It's an alarming headline: "U.S. F-22s came face-to-face with Russia's top fighter near Alaska and were at a major disadvantage."

After all, that Business Insider title would make you think that the U.S. F-22 air superiority fighter is highly vulnerable to the Russian Su-35 fighter in air combat. And were that true, it would also mean the U.S. has lost the keystone of its longstanding combined arms war-fighting doctrine: establishing air superiority in the battlespace. Fortunately, the headline is disingenuous. Absent exposure to a hardened web of S-400 air defense systems and a lot of Russian luck, F-22 would annihilate the Su-35 in conflict.

The key problem with Alex Lockie's article is its false premise that "with today's rules of engagement, the F-22's huge advantages in stealth mean little." This is because, he says, "During an intercept, a jet pulls up next to the plane that has invaded its airspace and tells the plane [to depart]."

Yes, in a straight-up intercept, the F-22 would lose its primary advantage: killing an adversary before said adversary can even see it. But that's just 10 percent of the relevant detail here.

First off, air intercepts are very rarely conducted with one aircraft. Moreover, were an F-22 flight of two more aircraft anticipating a hostile interdiction rather than a simple visual identification, one aircraft would radio the Russians or would conduct a visual intercept from a dominant position that allowed for rapid maneuver superiority. The other F-22 would shadow its wingman tens of miles away undetected by the Su-35. That combination would allow the second F-22 to engage and kill the Su-35 from range within a matter of a few minutes if a dogfight occurred. Even then, the first F-22 would be able to survive a short-term dogfight in light of the Su-35's likely inability to target the F-22 with its missiles at short range, and the F-22's better pilot (US Air Force pilots outmatch Russian counterparts). As it was surviving, the first F-22 would be feeding detailed targeting data (network-centric warfare is critical to the F-22's superiority) back to the second F-22, thus making the latter's missile targeting more effective.

Still, the real problem for Russia here is that the only reason they would have a good war-fighting reason to use the Su-35 operationally against U.S. territory would be in order to escort their bombers. One problem? Those Russian bombers and their escorts could be targeted and destroyed by the F-22s long before the F-22s were even detected. That's the beauty of the F-22: deterring enemy incursion by requiring such a significant cost-benefit outlay as to render an attempted incursion an act of tactical insanity. And remember, the F-22 has multiple targeting capabilities. The Russians would struggle to flood the zone.

So don't worry. The F-22 remains in very strong shape. The greater concern for U.S. military superiority is the Chinese and Russian advance in ground-based air defense and stand-off missile capabilities.