Modern air combat has changed more in the last decade than at any point since the Cold War. Fifth-generation stealth fighters have moved from experimental programs to operational reality, while the emergence of long-range sensors, networked warfare, and unmanned systems has begun to reshape what “air superiority” even means.

This article examines five fighter jets that shaped air combat between roughly 2015 and 2025: the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II, the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor, the Dassault Rafale, the Sukhoi Su-35 Flanker, and the Chengdu J-20 Mighty Dragon. Each of them is still highly capable today, but at the same time illustrates a different form of obsolescence already emerging, whether technological, operational, industrial, or strategic, as air forces prepare for the next generation of conflict.

Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II

The Fighter Jet That Defined The Decade

Credit: Antonio Di Trapani

The Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II is the most consequential fighter jet program of the past decade by virtually any measure. Accumulating approximately 20,000 combat hours in 2025 alone, while the platform’s capabilities are still actively maturing, it is widely regarded as the most advanced operational fighter jet in the world by a considerable margin, integrating stealth, sensor fusion, and real-time battlefield data sharing in ways that 4.5-generation competitors simply cannot replicate at scale.

The F-35’s defining contribution is information dominance. Its ability to fuse data from its own sensors, off-board platforms, and allied aircraft into a single coherent tactical picture transforms it from a fighter into a flying battle management node. No other production aircraft in any air force’s inventory does this at the same level. That capability explains why the F-35 is currently the most important fighter jet in the USAF, as documented by Simple Flying, cementing the F-35 as the strategic backbone of Western airpower for a generation. Its three variants — the conventional A model, carrier-capable C, and short takeoff/vertical landing B — also make it uniquely flexible across service branches and alliance structures.

However, the decade the F-35 defined is slowly coming to an end. Boeing‘s F-47, the sixth-generation air dominance fighter selected under the NGAD program in March 2025, is already in active production, and according to Defense News, the United States Air Force is targeting a first flight in 2028 and initial operational capability expected by approximately 2029. When in service, it will push the F-35 into a supporting “quarterback” role: passing targeting data from contested airspace to sixth-generation, uncrewed platforms, taking the most demanding missions in the highest-threat environments.

The F-35 will remain a frontline asset well into the 2030s and beyond, but its tenure as the apex platform in the USAarsenal will end before the decade does — a remarkable statement about how quickly the air combat landscape continues to evolve.

Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor

Replaced By Concept, Not Performance

Credit: Antonio Di Trapani

In 2026, the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor remains the undisputed benchmark of air dominance. No fighter currently in operational service matches its combination of all-aspect low-observability, supercruise capability, extreme three-dimensional maneuverability, and sensor fusion. It is the aircraft against which every other air superiority platform — including the J-20, the Su-57, and the Eurofighter Typhoon— is routinely and unfavorably compared. That status, unchanged after more than two decades of service, is itself a remarkable achievement.

But the Raptor defines obsolescence in its most instructive form: a generational capability that was canceled before it could fulfill its strategic purpose. Capped at just 187 airframes, far below the 381 the United States Air Force calculated it actually needed to maintain genuine air dominance across its global commitments, the F-22 fleet has always been spread thin, with individual aircraft carrying operational tempo burdens that accelerate wear and complicate maintenance cycles.

An $8 billion “Raptor 2.0” modernization program now underway, covering avionics, sensors, and electronic warfare capabilities, is significant evidence that the USAF has no near-term replacement ready at scale to absorb the air superiority mission in the interim.

The Raptor’s greatest challenge is no longer technological but economic. The fleet’s small size has created a cycle of rising sustainment costs, declining readiness, and difficult modernization choices. As previously examined by Simple Flying, 32 aircraft in the F-22 fleet are non-combat Block 20 aircraft primarily used for pilot training, yet retiring them would create a serious training shortfall because they currently absorb the vast majority of basic F-22 instruction.

At the same time, upgrading those aircraft to combat standards would require billions of dollars for a fleet that remains numerically limited. The result is a force caught between competing priorities: preserving frontline combat capacity, maintaining pilot proficiency, and funding the next generation of air dominance programs. The F-22 has no rivals in the air, but sustaining that advantage is becoming increasingly expensive and operationally complex.

The Raptor’s legacy is therefore double-edged. It defined air superiority for an entire decade while simultaneously exposing the risks of building too few examples of a generational platform. The aircraft remains the standard by which every rival fighter is measured, but its small fleet, high operating costs, and training burdens have made it a case study in how even the world’s most capable fighter can become strategically constrained by economics and force structure rather than combat performance.

Dassault Rafale

The Peak Of The 4.5 Generation

Credit: Antonio Di Trapani

The Dassault Rafale is the most combat-proven Western non-stealth fighter of the last decade, having employed virtually every weapon in its inventory under live operational conditions across Libya, Mali, Syria, and Iraq. It is also the only Western fighter certified to carry both conventional precision munitions and nuclear weapons, a unique status that underpins France’s independent nuclear deterrent and has proved a powerful export argument across India, Greece, Egypt, the UAE, Indonesia, and beyond, making it the defining non-US fighter success story of the era.

Its F4 standard, entering service from 2024, adds the MICA NG air-to-air missile, significantly enhanced networking architecture, full Meteor beyond-visual-range missile integration, and an upgraded SPECTRA electronic warfare suite. By every metric relevant to 4.5-generation fighters, the Rafale sits firmly at the top of the class, and the pace of its F4 upgrades suggests Dassault intends to keep it there for years to come.

However, its operational reputation is increasingly being interpreted through the lens of how modern air combat actually unfolds, instead of analyzing the aircraft performance in isolation. As highlighted in a Key Aero analysis of recent India–Pakistan air combat reporting, engagements involving Rafale-operated forces in 2025 were not decided in visual-range maneuvering or platform-on-platform comparison, but in the earlier stages of detection, identification, and long-range missile employment. The article notes that the decisive variables were “the integration of sensors, data links, and beyond-visual-range weapon employment,” rather than any single aircraft’s aerodynamic performance alone.

Its fundamental obsolescence is therefore structural, not technological. Fourth and 4.5-generation designs can close performance gaps through radar upgrades and electronic warfare improvements, but they lack all-aspect stealth and internal weapons bays, leaving them materially exposed in first-strike scenarios against true stealth opponents equipped with modern beyond-visual-range missiles. In a peer-adversary environment, radar cross-section becomes a defining limiting factor regardless of software maturity.

FCAS, the Franco-German-Spanish program intended to eventually succeed the Rafale, faces serious industrial disputes, competing national priorities, and a political process that moves slowly — carrying no confirmed service entry before 2040. That timeline means the Rafale will be asked to remain competitive in a threat environment its fundamental airframe architecture was not designed to meet, relying on incremental upgrades to compensate for a structural stealth deficit that upgrades alone cannot fully resolve.

Sukhoi Su-35 Flanker

The Fighter That Dominated Russian Exports For A Decade

Credit: Antonio Di Trapani

For most of the last decade, the Su-35S was Russia’s flagship export fighter and its most advanced operational platform, regularly promoted as a direct rival to the F-22 in manufacturer materials and capable of attracting genuine export interest from China, Egypt, and some other countries of the Global South. Within Russia’s domestic context, it represented the ceiling of what its aerospace-industrial base could consistently produce at volume, and it offered real capability in several specific areas — supermaneuverability, raw radar output, and combat range among them.

The war in Ukraine has provided a more rigorous operational evaluation than any exercise or export demonstration. The conflict has highlighted how platform capability is inseparable from system-of-systems integration: Russia’s broader air warfare system lacks the advanced data links, persistent off-board sensing, and space-based cueing networks that NATO air forces treat as standard infrastructure. The result has been that individual aircraft performance, however capable on paper, operates in a significant tactical information deficit relative to Western equivalents.

The Sukhoi Su-57 Felon, intended as the Su-35’s successor in the fifth generation fighter role, has not matured into a credible large-scale operational program. It faces persistent challenges in production volume, financial backing, and the precision industrial support needed to sustain a modern stealth aircraft fleet at scale, leaving the Su-35 as the primary reference point for Russian tactical airpower even as the program’s broader limitations have become considerably more widely understood. For export customers and strategic planners alike, the Su-35’s decade of prominence has ended on a note of significant qualification.

Chengdu J-20 Mighty Dragon

The Jet Fighter That Defined China’s Rise

Credit: Shutterstock

The J-20 carries strategic significance that goes well beyond its individual performance specifications. Its entry into service — and the delivery of approximately 300 airframes based on serial number analysis by 2025, as reported by The Aviationist — marked China’s definitive demonstration that it had closed the stealth fighter technology gap with the United States at production scale. No nation outside the US had previously achieved genuine fifth-generation output in numbers sufficient to shape real operational planning. That strategic reality, more than any individual performance metric, is the J-20’s enduring contribution to the past decade of air power competition.

The economies of scale the program achieved matter enormously in strategic terms. While Russia’s Su-57 program has struggled to reach single-digit annual production volumes, China’s indigenous aerospace-industrial base has sustained a fifth-generation fleet large enough to require serious operational planning by rival air forces across the Indo-Pacific.

As reported by the South China Morning Post, the J-20’s WS-15 engine upgrade has also addressed one of the program’s most persistent criticisms, improving supercruise performance and overall propulsion reliability, removing a key argument used to discount the platform’s long-term competitiveness and reinforcing China’s credentials as a self-sufficient advanced aviation power. Yet China is already looking well past it.

The Shenyang J-35, a carrier-capable fifth-generation fighter, is maturing toward operational service, while China’s sixth-generation program produced prototype aircraft observed in flight tests in late 2024, featuring tailless configurations and design characteristics, suggesting Beijing is investing seriously in whatever follows the J-20’s generation entirely. In compressed form, China is managing the same fifth-to-sixth-generation transition the US Air Force is navigating with the F-47 — a striking parallel that would have seemed implausible a decade ago.