As early as 2021, that is, after the first official announcement of the JF-30 in China, US officials said that they would speed up the restart of the F-22A production line, and consider lifting the export ban after the restart to provide the fighter to allies in need.

At the time, not many people were making the connection between the two.

It was only a few months later that the first prototype of the JF-30 made its maiden flight and Huaxia's aircraft manufacturing company made its basic design specifications public.

The United States intends to export the F-22A, in fact, it is going to the JF-30.

Quite simply, if you talk about air supremacy, only the F-30A can hold down the JF-22A.

That is, the United States intends to use the F-22A to seize the market for air supremacy fighters, thereby forcing the JF-30 into a blind corner and making it unable to obtain overseas orders.

At the very least, it will be possible to reduce the export volume of JF-30 by a lot.

Of course, when it comes to air supremacy, the JF-30 is definitely no match for the F-22A.

No matter how advanced the JF-30 is, it is no match for a heavy fighter, just as the F-16, no matter how agile, is no match for the F-15 in air combat.

Moreover, the reproduced F-22A, which is definitely not the F-22A.

The exact name should probably be F-22B or F-22C.

Why?

Before restarting the production line, to be precise, before restarting production, the United States will definitely improve the F-22A, using the new technologies born in the past ten years, as well as many new equipment that has been used on the F-35, but not the F-22A, to greatly improve the combat effectiveness of the F-22.

After such changes, the performance of the F-22 will inevitably be greatly improved.

If nothing else, just a lightweight structural design can reduce the weight of the F-22 by 2 to 3 tons, and it will definitely use an engine with more thrust.

It is conservatively estimated that the maneuverability of the F-22B will be more than 30% higher than that of the F-22A.

The JF-30 is just a medium-sized fighter, so even with the latest design ideas and advanced technology, it will certainly not be as good as the F-22B.

Of course, the problems with the F-22B are no less prominent.

What's the problem?

Price.

Japan and Israel have shown strong interest after the U.S. said it would speed up the restart of production lines and consider exports, and South Korea and India are willing to join, but when it comes to money, any good intentions are a big question mark.

Loma's $40 billion offer for restarting the F-22A's production line is still the most conservative offer.

According to the quotation submitted by Loma, because almost all the equipment needs to be repurchased, skilled workers have to be retrained, and there are factors such as inflation, if it can be completed by 2025, 40 billion US dollars is barely enough, if it is delayed after 2025, then the cost of restarting the production line will increase by 5 billion for each year of extension, maybe more.

Anyway, in a word, if you want to restart the production line, you have to get enough money first.

In fact, Loma can't be blamed for being greedy.

At the beginning, after the production of the F-22A was completed, Loma proposed to the U.S. Department of Defense that it would only need to invest about $1 billion a year to keep the production line in place and ensure that it could restart the production line with minimal cost in the future when needed.

According to the report submitted by Loma at the time, if the production was stopped for ten years, then when production resumed after ten years, the total cost of about $15 billion spent on maintaining the production line during the period would be less than $25 billion, which is tens of billions less than dismantling the production line and rebuilding the production line.

In addition, it has the advantage of being able to provide upgrade and improvement services for the US military's F-22A for ten years.

Unfortunately, the US Department of Defense did not take up the proposal of Loma.

Obviously, it is almost impossible to scrape together $40 billion.

The point is, the U.S. Congress still hasn't approved the F-22A to be exported.

Although Japan is eager to purchase the F-22A and is willing to provide part of the cost of resuming the production line, the premise is that the U.S. Congress must lift the export ban and Japanese companies must be involved in the later production work, that is, a production line needs to be sold to Japan.

It is clear that this is unlikely, especially for the sale of production lines.

To put it bluntly, the market demand for the F-22A is not large in the first place, do you need two production lines?

According to the most optimistic estimates, Japan will purchase 120 to 150 aircraft to replace the F-15J and maintain the size of the existing heavy fighters.

As for several other countries, the volume of purchases is even less, up to 40 in Israel and 60 in South Korea.

India?

Let's not talk about how many heavy fighters India needs, how many heavy fighters can India afford?

Let's not forget that India already has more than 200 Su-30MKIs, and they have only been in service for about ten years, far from the time of retirement.

Even in order to counter the J-20 of China, India will buy 100 of them.

In other words, there are more than 300 clear overseas orders.

Counting the US military procurement, after the resumption of production, the production of F-22s will definitely not exceed 600 aircraft, maybe more than 500 aircraft.

The output is so small, not a single production line can be fed!

In addition, if you take into account the cost of restoring the production line and improving the design, based on the production of 600 aircraft, the upfront apportionment price of each aircraft exceeds 100 million US dollars!

You know, the target apportionment price of the F-35A is only 30 million!

It can be said that such a high upfront assessment price can keep the vast majority of countries out.

In fact, even the US military can't afford to play.

Otherwise, the resumption of production of the F-22A has been said for more than ten years, why has it not been started?

Even if production is successfully resumed, what can be done?

It is conservatively estimated that the F-22A will definitely not be sold for less than $500 million after the resumption of production.

What is this concept?

That's the equivalent of 3 or 4 F-35A.

If the JF-30 can be sold at between $120 million and $150 million, it will be only a quarter of it.

Obviously, even if the JF-30 is a medium fighter, its performance is not comparable to that of a heavy fighter, and the numerical advantage of four to one is enough to make up for the gap in performance.

The point is that the JF-30 is also a fourth-generation aircraft, and there is no generation difference compared to the F-22A.

To put it more bluntly, no matter how powerful the F-15C is, its combat efficiency cannot be four times that of the F-16C, or even less than twice that of the F-16C.

It can be seen that even if the F-22A resumes production, it may not be the opponent of the JF-30 when it comes to the price war.

What's more, for many countries that are not rich, they will definitely not be able to afford the F-22A, and it would be very good to be able to buy a few JF-30s.

Obviously, to fight a price war, the F-22A is definitely the wrong choice.

In fact, the United States simply does not have a fighter that can compete with the JF-30, because it is simply not so cheap in terms of price.

Whether it is the F-22A or the F-35A, which has developed an air version, there is a problem that the price cannot be reduced.

From this point of view, the Americans make a fuss about restarting the F-22A production line, but in fact, the gains outweigh the losses, or they fall into the pit dug by China.

Why?

Here, there is a great, even suspicious, crucial relationship with the development unit of the JF-30 and why the JF-30 was launched at this time.