[jyl]

The price tag for the F22 ($150MM quoted above, that is the unit cost to acquire each additional F22, excludes all the development costs) got me thinking - about cost and attrition.

In the 1970s, my father helped design the Phoenix missile for the F14 Tomcat. I recall that the F14 was very expensive back then. So I looked it up: $38MM initial acquisition cost. The plane entered service 34 years ago. Assuming 4% inflation, $38MM then is $144MM today. So the F14 was every bit as expensive in the mid-1970s as the F22 is today.

We built appx 630 F14s, not counting the 80 or so sold to Iran. 160 were crashed in the 22-odd years before the F14 was retired. Hopefully we will crash F22s at a fraction of that rate, or in 15 years there won't be many left.