Letters: What value are costly jet programs?

Re “F-22’s rough ride,” June 16

While spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the F-22 and the F-35 programs, we still have weapons systems that, despite their sophisticated schemes to avoid radar or thermally guided threats, are still vulnerable to conventional anti-aircraft shells, other ballistic ordnance and even accidental damage.

What missions might justify risking such costly weapons and their crews? What might they achieve that could justify their loss?

Even if we make the large assumption that we can get these aircraft to perform as designed, they just might be too expensive to hazard.

Donald J. Loundy

Simi Valley

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