In the ultimate expression of YF-23 what-if-ism, Tyler Rogoway at The War Zone collaborated with digital artist Adam Burch to produce some gorgeous conceptual art depicting an operational “F-23A” version of the YF-23. Rogoway explained that he wanted “to show the world exactly what the F-23A would [have], or at least could have, been.”

Majumdar, Mizokami and Rogoway are professionals. They are my colleagues and, in some cases, my friends. I don’t mean to attack them. In writing about the YF-23, they’re responding to demand as much as they’re creating it.

The mythologizing of the YF-23 isn’t their fault. Rather, it’s the symptom of a dangerous belief that’s widespread and deeply-rooted in American culture, and in military circles in particular.

That technology will save us. And if technology isn’t saving us, it’s because we developed the wrong tech. “Technology shapes thought even as it becomes a substitute for it,” wrote William Astore, a teacher and retired Air Force colonel.

The F-22 is an effective, if outrageously expensive, warplane. The type has flown hundreds if not thousands of combat missions targeting Islamic State militants in Syria. Critics rightly have questioned whether former defense secretary Robert Gates erred when, in 2009, he ended production of the F-22 at just 187 copies — far fewer than the Air Force said it needed.

But the F-22 won’t end terrorism. It won’t stop Russia from exerting its influence along its periphery in order to work out the national trauma of past wars. It won’t stop China’s explosive economic growth and commiserate military expansion. It won’t reverse America’s disastrous invasion of Iraq or bring a tidy end to the nearly 20-year-old U.S. war in Afghanistan.

For all its high-technology, for all the time, energy and money the United States has poured into its development, the F-22 isn’t saving us.

So it perhaps is natural that we’d ask whether the F-22 was the right choice. Maybe, just maybe, the F-23 could’ve succeeded where the F-22 failed. What if the Air Force had picked the other stealth fighter design? What if America were stronger? What if we were safer? What if the whole world were a better place?

“Americans tend to see technology as a panacea,” Astore wrote. “Even deadly technology.”  When natural and historic forces prove, as they so often have done, that tech isn’t a panacea — that the planet will warm, that societies will build walls to keep out the others, that fear more than any other impulse will drive human decisionmaking — Americans blame the tech, and look around for a replacement.

Even if that means looking into the past at a long-grounded prototype airplane and imagining an alternative present where that airplane kept flying … and presumably changed the whole world for the better.

The YF-23 won’t save us.