If you look at it, air superiority fighters are the Mutually Assured Destruction of aviation. An F-16 is more than ample for 99% of the air sorties in the world, it's only when you need your fighter to shoot down someone else's fighter and then you need your fighter to be the best fighter in the world because if you don't have the best fighter in the world than the other guy is going to know he can shoot down all your other fighters and we can't have that so F-22s for everyone.

It's like the F-15. What did it ever get used for? Dropping dumb bombs on Iraqi insurgents. Because as it turns out, the only other thing we have to drop dumb bombs with is the B-52 and using B-52s on Iraq looks way too much like Vietnam

so here we are.

Meanwhile the poor stupid things have outflown their carbon fiber envelopes and all have to be grounded because nobody ever anticipated an air superiority fighter delivering the mail over Baghdad day in day out so we gotta retrofit 'em meanwhile we don't actually need an F-22 for any mission other than shooting down PAK-FAs so we only need a few but our next dumb bomber also had to be an air superiority fighter and a VTOL and carrier-based and make julienne fries

And you start to wonder if maybe we ought to just invest in really fuckin' good surface to air missiles and be done with it.