Rumsfeld is a cunning bastard. Of all the people Bush has put in office, Rumsfeld is the only one I respect. I don't much like him, but I respect him. I think the whole F-22 as a multipurpose fighter/tactical/bomber thing is a cunning attempt to kill the program.

The program is too big and has been running too long to kill unless it is an obvious failure. There are billions of dollars on the line, and a lot of companies and Congressmen that want that money.

But no plane can be good at everything, and equiping it to do everything runs the price up and lowers performance. The end result is that Rumsfield can turn the project into a massive failure so he can cancel the entire thing. An F-22 already costs on the order of 3 times as much as an F-15 and that cost will only go up as the plane is equiped for bomber roles.

If he is really cunning he will use this as an excuse to put the F-22 back into development. The F-22 has the potential to be a great interceptor, but it obviously still needs a lot of work. Make it a 'concession' move to Lockheed-Martin, which can't probably can't afford to the have the program killed entirly. Then they can take another decade finishing the F-22 and roll it out around 2010.

Jay