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Tentatively named the F-36 and will cost $6 billion per plane.

Basically when it comes to performance, we have currently reached the plateau we are at roughly 50 years ago. If JFK came back, he said, "I had planes that just went as fast and maneuvered just as well" if he saw what we have today. I admit there have been improvements in electronics and stealth but hey are generally icing on the cake. It does not take much computing power to acquire a target and guide a missile to it, even a computer with a pea brain of 4K or 8K can handle it. We went to the Moon with only a little bit more.

It will become cost prohibitive at some point if we did not cross it already. It's like the old joke that "By 2050, we will only have one fighter where the Air Force uses it on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, the Navy gets it on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday and the Marines have it Sunday." B-) My take, keep the F-22's we have, hopefully we can make more. Break one, make one. I'd go with current designs we've been using from the 1970's onward and keep upgrading them if need be. The F-15 SE, Silent Eagle is one, the F-16, I'd keep along with the F-18's. Joseph Stalin did have a point where quantity has its own quality, we need something low cost like the F-5 to fill in the gaps, the F-20 comes to mind. Countries like India and others are correct in upgrading planes like the MiG-21 to more modern standards and if it was me, I would have kept the F-4 and done the same thing.

I know I might get some upset but I always thought the B-2 bomber was a waste, we could have done much better upgrading and adding to the B-1's and B-52's we have now. I'm a big believer in defense but I do see what Eisenhower warned us about as well.