February 22
17:40
2016
The jets, some of the most sophisticated and priciest stealth fighter planes ever built, are not sitting out the Air Force’s latest aerial operations in Iraq and Syria, as they did in previous campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. Since their maiden mission in September 2014, F-22s have been “operating regularly” in the anti-ISIS campaign and have dropped more than 200 bombs on targets in 150 sorties, according to the Air Force. But these missions are not the ones for which the air-to-air combat specialist F-22 was initially designed, and the Air Force acknowledges that the pricey planes don’t necessarily need to be the ones conducting them.
