Fixing the Fighter Gap

[parsifal]

Australia will never risk buying another Euro fighte4r after our experiences with the mirage. Nothing wrong with the plane, but the French would not allow "their" aircraft to be flown in Vietnam, which really upset the Sust5ralian government. The French recalcitrance tarred every EWuropean supplier in Australian eyes.

With no European suppliers that we aree prepared to rely on, who else in the world can we rely on?

Another issue for us is commonality with our chief ally and military partner. During Gulf war 1, Australia considered sending a brigade of Leopard Is to the region. We decided against it in the finish, for a number of reasons, but including our inability to integrate our leopards into the Abrams equipped US formations. The differences in range, fuels/kubricants, ammunition mobilitymade these otherwise good tanks incompatible to our coalition obligations.

Australia has a rapid deploymwent force, that is expected to plans to integrate fully to US force structures and capoabilities. We want the force to have access to fully compatible armour artillery, etc, to make the force as ballanced and integrateable as possible.

 

[FLYBOYJ]

But then the F-111 can still fly further with more payload as it too can be refueled.

That it can, but at twice the cost and not as effective even though it carries more.

It is not a fighter, it is a low-level high-speed strike aircraft.
It is for that why the Australians bought them. That is what they need, not a fighter for local air superiority 1000 miles from home.

Making a point in comparing them to F-22s, but yes, a "Strikefighter" that could be deployed.

I consider myself to be just that. So thanks for the insult

Kris

You know I'm joking....

 

[Clay_Allison]

Your friends simulations should tell him India is an ally.

When does the USA plan to invade India?

Or is India planning a pre-emptive strike?

Because of some hurt feelings over their nuclear program and a mutual border with China, India has closer military ties to Russia than it has with us. India has also become one of biggest detractors of the US Dollar in recent months. I don't think it will happen any time soon, but there might come a time when India's interests in their sphere and ours do not coincide. Our economies are not nearly as tied together as the U.S. and China are. Indians are good people and they are far from an ambitious would be super power, but don't be surprised if they start to resent not sitting at the grownups table in the U.N. Security Council and start throwing their weight around.

Imagine if, for instance, they told us to get out of Afghanistan or else either for local political reasons or to make a point. We'd have to do it.

 

[parsifal]

The obvious flashpoint for India and the West is Pakistan. If the west were to back Pakistan too strongly in the war against terror, selling them hi-tech weapons for example, and the Pakis, instead of using them as intended, used them to conduct even more outrageous terror attacks in India, the Indians would be far from happy. Its not WWII, but both these countries have nuclear weapons. A few atom bombs dropped on the sub continent, could easily run up a casualty figure of several hundred million

 

[Civettone]

Fb, what did you mean by twice the cost ? F-111 more expensive than the F-35??

I like this page on the JSF and Australia
Australia and the F22 Raptor || kuro5hin.org

The F22 is very expensive, currently thought to be in the area of 200 million USD each, but Maj. Gen. Richard B.H. Lewis claims the next production run of one hundred F22s will bring the unit cost down to 116 million per aircraft.
That makes it cost competitive with the JSF which is thought to currently cost somewhere between 95 million and 100 million.
That may be cost competitive with the F15K as well. South Korea bought forty F15Ks for 4.2 billion which comes out as a unit cost of 105 million each. Modern platforms are expensive no matter what. A C130J goes for over 60 million now!

(...)

Australia is in a similar position with its F111 being retired without a replacement. Miniaturisation has meant that platforms such as the F18 can carry the precision weaponry that previously the domain of large strike-bombers such as the F111.
But there is no denying that even with the JSF replacing the F111/F18 platforms there will be a loss of Australian projection. There is the added problem of there being a gap between the F111's retirement and the JSF coming into service.

(...)

Australia's relationship with Indonesia took a nasty turn recently with Indonesia recalling their Ambassador. A silly move that is normally a prelude to open warfare but a display that Indonesia is prepared to enter another Konfrontasi cycle with Australia. This is not a good thing for regional security or stability.
The current summit between Australia and Indonesia is nothing to write home about as Indonesia is playing power politics with us, and winning.

Kris

 

[Clay_Allison]

Australia's relationship with Indonesia took a nasty turn recently with Indonesia recalling their Ambassador. A silly move that is normally a prelude to open warfare but a display that Indonesia is prepared to enter another Konfrontasi cycle with Australia. This is not a good thing for regional security or stability.
The current summit between Australia and Indonesia is nothing to write home about as Indonesia is playing power politics with us, and winning.

What is it you and Indo normally fight over?

 

[parsifal]

Generally territorial claims by the Indonesians, or attempts to deflect attention from internal problems. Examples were the Indonesian takeovers of West Irian in 1961, the attempted takeover of Mayasian Borneo in 1965, the invasion of Timor in 1975, and the Australian led intervention force in 1998. Several of these led to shooting incidents with Indonesian backed forces. Several others led to a significant ramping up of tensions. Recently there have been rising latent tensions about an Australian film concerning the alleged murder of Australian journalists in 1975, as a result of deliberate targetted fire from the invading Indonesian forces

If the Indonesians had had thougt that Australia lacked the capacity to project its force, or the ability to resist them, Australian wishes and national interests would have been just brushed aside as worthless by the Indonesians. We are friends with them, but lurking just beneath the surface is a deep seated animosity and distrust.....

 

[Clay_Allison]

Generally territorial claims by the Indonesians, or attempts to deflect attention from internal problems. Examples were the Indonesian takeovers of West Irian in 1961, the attempted takeover of Mayasian Borneo in 1965, the invasion of Timor in 1975, and the Australian led intervention force in 1998. Several of these led to shooting incidents with Indonesian backed forces. Several others led to a significant ramping up of tensions. Recently there have been rising latent tensions about an Australian film concerning the alleged murder of Australian journalists in 1975, as a result of deliberate targetted fire from the invading Indonesian forces

If the Indonesians had had thougt that Australia lacked the capacity to project its force, or the ability to resist them, Australian wishes and national interests would have been just brushed aside as worthless by the Indonesians. We are friends with them, but lurking just beneath the surface is a deep seated animosity and distrust.....

Being friends with a breeding ground for Islamic terror has to be difficult. But then look at us, we are friends with Saudi Arabia, one of the funding and personnel capitals of terrorism.

 

[Civettone]

what does islamic terror has to do with it?

That;s like calling the American invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan ... the "christian invasion by the Americans".

The only reason why you can drag the religion into this is if the invasion was for religious reasons.

Kris

 

[parsifal]

The relationship over the years has at times been difficult, but each nation is keen to maintain the good neighbour relations. There are extreme elements in both countries, and at times our national interests have collided with each other. For all that we have managed to carve out a reasonable relationship with the largest Muslim country on the planet....

 

[FLYBOYJ]

Fb, what did you mean by twice the cost ? F-111 more expensive than the F-35??

To maintain and operate - even though the F-35 is expesive up front, you have to consider maintenance and operational costs during the aircraft's lifetime. I do know the -111 is not an easy aircraft to maintain and keep in the air.

 

[Butters]

The Lockheed Booster Club Fact Sheet may impress those who can't divide $65B by 187, but others may not be so impressed. This is from a piece by Pierre Sprey and WT Wheeler

"The F-22 is outrageously expensive. The 187 now authorized are costing the nation just over $65 billion. That's almost $350 million for each one, counting all development and production costs.

Not a single F-22 has flown in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It would be foolish to deploy them. There is no enemy air force there. To send F-22s as yet another bomber - at what DOD data shows to be three times the operating cost of the F-16s that are already bombing too much over there - would be just another harmful drag on the real war effort.

Even more important is the question of whether the F-22 makes a good fighter, presumably against a competent enemy air force - if we are ever faced with one. The simple truth is that the F-22s make US air power weaker, not stronger.

Study after study - to say nothing of war itself - shows conclusively that pilot skill dominates all other factors in winning or losing air battles. Because of the F-22, the skill of our pilots has been seriously degraded. Due to its gigantic maintenance and support burden - over $3 million per fighter per year, again according to official DOD figures - the Air Force has slashed our in-air pilot training. In the 1970s, famously called the "hollow decade" because of low combat readiness, our fighter pilots were getting 20 to 30 hours a month of air combat training - half what the Israeli Air Force pilots found necessary to achieve their lopsided 15 to 1 victory ratio in 1973. Today, our F-22 pilots get an obviously inadequate 10 to 12 hours. High tech theorists claim flying training can be replaced by ground simulators. Experience teaches otherwise: simulators can be used for cockpit procedures training but, by misrepresenting in-air reality, they reinforce tactics that could get pilots killed in real combat.

Ignoring the combat-dominating human dimension, the Air Force, Lockheed, and their congressional boosters tout the F-22 as the magic silver bullet of air combat, a technological wonder weapon. It's likely to be the opposite.

The F-22's so-called "stealth" may hurt more than it helps. First of all, stealth imposes huge aerodynamic, weight and maintenance penalties, reducing both combat agility and numbers of fighters available in the air. The invisibility claimed is disingenuous. In truth, against small (that is, short wavelength) radars, the F-22 is hard to detect only over a very narrow band of possible viewing angles. Over the huge remaining span of viewing angles, it is very detectable. Worse, there are thousands of existing long range, long wavelength radars, particularly Russian and Chinese ones, that can detect the F-22 from several hundred miles away at all angles - simply because all long wavelength radars are immune to any kind of stealth shapings or coatings. Believers in stealth's cloak of invisibility should ask the pilots of the two - not one, as commonly believed - stealthy F-117 bombers taken out of action by antiquated Russian radar-directed defense systems in the 1999 Kosovo air war. Moreover, a new unfolding whistleblower scandal is presenting court evidence that the F-22's stealth skin has failed to meet its stealth requirements - limited as they are - because it has been badly fabricated and dishonestly tested.

Worse, the widely advertised 10:1 or even 30:1 kill ratios of the F-22 in Air Force-umpired mock air battles rest entirely on using its radar (without allowing enemy anti-radar measures) and on assigning wishfully inflated kill percentages to its radar missiles. Despite the Air Force's long standing dream, in every real war of the last 45 years, our radar-equipped fighters were simply unable to use beyond-visual-range radar missile shooting or, at best, fired off a handful of inconsequential pot-shots. These few actual firings produced kill rates far less impressive than the percentages the Air Force assigns in F-22 mock battles.

The vaunted invincibility of the F-22 founders on two incurable flaws:

First, the plane's so-called "low probability of intercept" radar may now be easily detected by simple, low cost electronics, thanks to the worldwide proliferation of spread spectrum technology in cell phones and laptops. That creates an environment where, if the F-22 pilot is foolish enough to turn on his radar, he announces his presence over hundreds of miles. Even better for the enemy, the radar makes an unmistakable beacon for home-on-radar missiles. Both the Russians and the Chinese specialize in - and sell - just such missiles. Despite that, our Air Force almost always bans these potentially devastating missiles and tactics from the F-22's mock battles, for reasons that are not hard to fathom.

Second, when actual combat forces our F-22 pilots to turn off their radars and forget the beyond-visual-range dream, they'll find themselves forced into a close-in, maneuvering fight. Compromised by the burden of complex stealth and heavy radar electronics in that dogfight regime, the plane's agility, short range missiles, and guns are nothing special - as one of us observed at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada when an F-16 "shot down" an F-22 in exercises.

As for the plane's advertised ability to cruise supersonically - indeed a desirable characteristic - unfortunately, the F-22's low fuel capacity (27 percent of takeoff weight, only two thirds of what's needed for combat-useful supersonic endurance in enemy airspace) reduces this to a brief airshow trick. Why the big fuel shortfall? Once again, to make room for combat-irrelevant tons of stealth technologies and radar electronics.

It's not as if it's technically hard to design and produce a truly great air-to-air fighter that can whip any other fighter in the world. The only hard part is enforcing the discipline needed to: 1) focus austerely on what has proven inescapably effective in the actual air combat our pilots have experienced and are likely to experience (as opposed to the imagined high tech air combat dreamed up by our arm chair theorists); 2) rigorously excise extraneous niceties and alluring but untested technologies; 3) build two competing combat-capable prototypes, then go with the winner of a brutally administered series of head-to-head dogfights and live weapons firings (even if the winner fails to evenly spread subcontracts across 40-plus states). The two most successful planes flying in today's Air Force were built just that way. There's no reason we can't do that again - and come up with a new, even better, world-beating fighter."

Link to full text to follow...

http://www.cdi.org/program/document.cfm?DocumentID=4527

 

[FLYBOYJ]

The Lockheed Booster Club Fact Sheet may impress those who can't divide $65B by 187, but others may not be so impressed. This is from a piece by Pierre Sprey and WT Wheeler

And with that document, you have the current F-22 fleet EXACTLY what Sprey said it should be in several 2009 papers written on the aircraft this year that eventually led to the current production halt. It funny though, Spey was part of the "Fighter Mafia" that brought about the F-15, 16 and A-10. How he defended his concept then and now out of "the loop" is condemning new aircraft based on his own design philosophies.

Bottom line Butters, the F-22 is bought and paid for and the reduced numbers reflect the current need and future planning. At the same time the same Pierre Sprey also said that we should build "4,000 smaller and more agile A-10s" and he thinks it will cost $60 billion, the same for 1,100 "smaller, faster F-16s for $44 billion. Now you do the math and if you anything about re-starting a production line, re-tooling for reconfigured design, and the sustainment engineering to go along with it, your first comment about dividing $65B by 187 will make a lot more sense.

BTW Sprey has also mentioned in some of his other recent papers that his 2009 "dream team" - "electronics will be cutting edge, all-passive with 360 degree infrared and radar warning," in other words no radar.

Sprey was brilliant in his day but I think not being a "player has effected his judgement.

 

[Clay_Allison]

And with that document, you have the current F-22 fleet EXACTLY what Sprey said it should be in several 2009 papers written on the aircraft this year that eventually led to the current production halt. It funny though, Spey was part of the "Fighter Mafia" that brought about the F-15, 16 and A-10. How he defended his concept then and now out of "the loop" is condemning new aircraft based on his own design philosophies.

could you expand on this inside stuff? I'm extremely interested.

 

[tomo pauk]

F-15, F-16 and A-10 are awesome pieces of hardware. Mafia or not, whoever was giving orders did a good job ordering those back in 70's.

 

[FLYBOYJ]

could you expand on this inside stuff? I'm extremely interested.

Just look up info on Sprey

Nieman Watchdog > Ask This > The F-22 Raptor is said to be invisible...until it isn't

http://www.cdi.org/pdfs/Sprey Quarter Century.pdf

Is the F-22 Worth the Money?

F-15, F-16 and A-10 are awesome pieces of hardware. Mafia or not, whoever was giving orders did a good job ordering those back in 70's.

Errrr..... Tomo, he wasn't in a "Real" mafia - that was just a term given to a group of visionary aircraft design concept engineers who paved the way for the development of those 3 aircraft. Boyd, Sprey, Riccioni to name a few....

Fighter Mafia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[tomo pauk]

No worries, I've heard about 'fighter mafia' some time ago

 

[Colin1]

I've heard about 'fighter mafia' some time ago

There's no way you'd get an F-15 into a violin case

 

[Glider]

It was interesting stuff but to be honest most of the slide presentation was nonsensical. To call the F14 a short legged aircraft, just assume that you could shave 20% off the weight of an F5 and that 6 x 0.5M3 were the most effective guns ever, says it all.

 

[tomo pauk]

There's no way you'd get an F-15 into a violin case