It Would Have Cost $50,000,000,000 To Restart the F-22 Raptor ‘Factory’ and $259,000,000 Per Fighter: That Meant No More Can Ever Be Build

I saw the debate unfold ten years ago: Restarting production and procuring 194 additional Raptors would have cost approximately $50 billion in 2016 dollars: about $9.9 billion in non-recurring startup costs before the first new jet existed, and roughly $40.4 billion for the aircraft themselves. Averaged across the whole buy, each new Raptor came to about $259 million, at a time when an F-35A cost…