You should keep on reading till the end then. Wikipedia is knowledgeable enough to tell you exactly what I told you in above post about the actual firing mode. "Fire and forget" means that pilots doesn't have to think about guiding the missile. It doesn't mean that plane's system has the same luxury. In fact, the best known counter action to AIM-120 long range launch is to lock your own fire control radar on the enemy and open fire. This will likely force enemy fighter to flee, and AIM-120 will self destruct without mid life update.

While we don't know the exact specs for obvious reasons, it would take quite a state of art radar to provide accurate fire control data at 200km+. As of typing this, F-22's radar has stated detection range of 100-200km (search radar). Active fire control radar is typically far more limited in range as it has to fire a tight beam and collect far more accurate data. About the only fighter aircraft in existence that can pull off a maneuvre you're describing and is not a dedicated AWACS aircraft with huge radar antenna is MiG-31, which is specifically designed for this task and isn't really a fighter - it's more like an AWACS married to a plane that can launch missiles.

A far more likely scenario is for planes to fire up radars in short bursts one by one to provide mid life updates to one another to confuse the enemy a bit like P-700 missile swarms do, but with interlinked planes taking turns with quick "fire-ups". However this will most likely happen in "danger zone" where enemy can engage as well due to range issues.

There are a LOT of things that retrofits were planned for in case of F-22 program. They were almost all canned because of exploding costs of the program.

That's why it's called top secret technology. It wouldn't be top secret if random people on internet forum such as ourselves would know, would it?

Officially F-22 is designed to be used with AIM-120 AMRAAM which is not capable of what you're describing in any of its current or known planned variants. I assume you have some sort of classified information available, as most missiles known to be used in US Air Force today require data from aircraft they're being fired from for both initial and mid life course updates. Their own radar is typically very short range terminal stage one, designed for terminal guidance purposes.

Dare I ask for a source?

According to news on wired, there's a total of seven aircraft in entire US airfoce that can handle the task. AWACS is incapable of it, they have special retrofitted civilian aircraft with this communications system and standard data link.

Actually the main reason was because our multinationals controlled these just fine until recently, and wars were often used by said multinationals to improve their extraction terms with locals.

And nowadays we cannot really go to open war with China that uses its state companies to do the same thing.

I don't think you know how RADAR works. To get a "lock on" you need radio illlumination. To illuminate, someone, you or someone else needs to radiate energy towards the target. That is what fire control radar does - it fires a thin, concentrated beam of energy at the target in a certain pattern, and tracks the reflections. That is something that F22 cannot use when stealthed. Unless someone else illuminates the target for it, in which case it will need exact data on how illumination was done, or unless target itself radiates energy in which case it can use anti-radiation systems to get a passive lock.

Or clued in politicians with certain agenda diverting attention from things their handlers told them to divert attention from and diverting said attention to things their handlers told them to divert attention to.

I can see this as legit rabidly anti gay politician using this as escape:

"It's the emancipation's fault I got caught having sex with this person dressed as a cowperson. I totally I wanted to order a cowgirl, but I used a politically correct term and got a cowboy instead! It's liberals fault!"

Far more importantly, these are wars fought where people involved actually live. There is a massive disconnect in the Western countries about the entire concept of war, largely driven by mass media.

You see, even modern wars fought by West, like Iraq and Afghanistan are fought on the ground. The main difference is that one party only has army living out the realities of the war, while its civilian population is far away and doesn't have to experience any of the harsh reality of wars. Wars like Iraq and Afghanistan, only the enemy civilians are exposed to the war.

And yes, I know that official propaganda line is that they're not the enemy. It doesn't change the fact that they are treated like enemy civilians of occupied enemy nation, and the fact that they react like such civilians, by widely supporting local guerilla freedom fighters who are fighting asymmetric war against far more powerful invader that has no non-mercenary civilians of its own exposed to the war.

Personally I recommend BBC's Bomb Alley.

A good question is how much radar data from passive only F22 is to a typhoon that has its active radar powered up. F22 essentially cannot fire up its radar and stay stealthy for obvious reasons, so its passive radar only. The major part of data link is sharing targeting data. F22 is designed to feed off allied aircraft's search and fire control radar data for both target acquisition and weapon guidance.

Not having proper communications link is a bitch, that's certain. But F22 is just not designed to be fighting alongside aircraft it needs to talk to in the first place. It's the silent hunter that doesn't really see anything on its own, and just listens to what allied aircraft tells it via datalink or what it can scrounge up from passive sensor data, and then performs interception based on that data. It apparently can also occasionally fire up its own fire control radar in short pulses to minimize risk of detection, but it's simply not intended to be an actively radiating aircraft.

The stupidity here is that it has no standard NATO datalink for cases where it has to perform other roles. It's one of the reasons why F22 hasn't seen any combat to date. There are no pure air superiority missions in the modern world for US airforce, and F22 is pretty incapable of doing anything properly else because of the way it was designed. Lack of common data link is just one of the design choices that hurts that aircraft really badly when it comes to doing anything else.

F22s can talk to each other, but it requires a special data link that is apparently top secret and cannot be given out to allied aircraft.

Africa is still full of old school wars. We just don't see them talked about on news because it's not really in interests of anyone to have voting sheep know that real wars are still fought, and as a result start thinking that wars aren't about sexy hardware and war heroes and supporting your troops (several from safety of at least one ocean away). Not having modern weaponry, good support base far away from conflict and hatred for your neighbour that can only be born from cohabiting for millenia makes for a wonderful pot dish of war.

Those thinking this is "nonsense" should stop for a moment and recall what happened when pilots didn't take smoke warning seriously:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swissair_Flight_111