Easternization: Asia's Rise and America's Decline From Obama to Trump and Beyond

by Gideon Rachman

The expense of the American military program is illustrated by the U.S. Air Force’s F-22 Raptor fighter, which proved so expensive to produce—at a “through-life cost” of $670 million a plane—that only 182 of them were bought, as opposed to the original plan to purchase some 650. The result was to significantly reduce America’s military capacities. As Mark Urban, the BBC’s defense correspondent, notes, “If America held back some squadrons for home defense, it is unlikely that it could deploy more than a few dozen Raptors in any confrontation with China, with its hundreds of fighter jets.”18 The F-22 was not an isolated example. The new B-2 Stealth bomber—the most modern bomber plane the United States possesses—is “so colossally expensive to procure that at the time it was calculated that an aircraft of the same weight made of solid gold would have been cheaper.”19 As a result, America has been able to build only nineteen B-2s, of which just six are likely to be deployable on any given day.