Lauren Thompson, an analyst at the Lexington Institute, was the first to speak on this issue on March 22, 2011. According to him, the most advanced American combat aircraft is simply not designed to perform military tasks similar to those that were implemented in Libya at the very beginning of the Odyssey. Recall that the main purpose of the first stage of the military operation was to ensure a no-fly zone over the territory of the African state, for which it was necessary to disable all air defense systems that were under the control of troops loyal to Muammar Gaddafi. At the same time, the confrontation of Libyan aviation was not taken into account (and indeed, since the beginning of the Odyssey, no Libyan aircraft has been seen in the air). Thompson noted that the F-22 is not physically designed to strike ground targets. The aircraft can be armed with two adjustable 450-kilogram JDAM bombs, which are capable, however, of hitting stationary, but not moving targets. In addition, as it turned out, the F-22 radar is not able to map the terrain, as the synthetic aperture radar does, which means it cannot independently select ground targets. This actually means that if the F-22 in its current form is used to bomb any objects, information about the targets will be loaded into the aircraft's on-board computer even before takeoff.

However, the authority of the F-22 was undermined much earlier. So, in February 2010, the US Air Force suspended the flights of all Raptors for a while - it turned out that the body of the aircraft is unstable to moisture and easily corrodes. Corrosion on fighters has been detected before, but in this case it turned out that the system for removing excess moisture from the aircraft's lantern is structurally bad and does not cope with its task. As a result, rust appeared on some elements of the aircraft's lantern and even inside the cockpit, and the corrosion that appeared could cause problems with the ejection system.

In the same year, former Lockheed Martin engineer Darrol Olsen accused the American company of creating a defective F-22. According to Olsen, several extra layers of coating were applied to the F-22 aircraft so that the fighter could pass all the necessary radar tests. The marriage lies in the fact that the radio-absorbing coating of the F-22 is easily erased from the fuselage under the influence of water, oil or fuel. Lockheed Martin rejected Olsen's accusations, saying that a stable and high-quality radio-absorbing coating is used in the production of the aircraft.