0300 hours. The Pacific. The missiles are not aimed at Taiwan. They are aimed at Kadena, Andersen, Misawa and Elmendorf — the forward airfields every F-22 Raptor in the Pacific has to stage through. By the time a Raptor gets airborne, half its squadron is burning in a hangar. This is the briefing Washington does not publish. The F-22 Raptor is still the best fighter ever built. Frontal radar cross-section the size of a marble — one ten-thousandth of a square metre, measured. Mach 1.5 sustained supercruise. Thrust-vector nozzles. Twenty-one years on, no aircraft on Earth has matched it in the head-to-head duel. If a Raptor finds your aircraft, you are already dead. That is not the war it is flying. The war it is flying begins with its hangar on fire. This Iron Command assessment lays out the intelligence picture as it stands in 2026. The PL-17 — China’s 400-kilometre air-to-air missile, o

Source: F – 22 vs J – 20: America’s 187 – Plane Problem