Modern wars

[Agiel]

War is Boring is good for its historical and political commentary and bad for its technological and doctrinal analysis. And honestly sounds more like the writer is deliberately twisting the words of said pilot and omitting stuff that's inconvenient . original piece from Aviation Week:

 

http://aviationweek.com/defense/f-35-flies-against-f-16-basic-fighter-maneuvers

 

 

 

 

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter has been flown in air-to-air combat maneuvers against F-16s for the first time and, based on the results of these and earlier flight-envelope evaluations, test pilots say the aircraft can be cleared for greater agility as a growth option. 

 

Although the F-35 is designed primarily for attack rather than air combat, U.S. Air Force and Lockheed Martin test pilots say

the availability of potential margin for additional maneuverability

is a testament to the aircraft’s recently proven overall handling qualities and basic flying performance. “

The door is open to provide a little more maneuverability

,” says Lockheed Martin F-35 site lead test pilot David “Doc” Nelson..... 

 

..... “When we did the first dogfight in January, they said, ‘you have no limits,’” says Nelson. “

It was loads monitoring, so they could tell if we ever broke something. It was a confidence builder for the rest of the fleet because there is no real difference structurally between AF-2 and the rest of the airplanes

.” AF-2 was the first F-35 to be flown to 9g+ and -3g, and to roll at design-load factor. The aircraft, which was also the first Joint Strike Fighter to be intentionally flown in significant airframe buffet at all angles of attack, was calibrated for inflight loads measurements prior to ferrying to Edwards in 2010.

The

operational maneuver tests were conducted to see “how it would look like against an F-16 in the airspace,

” says Col. Rod “Trash” Cregier, F-35 program director. “It was

an

EARLY

look at any control laws that may need to be tweaked to enable it to fly better in future. You can definitely tweak it—that’s the option.”

 

 

Edited July 1, 2015 by Agiel

[Zoraptor]

Well, that aviationweek article doesn't seem to say how it actually performed against/ relative to the F16 in a practical comparison, at all. If it had performed well you'd expect them to focus on how much better than the F16 it already was and how they won x out of y simulated engagements or whatever while still having room for improvement, not just on it having room for improvement.

 

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter has been flown in air-to-air combat maneuvers against F-16s for the first time and, based on the results of these and earlier flight-envelope evaluations, test pilots say the aircraft can be cleared for greater agility as a growth option.

 

 

 

ie, this has no mention of actually being better than the F16, just that they think the F35 has room for improvement. It's certainly inference, but it's pretty likely inference that it isn't better than the F16, just as war-is-boring claims. 

 

I have to admit I've never really 'got' the F35 though. Seems far too much a jack of all trades, master of none compromise to me.

[Agiel]

E-M diagrams from tests by Marine Corps test pilots say it compares favourably from the legacy F/A-18Cs they are graduating from.

 

http://archive.defensenews.com/article/20110516/DEFSECT01/105160302/F-35-Tests-Proceed-Revealing-F-18-Like-Performance

 

Note that the legacy Hornets are widely regarded as among the most agile fighters out there short of the super-manueverable Rafales and Typhoons out there. There is a reason the Blue Angels fly them, and why they're used to simulate asymmetric fighter threats by Navy "Aggressor" Squadrons:

 

 

So "growth" can be defined as "its potential can be unlocked to match the performance of projected, notional threats (if said threats even arrive)". Which may be a bit of a moot point in an age of Helmet Mounted Displays and advanced high-off boresight IR-guided missiles; there is absolutely no aircraft that can ever out-fly an AIM-9X or an ASRAAM flying at Mach 2.5 and pulling 70Gs.

Edited July 1, 2015 by Agiel

[Malcador]

F-35 is such a hot item, find it hard to not believe any article on it is either a shill or a hack piece, heh. Good business by Lockheed though.

 

PR response to the article yesterday - https://www.f35.com/news/detail/joint-program-office-response-to-war-is-boring-blog

 

Aside, "warfighters" being used in a serious context is amusing.

Edited July 1, 2015 by Malcador

[Zoraptor]

Which may be a bit of a moot point in an age of Helmet Mounted Displays and advanced high-off boresight IR-guided missiles; there is absolutely no aircraft that can ever out-fly an AIM-9X or an ASRAAM flying at Mach 2.5 and pulling 70Gs.

 

They have said pretty much exactly that sort of thing before though, prior to the Vietnam War when they were making F-4s with no cannon because they'd only need missiles. The end result was the F4 getting a cannon and the F14/15/16/18. Though they could be right, this time.

[Sarex]

Is the armor still made from cardboard on these (f-35) jets?

 

 

some additional info for the story above:

http://www.businessinsider.com/f-35-can-not-dogfight-effectively-2015-7

https://medium.com/war-is-boring/test-pilot-admits-the-f-35-can-t-dogfight-cdb9d11a875

Edited July 1, 2015 by Sarex

[Gfted1]

Manned fighters are so passé. I wish we would have poured that ~900B into a F/A drone but we're too far down the road to just drop the program now. Nothing can really compete with the F-15/16/18/22's anyway so the F-35 seems kind of unnecessary.  

[Sarex]

I would be kind of paranoid of letting it all be unmanned, I mean it's unhackable until someone figures out how to hack it and when that happens then it's just welp... Until a unit can be autonomous I think it's not really worth it going too deep in to unmanned, though that brings another host of potential problems.

[Gfted1]

I would be kind of paranoid of letting it all be unmanned, I mean it's unhackable until someone figures out how to hack it and when that happens then it's just welp...

I agree that the potential exists but I wonder how big of a problem it would really be. Drones are typically operated from half a world away, on a military base. And I don't think there is a "master system", instead "modules" control several drones each, right? So maybe they could hack a few at a time? I don't know, Im asking.

 

So that leaves line-of-sight attack, jam the master signal and override with your own, and take control. I think this is what Iran did when they snagged one of our sweet drones. I was kind of surprised the drone didn't have some kind of failsafe built into the programming where if it sensed a loss of the master signal that it would just automatically gain altitude and fly over the horizon. Or something like that.

 

Until a unit can be autonomous I think it's not really worth it going too deep in to unmanned, though that brings another host of potential problems.

Like what?

[Sarex]

I agree that the potential exists but I wonder how big of a problem it would really be. Drones are typically operated from half a world away, on a military base. And I don't think there is a "master system", instead "modules" control several drones each, right? So maybe they could hack a few at a time? I don't know, Im asking.

So that leaves line-of-sight attack, jam the master signal and override with your own, and take control. I think this is what Iran did when they snagged one of our sweet drones. I was kind of surprised the drone didn't have some kind of failsafe built into the programming where if it sensed a loss of the master signal that it would just automatically gain altitude and fly over the horizon. Or something like that.

 

Don't know either. But I do know that someone always figures out a way. Though I guess it would be a back and forth battle of hacking and patching/fixing the loopholes. Another issue apart from hacking would be jamming, I suspects that jamming fields would be a quick way to defend against them (though that would require a lot of power).

 

Like what?

 

Have you ever seen a movie called Terminator. :D Joking aside, the big issue I see is that it would take a long time until autonomous became useful for anything other then being cannon fodder. I figure it would start as a dumb AI with a lot of if/then scenarios programed in to it and that is easy to abuse.

[213374U]

Manned fighters are so passé. I wish we would have poured that ~900B into a F/A drone but we're too far down the road to just drop the program now. Nothing can really compete with the F-15/16/18/22's anyway so the F-35 seems kind of unnecessary.  

 

I wouldn't be surprised if a doctrine that incorporates "wolfpacks" of drones working in tandem with manned fighters for target acquisition and coordination is being worked on. I remember reading that while kill ratios for Russian missiles were worse than their US counterparts, Russian doctrine simply called for MOAR missiles to be available per engagement. Having a bunch of unmanned missile dispensers flying alongside stealth(ish) fighters would solve that without necessitating a costly redesign of weapons systems or aircraft.

 

But as you say, is the F-35 needed for that? I don't know about its performance as cutting-edge fighter, but its success as too-big-to-fail subsidy facilitator for the Texas aviation industry is hard to dispute.

 

I kid, I kid...

[Zoraptor]

Another issue apart from hacking would be jamming, I suspects that jamming fields would be a quick way to defend against them (though that would require a lot of power).

 

Jamming would likely be far more used than hacking, after all it's 'simple' to jam a signal. You could also target the signal propagation at source by hitting the control facility or the satellite system as other potential examples. 

 

Though hacking would give some interesting possibilities without an 'assume direct control' approach, like revoking or corrupting security keys so no commands would be recognised.

[Agiel]

 

Which may be a bit of a moot point in an age of Helmet Mounted Displays and advanced high-off boresight IR-guided missiles; there is absolutely no aircraft that can ever out-fly an AIM-9X or an ASRAAM flying at Mach 2.5 and pulling 70Gs.

 

They have said pretty much exactly that sort of thing before though, prior to the Vietnam War when they were making F-4s with no cannon because they'd only need missiles. The end result was the F4 getting a cannon and the F14/15/16/18. Though they could be right, this time.

 

 

...which kind of ignores the fact that virtually all air combat kills since the 1982 Lebanon War were done with missiles. The kind of indictment of A/A missiles based on teething problems from their first ever combat usage would be akin to saying tanks had no place in maneuver warfare based on their initial showing at the Somme.

[Agiel]

 

Manned fighters are so passé. I wish we would have poured that ~900B into a F/A drone but we're too far down the road to just drop the program now. Nothing can really compete with the F-15/16/18/22's anyway so the F-35 seems kind of unnecessary.  

 

I wouldn't be surprised if a doctrine that incorporates "wolfpacks" of drones working in tandem with manned fighters for target acquisition and coordination is being worked on. I remember reading that while kill ratios for Russian missiles were worse than their US counterparts, Russian doctrine simply called for MOAR missiles to be available per engagement. Having a bunch of unmanned missile dispensers flying alongside stealth(ish) fighters would solve that without necessitating a costly redesign of weapons systems or aircraft.

 

 

Weirdly enough, that's what DARPA is envisaging leveraging F-35's sensor fusion capabilities and the payload capacity of cargo aircraft, and even a proposed interceptor variant of the B-1B Lancer (with the unfortunate name, "B-1R":

 

 

Going a step further, there has been a proposal for long-endurance turbo-fan powered "suicide interceptors" loitering a given airspace that attack positively ID'ed tracks entering its airspace with a second-stage rocket booster for the intercept stage.

Edited July 2, 2015 by Agiel

[Agiel]

Former F/A-18 and F-16 driver writes on "Why the 'F-35 v F-16' Article is Garbage."

[Malcador]

https://medium.com/war-is-boring/read-for-yourself-the-f-35-s-damning-dogfighting-report-719a4e66f3eb

 

Axe posted the report, for what it is worth.

 

Canada should have just upgraded the CF-18s, but that's a Tory for you.

[Agiel]

Even disregarding the need for an aircraft that corresponds to future threats, the RCAF has to replace its jets sooner or later. Fighter jets are complex machines and the parts and (more importantly) the airframes have limited lifespans. The procurement run for the CF-18s ran from 1982 to 1988, and as the years go by more maintenance hours are needed to keep the aircraft airworthy. For instance, the F-14 was replaced because they took twelve hours of maintenance time for every hour they spent in the air compared to the three hours of maintenance per flight hour of the F/A-18C. As the years go by the Canadians could cut corners on maintenance in order to keep up with their pace of sorties, but recently we've seen the consequences of that (and the prove that they can be potentially lethal). Last month the Russians experienced three crashes in five days, likely because their air planners never envisioned their current tempo of operations until major reforms and modernisation programs were complete (to which they aren't anywhere close to).

[Malcador]

Yes, maintenance is important. But for Canada, they should have prioritized saving cash - we're a tiny dog in NATO and WW3 isn't likely to break out soon versus us subduing brown people over the ocean now and then. Think the Super Hornet was that option (also has 2 engines, which is some fetish in the Canadian military)

[Agiel]

Trends in Air-to-Air Combat: Implications for Future Air Superiority

 

 

 

On Tuesday April 14, CSBA’s Dr. John Stillion discussed his study on trends in air-to-air combat at the Air Force Association’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies. The study concludes that advances in electronic sensors, communications technology, and guided weapons over the past few decades may have fundamentally transformed the nature of air combat. As a result, the utility of some attributes traditionally associated with fighter aircraft has decreased, while the utility of attributes not usually associated with fighter aircraft has increased. Dr. Stillion argues that due to these trends, it may be appropriate to cast a much wider net in the development of future air combat operational concepts, sensors, weapons, and platforms, and examine radical departures from traditional fighter concepts.

 

Edited July 6, 2015 by Agiel

[kgambit]

Never play with a new toys unless you know exactly what you are doing ......

 

 

Edited July 6, 2015 by kgambit

[Gfted1]

This Is A Fully Armed F-15SA, The Most Advanced Production Eagle Ever.

[Agiel]

Gulf War Air Power Survey - Selected Figures:

 

http://imgur.com/a/ftxZv

[kgambit]

F-35 porn ....... 

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zv6SRY5Zj3g&feature=youtu.be

[Sarex]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpVA2TCwJFs

 

 

 

 

 

Gulf War Air Power Survey - Selected Figures:
 
http://imgur.com/a/ftxZv

 

Any figures on the Vietnam war?

Edited July 19, 2015 by Sarex

[Agiel]

There is the Ault Report AKA Project Red Baron which was a massive study on air to air encounters over Vietnam, It's a dense and rather impenetrable tome however, but its conclusions basically were:

 

1. Almost universally losses (on both sides) were attributed to the pilot never knowing that his assailant was there. Meaning situational awareness was key to survival in air combat.

 

2. There was a need for Dissimilar Air Combat Training to prepare pilots against adversaries flying aircraft with different flight characteristics. In other words, take full advantage of the strengths of one's aircraft and minimise the importance of the strengths of his opponent's aircraft in an encounter. This led to the formation of the US Air Force's and Navy's "Aggressor" squadrons.

 

3. A pilot who had managed to survive 10 sorties could see his chances of seeing the end of his tour alive massively increased. So the "Red Flag" exercises were created in order to simulate as realistically as possible those 10 sorties not just for US forces but also allied forces. This also served to increase interoperability between those air forces as well.

 

A little summary of a portion can be found here:

 

http://elementsofpower.blogspot.com/2014/02/air-to-air-combat-over-southeast-asia.html