Here is a riddle the Pentagon wrote by accident and never quite solved. In December 2005 the U.S. Air Force fielded the most fearsome air superiority fighter ever built — the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor — expressly to retire the aging McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle. Two decades on, the Raptor line is cold, scrapped, and effectively unrevivable, while Boeing is still bolting together brand-new Eagles in St. Louis and the Air Force keeps signing the checks.

The jet that was supposed to be replaced has outlived its own replacement on the assembly line. That is not a typo. That is procurement.

It is one of the stranger outcomes in the long history of the fly-offs and programs that shaped US air power, and it happened not because the F-15 out-fought the F-22 — it never could — but because of money, politics, and a set of 1990s assumptions that aged like milk. We have full deep-dives on each jet if you want to go further, but the short version is a lesson in how a superior aircraft can lose the war that actually matters: the budget war.

The Raptor was designed to bury the Eagle

Let us be clear about the original intent. The F-22 grew out of the Advanced Tactical Fighter program the Air Force launched in 1981 with one job: replace the F-15 and F-16 before a new generation of Soviet fighters and surface-to-air missiles rendered them obsolete. Lockheed’s YF-22 beat Northrop’s YF-23 in the ATF competition, the winner was announced in April 1991, and the production Raptor first flew on 7 September 1997. When it formally entered service in December 2005, it did exactly what it was built to do — it began pushing the F-15 out of the Air Force’s frontline air superiority squadrons.

The plan was ambitious and, frankly, magnificent. The Air Force originally wanted around 750 of them to re-equip its entire Eagle fleet. Stealth, supercruise, thrust vectoring, sensor fusion no adversary could match — the Raptor was not an upgrade on the Eagle so much as a different species. On paper, the F-15 was finished. On paper.

How 750 became 187

Then reality, and the accountants, showed up. The 750-jet dream was trimmed to 381, and in 2009 Defense Secretary Robert Gates slammed the lid shut at 187 operational aircraft. The reasoning was brutally of its moment: the Raptor was staggeringly expensive, the Cold War peer threat it was designed to beat had apparently evaporated, and the wars America was actually fighting were counterinsurgencies where a supersonic stealth interceptor was of limited use. Why keep buying silver bullets when nobody could see the werewolf?

The numbers backed the axe. By the time the line wound down, the total F-22 program cost was estimated at roughly $67 billion — on the order of $360 million per aircraft when you spread development across the fleet. Meanwhile the cheaper, more flexible, exportable F-35 Lightning II was coming up fast to become the mass-produced stealth fighter the F-22 never would be. Just 195 Raptors were ever built; the last was delivered in 2012. It remains the finest air superiority fighter on Earth and one of the rarest.

The line you cannot switch back on

Here is where the paradox locks into place. There was one other quiet decision that doomed the Raptor to scarcity: it was never allowed out of the house. U.S. law has prohibited the export of the F-22 to any foreign government since 1998, to protect its stealth secrets. No allied orders, no economies of scale, no export line humming along to keep the tooling warm. Just one closed production run for one customer — and when that customer stopped buying, the whole enterprise simply switched off.

And you cannot un-switch it cheaply. When Congress asked the Air Force in 2016 to price a restart, the 2017 answer was sobering: roughly $50 billion to build 194 more Raptors, at something like $206–216 million each, including nearly $10 billion just to stand the line back up. The tooling had been scrapped or repurposed, the specialized supplier base scattered, the clearances lapsed. The Air Force declared it cost-prohibitive and walked away. The Raptor fleet is frozen at around 186 airframes, and that is where it will stay.

Why the Eagle simply refused to die

Now flip the coin. While the Raptor was being capped and its line dismantled, the humble F-15 — a design that first flew in 1972 — kept quietly doing the one thing the Raptor could not: it kept selling. Boeing never let the Eagle line go cold, because export customers kept it alive. Saudi Arabia bought the advanced F-15SA, which first flew in 2013; Qatar followed with the F-15QA. That living, breathing production line is precisely what made the next trick possible.

Facing a looming fighter shortfall as its 1980s F-15C/Ds cracked from structural fatigue — and with restarting the Raptor off the table — the Air Force did the pragmatic thing. It ordered a brand-new Eagle. The F-15EX Eagle II, built on that same hot export line to keep costs and delays down, made its maiden flight in February 2021, was christened Eagle II that April, and entered operational service in July 2024. It is not stealthy and nobody pretends otherwise. But it is fast, it carries an enormous load of weapons, it is comparatively affordable, and — crucially — you are allowed to sell it.

The clincher arrived in the budget books. The Air Force’s planned Eagle II fleet grew to 129 jets in the FY2026 request, and then the FY2027 plan roughly doubled it to around 267 aircraft. Read that again. The service is now planning to buy more new F-15s than it ever managed to buy F-22s — of the very aircraft the Raptor was created to render extinct.

The moral of the story

None of this means the F-15 won on merit. Put an EX and a Raptor in the same sky in a fair fight and the smart money never leaves the stealth jet. The F-15EX is a complement to the F-22 and F-35, not their equal — a shooter and a missile truck that lets the stealth fighters do the jobs only they can do.

But production lines do not care about dogfights. They care about cost, exportability, and political will, and on all three counts the Eagle quietly ran the table. The Raptor was too expensive, too secret to sell, and too perfectly optimized for a threat the 1990s had decided was gone. The Eagle was cheap enough, flexible enough, and open enough to keep finding buyers for half a century. So the jet built to be retired is rolling off the line brand new in the 2020s, and the jet built to replace it is a closed museum with 186 exhibits. In the great competitions that shape air power, the best aircraft does not always win. Sometimes the one you are still allowed to build does.

Sources: Wikipedia (Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor; Boeing F-15EX Eagle II); Air & Space Forces Magazine; The War Zone; Military.com; U.S. Air Force 2017 report to Congress on F-22 production restart.