Maj. Dan "Rock" Dickinson, F-22 Raptor Demonstration Team pilot from Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Va., does a high speed pass during Arctic Thunder Open House 2016 at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, July 30, 2016. The team is comprised of an F-22 demonstration pilot and 12 other members including crew chiefs and avionics specialists. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Sheila deVera)
Defense Tech: F-22 Was ‘Too Provocative’ to Send to Mideast: US Air Force
The F-35A will deploy around the world much sooner than the Air Force‘s other fifth-generation fighter did after achieving initial operational capability, the commander of Air Combat Command said Tuesday.
Air Force Gen. Herbert “Hawk” Carlisle, who announced to reporters at the Pentagon that the F-35A had achieved the IOC milestone, said while the F-22 Raptor did not see its first operational deployment until 2014, a decade after it reached IOC, the F-35 would not face the same obstacles.
“On a couple of occasions, we were going to send [the F-22] to different theaters and we didn’t because there were at least a group of people who thought that it was too provocative to send,” he said. “It was less about us not being able to or at least not wanting to; it was more about the message. … We didn’t send it to the Middle East, frankly because it was considered to be a provocative move to send the only 5th-generation fighter in the world to that environment.”
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WNU Editor: Provocative to who?
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