Toward future dogfights

The recent Atlantic piece on the F-22 was intended, I think, to raise worries about what would happen if production of the futuristic fighter is not continued. It's a difficult call, balancing the exigencies of future wars against those of present ones. But as the Pentagon moves to shut the line down, I am unimpressed by this bit of reasoning from Fareed Zakaria:

The F-22 has a price tag of over $350 million per jet. The F-22 was built to fight enemy jets. But when was the last time a U.S. pilot was involved in a dogfight?

The paucity of recent dogfights, of course, is in part because no other nation wants to go up against a qualitatively superior plane such as the F-22. That calculus is likely to change as the F-22 becomes a dwindling resource. Unthinking extrapolation from past to future is poor punditry.