The F-22 Raptor is widely regarded as a top-tier air-superiority fighter, yet only 187 aircraft were built, and the assembly line shut down more than a decade ago. Restarting it sounds simple in theory, but a tangle of enormous costs, tooling and workforce hurdles, legal restrictions on foreign sales, and broader Defense Department data-rights and intellectual-property constraints (as flagged by the GAO) makes a revival far harder than flipping a switch. Together, these barriers form a reinforcing loop: each one raises the price of overcoming the others, pushing the Raptor further toward permanent retirement.
What Congress Asked the Air Force to Study
When lawmakers began questioning whether the F-22 fleet was large enough to meet future threats, they did not simply take the Pentagon’s word for it. The House Armed Services Committee directed the Air Force to conduct a formal F-22 production restart assessment as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017. That assessment had to answer several pointed questions: how long would it take to reach low-rate production again, what would the timeline and costs look like, and what was the status of the specialized tooling that once supported the line?
The committee also specified that the Air Force had to estimate the cost of procuring 194 additional aircraft, which would bring the total fleet to 381, a number that reflected earlier force-structure goals before budget pressures slashed the buy. Beyond raw dollar figures, the assessment was required to evaluate the impacts of changing buy size and the feasibility of foreign participation. In short, Congress wanted a clear-eyed accounting of every variable that would determine whether restart was realistic or a fiscal fantasy. The scope of those questions alone hinted at the answer: if restarting were straightforward, the committee would not have needed to mandate such a detailed study.
The Export Ban That Kills Economies of Scale
One of the most effective ways to keep a fighter-jet production line affordable is to spread fixed costs across a large number of buyers, including allied nations. The F-35 Lightning II, for example, benefits from orders placed by more than a dozen partner countries, which helps drive down per-unit costs over time. The F-22 has no such advantage. Funding restrictions in Section 8056 prohibit using appropriated funds to approve or license the sale of the F-22A to any foreign government. That ban was rooted in concerns about protecting the Raptor’s stealth and sensor-fusion technologies, but its economic side effect is severe.
Without foreign customers, every dollar of restart cost falls on the U.S. taxpayer alone. The Air Force’s own restart assessment was required to address export and foreign participation precisely because lawmakers recognized this constraint. Even if Congress were to lift the export prohibition tomorrow, years of additional certification, technology-transfer review, and production ramp-up would follow before a single allied order could help amortize costs. The contrast with the F-35 program is instructive: international demand kept Lockheed Martin’s Fort Worth line running at high rates, while the F-22’s Marietta, Georgia, line went cold with no overseas lifeline to sustain it.
Tooling, Talent, and the Cost of Starting Over
Modern fighter aircraft are not assembled from off-the-shelf parts. The F-22 required unique jigs, molds, and composite layup tools, many of which were purpose-built and may no longer be readily available after years of inactivity. The congressional restart assessment explicitly required the Air Force to evaluate tooling availability, a telling inclusion that suggests lawmakers already suspected much of the original equipment was gone. Recreating those tools from scratch would be an industrial project in its own right, demanding years of engineering work before a single new airframe could take shape.
The human capital problem is equally acute. Thousands of skilled technicians and engineers who once built the Raptor have retired, moved to other programs, or left the defense sector entirely. Institutional knowledge about the aircraft’s complex radar-absorbent coatings, titanium machining processes, and avionics integration does not transfer easily through manuals alone. Reconstituting that workforce would require extensive hiring and training, adding both time and cost to any restart timeline. These practical realities help explain why the committee’s mandated assessment had to cover not just price tags but also the sequence of steps needed to reach even low-rate production.
Data Rights and the Vendor Lock Problem
Even if money and tooling could be conjured into existence, a deeper structural issue threatens the Defense Department’s ability to reconstitute any major weapon system. A Government Accountability Office report designated GAO-25-107468 found that the DOD often lacks the intellectual property and data rights it needs to maintain and reproduce its own equipment. That shortfall contributes to vendor lock, cost increases, and repair delays across the department’s portfolio. While the report addresses weapon-system sustainment broadly rather than the F-22 specifically, the pattern it describes would be highly relevant to any attempt to restart a complex aircraft program like the Raptor.
When the government does not own full technical data packages for a platform’s components, it becomes dependent on the original manufacturer for every modification, repair, and potential production decision. That dependency gives contractors significant pricing power and limits the Pentagon’s flexibility to bring in competing suppliers. For a hypothetical F-22 restart, vendor lock would mean that Lockheed Martin and its subcontractors would be the only realistic sources for critical subsystems, eliminating competitive pressure that might otherwise hold costs down. The GAO’s findings suggest this is not an isolated oversight but a systemic weakness in how the department negotiates and manages contracts from the outset.
A Feedback Loop With No Easy Exit
Each of these barriers reinforces the others in ways that make the problem worse over time. The export ban shrinks the potential customer base, which raises per-unit costs, which makes Congress less willing to fund a restart, which means tooling continues to decay and skilled workers drift further from the program. Meanwhile, gaps in data rights ensure that any cost estimate the Air Force produces will carry a large uncertainty premium, because the government cannot independently verify what it would take to reproduce proprietary components. The longer the line stays cold, the wider each of these gaps grows.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
