TBone,
What is your experience going against the Raptor? Not JUST their best fight, but over all of the engagements. In my experience, they are nowhere near 100% success. As a matter of fact, I can give you names of people who had "kill ratios" close to parity or better against them once the handcuffs were eased - and those handcuffs will be removed in the real world. I've had very good success when I did not abide by some of the handcuffs - and some when I did. We would have had a few more really good successes towards the ends of the vuls if the pre-fight tankers would have fallen through. In the real world, even some T-38's have been able to have an effect according to the video I linked to - and who knows what damage they would have done as strikers that got through.
As far as the F-15 vs the F-22, what are the chances that the ROE will let F-22's shoot on EID alone past Day 1 of the war in a high-EA environment? AWACs track-transfers alone are enough to add too much risk to BVR shots in a muddled environment - add unreliable friendly replies due to high-EA and comm jamming (you know, all of those legacy IFF's and radios still flying around) and it's VID for all. In a real-world VID environment, I would take more HMS/ESA/Link-16 F-15s with AIM-9X and the improved IRCM over fewer F-22's anyday. Besides, the big threats have IRST/etc so how stealthy is the airplane against that system in that VID environment? Did they go to war with external tanks due to a too high threat to get the tankers in close, there goes that low RCS. Add the real-world Pk of real-world missiles, and the reality of a full-on shooting war being so one-sided starts to be not so real.
There is a mission for the F-22 - double-digit SAM's, cruise missiles, etc - but we don't need 100% of a fleet that is half of the size (or less) of what a real air superiority fleet should be to have that capability.
It's a good airplane, but the realities of trying to maintain air superiority with just 187 are not good - especially with the MR rate that it has now, and the one that it will have when the ops tempo required from having 35% of the required fleet start to take its toll. When it comes to national defense and air superiority, I am more concerned with what can stop the hordes than I am with what's the coolest airplane. One leaker is too many and with the F-22 there will be many, especially when they have to go home for more missiles.
The uninformed nonsense is sitting around saying that 187 F-22's are better than some mix that includes maybe a few F-22's but A LOT MORE new off-the-line F-15's or refurbed F-15's. Wishful thinking has never won a war and 187 F-22's will not keep our HVAA from being shot down nor our troops from being bombed.
By the way, there is no reason why a new off-the-line Eagle could not approach the offensive capability of an F-22 - it's the electronics that do the work, not the airframe structure.