drill bits, but mostly used a couple only, since the majority of the time I had to drill into tiles.
The first drill bit of this couple costed me around 3€, lasted me about a dozen times before breaking apart and drilled through 90% of the tiles I had to deal with.
The second of these drill bits costed me 21€, never broke under any circumstance and could put a hole easily into any surface.
But it did wear down with use though and if I used it everyday, after a couple of weeks only, I would have had to go back to the store and buy a new one.
A new one that would have costed me 7 times more than the cheaper one of the 2.
So it was better for me, to have a bunch of these cheaper drill bits available at all times (more cost effective, right?) and only 2 of the expensive bits to use when the situation required it (because the more cost effective ones would not have been able to drill those harder tiles).
I needed both.
The fact that the US has procured and used a billion planes of various types, including heavily upgraded F-15s, its direct predecessor, and Congress has decided to cancel the project quite early signal to me, that military experts didn't see enough potential in the plane to justify its pricetag.
Politicians (Congress) are not military experts.
We didn't see the full run of F-22s or B-2s, because the world in which these platforms were conceived to be used had changed as they were being put into production.
You might surmise that there is no reason to have a 21€ drill bit if all the tiles I'm going to find in front of me are gonna be easy to drill through, right?
So there is no reason to buy all those Raptors if I don't see my former opponents as enemies anymore (end of the Cold War).
Unfortunately, this was absolutely myopic make-believe thinking from the people that were called to take these decisions, as reality turned out to be.
Just because you think yourself (or wish to be seen) not as an enemy by someone, doesn't mean that they are not going to see you as an existential threat to their way of life.
They have their own reasons to do so and might not be willing to compromise.
But I digress and I will not dwell further or respond to people that might want to drag me into a discussion about this point.
To go back to this statement:
For every other theather, opponent, from low tech to high, from small to big, the US has elected to use a different platform.
There is another good reason they are not being used every time and everywhere.
You might have noticed that F-22s, F-35s and F-117s have flown with Lüneburg lenses installed on them during deployments: it's because you don't want to telegraph your opponent your capabilities.
This goes for RCS, sensors, manoeuvrability or anything else.
So the less you use something out in the open for everybody to see, the closer you stick your cards to your chest, the less your opponents will know about how to defeat you.
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