Since the first Gulf War in 1991, Western air power has reigned supreme over every battlefield on which the US and its allies have chosen to fight. The USAF’s F-22 Raptor and, to a lesser extent, the Euro-canard fighters – despite being slow to reach maturity, extremely expensive and fielded in far smaller numbers than originally envisioned – have maintained a lead in conventional air-superiority terms over the best that Russia and China can field in their respective air forces and on the international export market.