There is no problems with the F-22 itself that are unreasonable. The unreasonableness was our USAF leadership insistence that ONLY the F-22 comprise our air-air fleet and their willingness to scrap nearly every other program to try to support their decision.

 

This is kind of funny to watch. Back in the early 90's when the AF wanted the B-2, they had good verifiable reasons, and targets that only the B-2 could handle. Thus they wanted initially 200 of them, later 100. Their logic was; they had 100 B-1's and the B-2 was a B-1 replacement.

Of course congress and the Fighter mafia wanted the money for other things, so they made the AF do an analysis of all the potential targets in the world and see how many B-2's were actually required to handle these targets. The conclusion was 20 B-2s could handle the mission.

Now the AF wants the F-22. They initially wanted around 700, why? Because it was the F-15 replacement and that's how many F-15's we have. Now we all know there are some situations where the F-22 is the only fighter capable of the mission. However, just like the B-2 and B-1, there are plenty of missions where the F-15E is more than capable of completing the F-22/F-15C mission. Boeing would gladly make a few more F-15E's (since it's the newest). They could buy a lot of those for the price of an F-22.

Just a case of history repeating itself.