Adios F/A-22?

[Mislovrit]

India is a tentative ally, but they are nowhere near as chummy with us as Pakistan. We have always backed Pakistan, and now Pakistan is more important to us than ever. In case you haven't noticed Pakistan and India are mortal enemies. India is one major incident away from becoming a real adversary.

(P.S. When we were flying over Afghanistan from the North Arabian Gulf, Indian intervention was REAL worry)

All things considered India is a very stable ally for the USA unlike Pakistan who's currently an tenous(sp) ally under serious duress by both the U.S. and Islamic milliants.

[legios]

The US has always supported Pakistan...well at least since the Reagan years. The US propped up Pakistan because it feared that the USSR would move into Pakistan after it finished Afghanistan. The fear was that the USSR was expanding south to gain a warm weather sea port. Since then, US/Pakistan ties have generally been strong while US/India times have been strained at times. The only time in the last 20+ years or so when the US/Pakistan ties were not that strong is when the US placed economic embargoes on both India and Pakistan for their nuclear shows of force in the late 90's. Of course, even then the US was generally supportive of Pakistan over India.

[Shin Densetsu Kai 7.0]

ID have to saay india is more of a threat. They buy mostly soviet made aircraft so if anything, they ar emore likely to jummp ship and side with russia on some anti us stuff. Pakistan is defly more of an ally. Likle legios said they have always been backed by the US and not to mention most of their aircraft are either bought from the british or US. I doubt musharraf would give into the militants. He i more trustworthy than the ayatollah komeini.

anyhoo I also believe legios is right in reference to the tornadoes. LIke the thud in vietnam, its possible they did have the highest shootdown ratio. Why? They were the ones who had to cater the runways by zooming str8 across a run way and dropping the catering runway buster munitions. to do this you have to be low and fast. low and fast=not much maniueverability or altitude to dodge SAMs.

i always thought tornadoes and thuds were cool though since they are heavy laden multirole demons from hell in the air.

[SupremeKaioshin]

Low flying aircraft don't do well in actual conflicts.  The biggest reason is that great forward looking terrain avoidance radar tends to let people know you're coming.  I don't have the exact figurers, but I think that Tornadoes had the highest loss/sortie ratio in the 1st Gulf War.  In addition, flying low subjects you to all sorts of ground fire.

Don't know if it's true or not, but I read somewhere about British pilots referring to Tornados as 'the Flying Coffin'.

Graham

yup...took heavy losses in Desert Storm along with the 15E's

[ewilen]

1. Cope India 2004 For which a great number of other articles and discussions can be found online. Now, the wrong conclusion is that India's aircraft are superior to American F-15C's, since whatever leaks out is likely to be heavily colored by public relations considerations. The right conclusion is that you don't engage in this sort of exercise with a potential adversary.

I also wonder how worried we could have been about India during Enduring Freedom, when according to the State Department, India "offered the United States the use of its territory for staging any military operations in Afghanistan." (Source: http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/6207.pdf )

2. On the question of how long it will take to develop a system to fill the role of the F/A-22...

Robot plane drops bomb in successful test

At $10-$15 million each, these things are looking like a bargain compared to escorting high explosive into enemy territory with human-piloted aircraft.

More on the X-45 here (look at the X-47, too) and here.

How long before these things get AMRAAMs, incorporate full-on stealth, IRST and/or radar, and are all networked with AWACS and JSTARS?

3. Can anyone comment on the effect of advances in noncooperative target recognition (NCTR) and LPI radar on the future of within visual range combat--and therefore the relative importance of avionics vs. flight performance?

[Shin Densetsu Kai 7.0]

meh not UAVS again! like isamu and such weere thinking iun macross plus

"damn you bastard GHOST drone planes! advanced variable fighter this!"

and then guld dies.

the ai of a drone can nevber compare to a full fledged combat pilot.

[Mislovrit]

ID have to saay india is more of a threat. They buy mostly soviet made aircraft so if anything, they ar emore likely to jummp ship and side with russia on some anti us stuff. Pakistan is defly more of an ally. Likle legios said they have always been backed by the US and not to mention most of their aircraft are either bought from the british or US. I doubt musharraf would give into the militants.

As long as Musharraf is alive and in charge Pakistan will continue to be an U.S. ally. But once he gone better expect to see CoW forces fighting Pakistani islamic milliants inside Pakistan.

India along with Russia and the U.S. have will partnering up to keep China in check. Especially when China is eyeballing most of it's neighbor's real estate including Russia and India.

[Graham]

yup...took heavy losses in Desert Storm along with the 15E's

IIRC, the RAF lost 6 Tornado GR1(?) in Desert Storm.

Graham

[Mislovrit]

meh not UAVS again! like isamu and such weere thinking iun macross plus

"damn you bastard GHOST drone planes! advanced variable fighter this!"

and then guld dies.

the ai of a drone can nevber compare to a full fledged combat pilot.

Imho once UAVs become the main fighters, expect to see a lot of Spec-ops targetting the techs and the command facilities running and monitoring the UAVs.

[Shin Densetsu Kai 7.0]

eww mai fighters? no way! humanity must not rely on UAVs to do the major missions! always possibility someone might turn rogue and program those things against us.

[Mislovrit]

Found these so far on DS Coalition Aircraft Losses but information is scant on this subject.

http://www.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet.asp?fsID=171

http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Aug2000/n0...0_20008088.html

[SupremeKaioshin]

Hmmm...I thought for sure the B-1B Excalibur took part in DS.

[Graham]

Here's some good info on the Tornado GR1 losses during Desert Storm: -

http://www.raf.mod.uk/gulf/loss.html

And some good basics on the air campaign: -

http://www.cdi.org/iraq/gulf-war-I.cfm

Graham

[David Hingtgen]

Just a note: most Desert Storm Tornado strike missions flew with terrain-following radar turned off. Pure skill, low-altitude high-speed flying. (Very few planes can do that as well as a Tornado).

[J A Dare]

More on the X-45 here (look at the X-47, too) and  here.

I thought that looked familiar....

PEGASUS: UCAVS LOOK SEAWARD

Northrop Grumman’s X-47 UCAV may evolve into the first pilotless combat plane to take off and land on aircraft carriers.

Where's the pilot?! uhhh...captain, there is no pilot.

[Graham]

That's one ugly plane IMO.

Is it real or a Photochop job?

Graham

[Graham]

Personally, I doubt that UAVs/UCAVs will ever completely replace manned aircraft in every combat role.

I'm only a layman on this stuff, but there are a few things that concern me about UAVs: -

• The time lag it takes for the control signal to travel from the operator in his control room to the UAV. Even though it is very short, I would guess that there is still going to be some delay in response, compared to a pilot who is actually 'there'.
  
• Reduced situational awareness. I doubt the UAV operater sees nearly as much flying using a computor monitor, compared to a fighter pilot with his nearly 360 degree bubble canopy.
  
• Susceptibility of the UAV's control signal to enemy jamming?
  

While I think there is a definite use for UCAVs for reconnaissance/armed reconnaissance and perhaps SEAD missions, I seriously doubt if we will ever see UCAVs in the air-to-air arena.

Graham

[legios]

I see UCAVS in the strike role very soon. With GPS weapons (JDAM and JSOW), most strike aircraft are just bomb trucks anyway.

I don't see UCAVAS taking the place of air to air or close air support any time soon. AI is not up to the task of performing these tasks on its own, and I think that jamming is still a problem. I argue with my peers all the time...most of them think that a few systems of ours are unjammable. I say that jamming is just a power issue...if you have enough power, you can jam anything.

Just a personal opinion.

[David Hingtgen]

And the counterpart: if you have enough power, you can burn through the jamming. That's basically how the MiG-25's radar works. And also why its hard to defeat an F-14 radar.

[legios]

But transmitting jamming decreases by cube of the radius (r^3). Since the strike aircraft by necessity have to be near the target, the power from a defensive jammer will be orders of magnitude greater than the power being transmitted by the attackers base stations. (for example a ship hundreds of miles away).

[F-ZeroOne]

Low flying aircraft don't do well in actual conflicts.  The biggest reason is that great forward looking terrain avoidance radar tends to let people know you're coming.  I don't have the exact figurers, but I think that Tornadoes had the highest loss/sortie ratio in the 1st Gulf War.  In addition, flying low subjects you to all sorts of ground fire.

Don't know if it's true or not, but I read somewhere about British pilots referring to Tornados as 'the Flying Coffin'.

Graham

yup...took heavy losses in Desert Storm along with the 15E's

It should be noted that, IIRC, most of those losses occurred while flying some of the most dangerous missions of the first Gulf War - runway denial attacks, flying across or even down the runway releasing cratering submunitions from an underfuselage cluster-pod, at low level. I believe most US anti-runway missions were instead carried out at medium altitude using Durandal anti-runway bombs.

We've learned better now, and I believe the RAF now uses a cruise-missile style dispenser or glide-bomb.

The RAF has always liked low and fast - the Tornados predecessor, the Blackburn Buccaneer is rumoured to have flown so low on one occasion that it returned with a tumbleweed hooked on the nose!

[renegadeleader1]

That's one ugly plane IMO.

Is it real or a Photochop job?

Graham

its a photoshop.

compare the direction of the peoples shadows with the planes.

ALSO THE FACT IT IS ON AN AIRCRAFT CARRIER!!!!!

Those aren't camera crew you know!

edit also note the shadow of the wing of the plane next to it. It comes up short of the wing itself while the UAV's shadow extends beyond its wing that would mean two different light sources.

Edited April 19, 2004 by renegadeleader1

[Zentrandude]

agreed about it being photochopped. also if you noticed it looks like its oddly out of place if it was being launched they should atleast got a rear end shot to put on it.

[ewilen]

That X-47 photochop doesn't even look like the pics elsewhere in the article it comes from.

Anyway, about UCAV's in the Air to Air role. In BVR, pilots are already engaging in pushbutton combat, so putting the operators on the ground or in an AWACS well behind the forward edge of battle isn't much of a stretch.

Time lag shouldn't be much of a factor in such engagements, and in any case is going to be minuscule--remember, we're talking about speed of light transmissions--unless via satellite.

For BVR engagments, SA means looking at a radar or IRST screen. With AWACS and "layered" sensor-carrying UCAVs all networked together, the operators would have a huge edge in SA. (Assuming the other side isn't similarly equipped.)

I am also concerned about jamming, but I also wonder how effective it can be against digital spread spectrum transmissions. Perhaps the UCAV swarms need to have a human-controlled command craft nearby.

In any case, it is certainly possible that some enemy aircraft will break through either to bomb or to attack the AWACS/command planes. In which case a number of human-operated dogfighters may be advisable. Perhaps F-22's, but conceivably F-16's or F-35's. But I'd reiterate that enemy attacks are more likely to be delivered by missile than by bomber.

About the B-1B. Definitely did not operate in Desert Storm. First use in combat was Desert Fox, the bombing raid on Iraq in 1998.

http://www.cdi.org/iraq/gulf-war-I-pr.cfm

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/lib...7134/letter.htm

From the latter,

The B-1B did not participate in the campaign because munitions limitations, engine problems, inadequate crew training, and electronic warfare deficiencies severely hampered its conventional capabilities.

And from the Air Force at http://www.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet.asp?fsID=81

The B-1B was first used in combat in support of operations against Iraq during Operation Desert Fox in December 1998.

[legios]

Air to Air BVR engagements are anything but push button warfare. It is a mentally complex and maneuver intensive evolution. And nobody shoots BVR anymore...too many civillians/blue forces. Almost all engagements need a visual ID (VID), so the fighters push to the merge. At that point, the manned fighter is crucial.

BVR was cool when we were fighting the Russkies and we were red and free with our weapons, and BVR is still the shot of choice. It's just hard to do in todays world.

[David Hingtgen]

A big factor is how the power is used.

An EA-6B, doing barrage jamming like they often do, is emitting all its power over every frequency, in every direction, with every amplitude and pulse pattern it can, trying to mess up whatever it finds. Thus any PARTICULAR radar emission will only be jammed by whatever small percentage of the EA-6B's total power happens to be on the same frequency going the same direction, etc.

If you don't know exactly what to jam, where, you're wasting like 99.9% of your power on "worthless" frequencies and directions and thus the "correct" emission is only getting less than 1% of the power you're putting out. If a fighter with a powerful radar goes to pure altitude/vector mode (generally the simplest, but highest-power and range mode for an air-to-air radar), that will overcome most jamming, unless the jammer can quickly determine what frequency and direction in which to concentrate the jamming. Which of course, is a whole other part of ECM etc---identifying threats and other emissions so as to know what you should emit, where.

The quick summary comparison is a machine gun---spraying thousand of rounds a minute around randomly is pointless if 99.9% of your shots are missing. Better to fire like 200 rounds, that are aimed well.

PS---if mainly BVR was expected to be how fighters fought in the near future, the ATF wouldn't have been required to be as agile as an F-16, nor have the best thrust/weight ratio ever. They would have said "as powerful a radar as you can, with lots of upgraded AMRAAMS". Sure, there'll be lots of BVR engagements, but they sure expect to have their fair share of dogfights.

Edited April 19, 2004 by David Hingtgen

[renegadeleader1]

I just got an idea from the other thread my starfighter thing.

Someone said a TIE design sucked because you only can see straight ahead.

in AIR to AIR with UAV's you would have the same problem. Like a flight Sim on a computer. Sure you could could toggle views from different cameras but that would take time. Time and reaction speed are two things most pilots can't afford to waste.(would be easier if you had several monitors for one UAV but this is the US military we are talking about budget cuts and low bidders and such.)

Anyways my problem with the UAV's is the argument that it will cut down on human casualties. If anything they will cause more. with cheap to build and easy flyable UAV's that any country could build them and things will become a throw back the WWII hundreds of UAV's going at each other while on the ground soldiers will have to go back to trench warfare due to no good air cover.

Basically though In see wars in the future being decided more than now not by how much of the enemy you kill but how much damage you do to their infrastructure.

[ewilen]

legios: If we're not going to fight BVR, then why bother with the F-22?

Point is, yes, being ready for WVR makes sense in low-intensity conflicts and less-than-all-out-war crises. That's why I think the F-22 is a slightly better choice for today's world than the (notional) F-23, because the YF-22's close-in maneuverability was apparently slightly superior to the YF-23's.

But we don't need an F-22 to fight third world nations. So people point to China. (I'm going to ignore India until someone presents evidence that India is considered a likely adversary.) If the US ever did fight China, it wouldn't be a small affair, it would be a major conflict with ROE similar to the old NATO-Warsaw pact scenarios, and a long-range BVR sniper like the F-22/F-23 would make sense. But war with China isn't happening soon, if ever, and even if it did happen soon, China's air force can't come close to us yet. We have a decade or more (probably two decades) to prepare for when it can. In the meantime the F-22 is soaking up funds that could be applied to doing a better job of handling today's threats and preparing for tomorrow's.

Also, I brought up NCTR because it has reduced the necessity to visually identify targets before pushing the button. I have read that F-15's operating in Desert Storm did not need to visually ID Iraqi aircraft before firing--all they needed was AWACS and ID via NCTR.

As for the difficulties of BVR combat--I am sure it is technically complex. But does the operator need to be in the weapons platform? Beyond visual range by definition means that the enemy is visible on data screens and projected on the HUD, but not seen by the eyeball.

[legios]

The F-15's also shot down two US Blackhawks. (yes I know that they weren't using NCTR). NCTR is not fool-proof. It's great when it works, but it requires the target aircraft do certain things. I won't go into what on this forum. It is also considered hostile intent (it uses a firing-solution radar), so its use is often restricted in congested airspace like the North Arabian Gulf.

China's airforce and to a certain extent, N. Korea's air force can compete with the US today. The reason why is that they have so many aircraft that US fighters would be overwhelmed. Both nations use tactics that take advantage of the fact that they have THOUSANDS of low tech (but still deadly) aircraft and a few hundred modern aircraft.

Their command and control is nowhere near as capable as ours, and right now that would be the difference. However, China has recognized this and is working to even the gap. The US has already had to block Isreal from selling China a really capable AWACS type platform.

The F-22 is much better equipped to integrate with the command and control platforms and as such it is able to engage more targets in quicker secession than current US fighters. This would make it a much more capable air-superiority platform. In addition, it is MUCH faster than everything else (sustained). Right now the Chinese Su-27's are difficult to interecept because of their speed. And MiG-25's?....fuggetaboutit. This allows the F-22 to employ a wide-range of new tactics, while at the same time reducing the amount of aircraft needed to maintain air superiority.

I'm not saying that BVR needs a human operator in the aircraft. I'm just saying that it's not just push button warfare. In other words, AI could not handle it, you would definitely need a human operator somewhere. Which in turn makes you vulnerable to jamming.

[Shin Densetsu Kai 7.0]

yea they tried thinking pushbutton would work in vietnam and look what happeend. Crusaders forever known as the last of gunfighters and a certified ass chomping mig killer while phantoms got shot down by low tech migs.(in the beginning not later)

technology should not be depended upon to defeat all threats. A golden rule. Yea china and n korea have sheer numbers but if anything I think india would be more of a threat. sure they are smaller foprce but they also got nukes and they seem to be able to afford more advanced soviet equipement than china. I mean they got su30mki customs while china being ths big ass nation it is only has SU-027s big difference. Nnot to mention india has carriers and stuff we made so with that said they know some of our tactics too.

[Mislovrit]

but if anything I think india would be more of a threat. sure they are smaller foprce but they also got nukes and they seem to be able to afford more advanced soviet equipement than china

Indian nukes are roughly comparable(sp) to 1950s Americans nukes at best, hence very big and bulky and underpowered compare to modern nuclear weapons.

Economic suicide for India to become hostile to the U.S. more so when they are more business friendly than China.

[David Hingtgen]

You know, I keep thinking "F-14's have a nice high-magnification camera, just for long-range BVR identification of bogies". It's very simple, so why aren't we putting it in more planes? I read they can identify most any plane at 10 miles, many larger fighters at 20 miles, and 747's at 70 miles. A nice zoom-lens solves a LOT of ROE problems for fighters.

[ewilen]

Apparently some late-model Phantoms got something called TISEO (Target Identification

System Electro-Optical, alternatively telescopic imaging sight electro-optical--don't ask me which is right) which was similar.

My guess--IRST and NCTR make the electro-optical system redundant.

[ewilen]

The F-15's also shot down two US Blackhawks.  (yes I know that they weren't using NCTR).  NCTR is not fool-proof.

If you are referring to the April, 1994 incident, the F-15's did a visual ID of the helicopters before shooting, as well as an IFF interrogation.

http://www.mit.edu/afs/athena/org/s/ssp/fall00/snook.htm

http://www.schwabhall.com/opc_report.htm

http://www.chinfo.navy.mil/navpalib/intl/iraq/perr0415.txt

IFF failed, and visual ID was incorrect--the Blackhawks were mistaken for Hinds.

Now, it is conceivable that NCTR was employed and there was a coverup; however, the incident as described in the public record has no bearing on the reliability of NCTR. Nevertheless, as this incident tragically illustrates, all systems are subject to failure.

[legios]

F-14 TCS is weather dependent and is useless at night. In addition, its effectiveness is highly user dependent. More importantly, it can only tell what kind of aircraft it is...not who is flying it.

For example, is that a French Mirage F-1 or an Iraqi one. Is that a red cross C130 or an Iraqi army one. etc.

Incidently, NCTR has the same problem.