Boy the Aussies weren't kidding when they said that they wanted the F-22, were they?

DEFENCE Minister Joel Fitzgibbon will step up pressure on the US to overturn its ban on the sale of the F-22 Raptor fighter, amid growing federal government concern about delays and cost increases affecting the Joint Strike Fighter program.

Mr Fitzgibbon said yesterday he intended to push US Defence Secretary Robert Gates to allow the sale of the world's most advanced operational stealth fighter to Australia at next month's NATO conference in Bucharest.

"Ongoing question marks over the delivery schedule of the JSF reinforces the need we have to look at other '5th Generation' aircraft such as the F-22 Raptor," he said.

This really is in our best interest, and the same can be said for Japan. It keeps the Raptor production line rolling on a foreign military's dime, and helps strengthen our position in the increasingly important Far East. Still, I'd like to see any Aussie/Japanese proposal to purchase F-22s include some strict language on how--exactly--they intend to protect the Raptor's super classified schematics from the highly competent Russian and Chinese intelligence services. If either get their grubby little paws on something as mundane as the stealth material used to construct the bird, it could be used against us in new iterations of Sino-Russian fighter jets. The only other workaround is someone (not us) spending billions to create a less stealthy version for export, but that, of course, would offset much of the value of exporting the bird in the first place.