Why Did America Stop Building F-22 Stealth Fighters? Great power competition has come roaring back, and with it the need for high-end weapon systems. So why not more F-22s? The F-22 stealth fighter program is long dead, but the debate over its legacy rages on. Introduced in 2005, Lockheed Martin’s F-22 Raptor was—and remains—one of the world’s best air superiority fighters. But despite the Raptor’s inarguably impressive performance, the F-22 program encountered no shortage of controversy during its lifespan. In its earliest days, the program was met with consistent political resistance. The complaints ran along two, interrelated fronts: onerous costs and limited usability concerns. Part of the problem is that there is no universally agreed-upon way to calculate the F-22’s price. The most popular metric is the fighter’s “flyaway cost”—namely, the production cost of a single additional model. Those estimates have ranged anywhere from $110 to $180 million during the 2000s. For a sense of scale, the Pentagon and Lockheed Martin have recently negotiated a flyaway cost of $80 million per unit for the F-35 fifth generation fighter. The F-22’s critics prefer to cite the total per-aircraft cost, which encompasses both research and development (R&D) as well as production outlays; that tally comes out to a less flattering $350-380 million.