his tenure commanding the famous 94th
‘Hat in the Ring’ Fighter Squadron (FS).
‘The Raptor has been achieving effects
for a decade; they just weren’t kinetic’, he
adds. ‘We [the Raptor community] are used
as a conventional strategic deterrent, in the
same way as an aircraft carrier. It just wasn’t
widely noticed.’
The last recorded USAF manned fighter
‘kill’ fell to an F-15C in Operation ‘Allied
Force’ in Kosovo in 1999.
‘Lobo’ continues: ‘It’s hard to quantify
a deterrent, but every combatant
commander wants F-22s in their AOR [area
of responsibility] — there simply aren’t
enough Raptors to fill their requirements.’
Few are in any doubt as to the Raptor’s
air-to-air lethality and since service entry in
2005 the squadrons have been deployed
regularly — it comes with the business.
So it was indeed ironic that it was an
air-to-ground strike that proved to be the
F-22’s first tangible event in combat rather
than kicking down the door in a ‘night
one’ LO (low-observable) offensive, silently
dispatching ‘Flankers’ in a highly contested
environment.
In fact, the 27th FS — the 94th’s sister
squadron at Joint Base Langley-Eustis,
Virginia — was nearing the end of a
scheduled rotation to the Middle East
when it made those watershed strikes.
They came on the night of September
23, 2014, as the US and Arab allies struck
at the heart of the so-called Islamic
State (IS) by attacking targets in Syria.
Joint Staff Director of Operations Army
Lt Gen William Mayville said at the
time that the F-22s used ‘GPS-guided
munitions’ to target a facility was located
in northern Syria, about 75 miles from the
Turkish border.
F-22s now maintain a constant deployed
presence within US Central Command
(CENTCOM) and they continue to play
an important role in this theatre. While
deterring any potential air-to-air threat in
the region, the Raptor’s suite of advanced
avionics is a vital node in this complex
operational environment and its ability
to be called upon to support ground
forces with 1,000lb GBU-32 Joint Direct
Attack Munitions (JDAM) or 250lb GBU-39
Small Diameter Bombs (SDB) cannot be
underestimated. What is more, although
Syria’s air defences have remained ‘passive’
and while President al-Assad knows it
would be foolhardy to resist the coalition
forces, the threat of surface-to-air
missiles (SAMs) remains — indeed, some
missions over Syria are still limited to LO
platforms only.RAPTOR^5150-63 1st FW C.indd 51 28/09/2017 14:49