The American F-22 Raptor is almost certainly the best air-superiority fighter in the world. It’s fast, agile, and very nearly invisible. It’s so effective that we won’t even sell them to our closest allies, which is more than can be said for the F-35. The only downside about the F-22 is that we don’t have more of them, and production has been shut down; we’re going to have to place our hopes in this area on the developing F-47.
For now, though, the F-22 is at the top of the heap – and we learned on Wednesday that a dozen F-22s have arrived in Israel.
A dozen American F-22 Raptor fighter jets, representing more than $4 billion of military spending, have arrived at an Israeli Air Force base amid a massive buildup of US military hardware in the Middle East.
The planes, widely considered the best in the world due to their speed and stealth, arrived in the Jewish state Tuesday evening as tensions with Iran soar, the Jerusalem Post reported.
Designed by Lockheed Martin, the F-22s cost around $350 million each, and are so vital to the US that the Pentagon has forbidden their sale or license to any foreign government.
The dozen jets were previously stationed at the RAF Lakenheath base in southern England and were seen taking off earlier on Tuesday, the Times of Israel reported.
This is part of a buildup of military assets in the Middle East; one might even call it a big, beautiful buildup.
F-22 and F-35 fighter jets, along with B-2 bombers, were used in June 2025’s Operation Midnight Hammer, in which the US struck three Iranian nuclear sites.
More than 300 US military aircraft are currently deployed across the Middle East, according to open-source intelligence monitoring and publicly available flight data.
The jets arrived just days after the world’s largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, arrived on Israel’s coast ahead of Thursday’s scheduled nuclear talks between the US and Iran in Geneva, Switzerland.
The F-22, of all these assets, is one we don’t deploy lightly.
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For one thing, it’s an expensive aircraft to operate. The Raptor requires not only expensive and highly proficient ground crews to maintain its cutting-edge systems, but it also requires between 10 and 30 man-hours of maintenance – claims vary – for each hour of flight. But when you need the best, well, the Raptor is the best, and if it’s used in the skies over some Middle Eastern nation, like, oh, say, Iran – well, it will be facing some reassembled hangar-queen examples of fighters that were pretty hot stuff around the time of the Vietnam War.
The United States military has always operated on the theory that no war ever was lost because the losing side had too much ammo or too many shooters. The United States Air Force puts its best shooters in this best of all fighter aircraft, and now these aircraft are poised in a place where they can transit to Iran pretty quickly.
Negotiations with Iran are still ongoing. But the one thing we can count on regarding the current regime in Tehran is that they won’t deal in good faith. Things are sure looking like President Trump intends, if we have to go in, to go in big. If I were in Iran’s Supreme Leader’s sandals right now, I’d be making sure my life-insurance policy was paid up.
Stay tuned. More and more, it looks like things might get spicy in the skies over Iran.
Editor’s Note: With President Trump back in the White House, the state of our Union is strong once again.
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