Started to avoid hijacking the Ukraine news thread, and as a parallel to the thread about tanks. Is there much use for fighter jets with pilots on today’s battlefield? Here’s a few of the points that come to my mind based on what I know of the war in Ukraine.
Ground anti-aircraft seem to do a really good job now of shooting things down, whether it’s aircraft or the missiles that they launch. The flip side is that ground to ground missiles, like the recently in the news Storm Shadows sent by the UK, seem to not do any worse than missiles / bombs launched by planes in the air. If that’s the case, why not switch to using ground to ground missiles instead of air launched missiles? Then there’s the seemingly even more obsolete old fashioned bombers, like the A-10 and its Soviet counterpart, the Su-25 Frogfoot. From what I’ve read, Russia got away from using the Su-25s because they were all getting shot down. I assume the A-10 would meet the same fate if we were to give them to Ukraine. Then there’s the now infamous F-16s, and the article I read that got me thinking about this topic.
Is this just one guy’s opinion, or is he right that even the F-16s wouldn’t be of much, if any use?
USAF is in a full court press now to develop unpiloted fighter / attack aircraft. The next step is a manned fighter with 2 or 4 smaller unmanned escorts that offer comparable performance for 1/10th the price. The early models are being assembled now. See
Lethality of modern air defense (in the absence of stealth) is a big driver. So is the extremely high cost (both purchase price and price per hour of peacetime operation) of manned fighter / attack airplanes, especially stealthy ones, and keeping pilots well-enough trained to use them to maximum advantage.
A confounding problem with using ground to air or ground to ground weapons instead of manned fighter / attack aircraft is that you can attack a blip, or you can attack a picture taken a few hours ago from orbit, or you can attack a set of coordinates. But until you have a way to put live real-time human eyeballs looking at the target, you’re not really sure what you’re shooting at.
The farther behind enemy lines you get, the worse the targeting problem is. And modern TacAir is designed to address the target set from 50 to ~400 miles behind the front.
Plinking targets right in front of your own troops (“Close Air Support”) is a luxury that won’t much work in the face of a determined well-equipped enemy. CAS was already largely obsolete when I was doing this in the 1980s. The fact DoD has kept it alive until now has been entirely down to fighting outfits like the Iraqis, the Taliban, and ISIS. Against a “near-peer adversary” to use DoD’s preferred terminology, CAS is a non-starter and everybody knows it.
Older jets having little chance against ground to air missiles is not a surprise. But state of the art jets should continue to rule the skies for a few more decades.
If I recall correctly, planning is already in place for mixed airwings on the new Carriers. Eventually they’ll reduce the number of manned aircraft by 20-30 jets and replace with 40-60 larger drones and maybe an equal number of small ones.
Also expected are mixed wings on our so called “Lightning Carriers”. These are amphibious assault ships that were built to land Marines and fly copters. Now being tested with 20 F-35s also. Eventually will be mix Jets, Copters & Combat drones.
The pilot in the above linked article is very specifically speaking of 4th generation fighters (such as F-16, F-15 and F-18, with little to no stealth) as having little chance, one on one, against a largely intact, modern integrated air defense. And I suspect that is true.
But that is a very different thing than 5th generation planes (stealthy F-22, F-35), backed up with radar jamming and dedicated aircraft to attack the air defenses.
So I agree - F-16s alone, would likely have little impact on the ground war; but might be a vast improvement in defending against drones and such.
But I do not think that is the same question as – are piloted combat aircraft becoming obsolete.
As to that question; I doubt anyone that is in a position to have an well informed option, is allowed to voice it in public, at least not in detail.
Some yes, but the bulk no.
Those two were the dedicated CAS airplanes designed in the 1970s to survive (barely) in the 1980s against determined opposition. And have been used to good effect ever since on both sides since both sides have so far specialized in fighting much weaker less well-equipped nations, not each other directly. The Ukraine war is really the first war that involves modern (> year 2000) weapons employed by both sides skillfully. And even then the Russians demonstrate some big gaps in “skillfully”.
CAS has also been done by faster aircraft, from the F-100, F-4, and A-4 in Viet Nam to the F-16 & F/A-18 in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. And corresponding tech Allied or Russian equipment is / was used by both sides as well. By sheer number of sorties over ~30 years, the fast movers probably have the edge over the A-10, but not by a lot.
Heck, in Afghanistan & Iraq during the insurgency phase we were using B-52s and B-1Bs as CAS airplanes. In an era when a grunt can get the accurate to +/- 1 meter coordinates of some enemy gun emplacement 500 meters away from themselves, and datalink them up to a B-52, the BUFF can drop a smart bomb unseen & unheard from 7 miles up 3 counties away and the gun emplacement simply vaporizes.
Bottom line:
For an environment like Ukraine vs Russia, or a full bore NATO vs Russia, A-10s would initially be useless; they’d all be shot down on their first mission. F-16s would not fare much better initially. The plan remains to kill the enemy’s air defenses in the first 2 or 3 days using the comparatively few stealth aircraft that can survive over a mostly-intact defensive shield, then once that shield is gone, or nearly so, that opens up the airspace for the much more numerous non-stealthy platforms to work. Who, not coincidentally, can carry 2 to 6x the ordnance load per sortie. Stealth and payload are very much opposites.
The problem of course is the enemy gets a vote. And they’re going to be trying very, very hard to ensure there’s at least some high quality air defense anywhere they present a high quality target. And trying to reconstitute whatever gets wrecked as fast as possible.
The Storm Shadow is air-launched, not ground launched. The speed and altitude provided by the launching aircraft give it the very long range it has, which allows it to be fired from well outside of the range of enemy SAM systems, so it isn’t really that big of a point in the context of the question, but there it is. Regarding how effective air defense has been over Ukraine in the current war, Perun does a much better job of explaining it than I could if you have the time and willingness to listen to one of his excellent hour long videos:
For anyone interested in a factual look at air defense in the Ukrainian War and the odd situation where both Russia and Ukraine have air defenses so effective against the other sides aircraft that both sides have resorted to flying manned aircraft at very low altitudes where they are vulnerable to MANPADS, Perun put out another of his excellent videos on just this topic the other week.
The short of it is that they both inherited Soviet-era air defense systems that are very effective when not suppressed against non-stealth aircraft and can cover huge areas for aircraft that risk flying at anything but low altitude, and the Soviets also devote immense efforts to low level capable, but by necessity shorter ranged air defense systems. While Russia in theory inherited Soviet-era anti-radiation missiles and SEAD (Suppression of Enemy Air Defense) tactics, the Soviets never placed anywhere near the kind of emphasis on SEAD that the West in general and the US in particular did. Add to that the general clusterfuck of corruption and ineptitude that the Russian Federation’s military is, and Russia has been unable to even achieve air superiority over a foe that it dramatically outnumbers in terms of combat aircraft even after 8 months. Russian pilots didn’t even in theory get anything close to the number of flight hours that NATO pilots get, and no aircraft squadrons are specifically dedicated to SEAD.
By contrast, the very first thing the US and NATO plan to do in any air war is to carry out heavy, extensive, sustained SEAD to destroy their enemy’s ability to effectively conduct just the sort of air defense that both Ukraine and Russia are putting up. Pilots are trained in SEAD, and entire squadrons and their equipment are dedicated exclusively to the task. Contrary to what our resident comrad thinks, air defenses have long been multi-layered and integrated affairs, Soviet-style ones in particular. The term is IADS, Integrated Air Defense System. Iraq had a Soviet-style IADS back in the 1991 Gulf War, which was the first target of the air war, and we all know how that turned out.
One consequence of this is that the US and NATO haven’t placed anything like the kind of emphasis on surface to air missiles for air defense as the Soviet Union and Russia have, and they are often intended as much for missile defense as for defense against manned aircraft.
F-16s would be immensely useful in the war in Ukraine for launching JDAMS, which again rely on using a launching aircraft to provide the speed and altitude to give them their range. JDAM doesn’t have anything like the range of Storm Shadow, and there is a recent thread in FQ regarding using the Physics of using Toss Bombing to minimize the risk to the launching aircraft by having them fly low towards the target, then release the JDAM while climbing and accelerating at the launching point, which provides them with their range. They are being jerry-rigged to be compatible with Ukrainian Soviet-era MiG-29s, Su-27s, and Su-24s (if any Ukrainian Su-24s are actually left operational) just like the Storm Shadow is, but the F-16 is already compatible with JDAM and doesn’t need jerry-rigging. It’s also natively compatible with the AGM-88 HARM, which has also been provided to Ukraine and jerry-rigged to work with their Soviet-era aircraft.
As others have said, the question of the future of manned vs remote piloted aircraft is a very distinct question from would F-16s and the like be useful in Ukraine and why is the airspace over Ukraine so deadly for both sides.
AIUI, the main benefit of manned aircraft is that, no matter how much electronic warfare is going on (jamming, interference, etc.) there will always be a human pilot inside the plane to make sure the plane can fly from point A to B and return home, etc.
Whereas with a purely remotely-guided aircraft, you don’t have that internal safeguard against shenanigans.
But it’s worth noting that even modern planes like the B-21 Raider are coming with a fully-remote option if need be.
You’ve mixed “remote guided” with autonomous. The future idea is not a remote controlled airplane. It’s an airplane that flies itself, fights itself, and deals with whatever it finds in the target area. By itself.
We have remote-guided airplanes now. Which still can do a lot of flying with no connection to the outside world. But where a remote pilot is actively managing them during the active combat phase. If the link is lost during that active phase, the machine either loiters a while nearby then goes home, or it goes straight home. It already “knows” what to do.
The machines I was linking to above are fully autonomous as airplanes. They can fly themselves with no human involvement besides putting fuel in them and pressing “go”, then waiting for them to come back and park themselves.
The near term plan is to have them fly as robo-wingmen to manned aircraft where the human pilot’s job becomes picking out specific targets then telling robo-wingman #3 to go attack that thing then rejoin the formation. Robo-wingman #3 will decide on its own exactly how to approach and attack the target, and decide how to get itself back to the rest of the formation. No human is guiding that process even a little bit. That’s autonomy.
That’s what we’re doing in prototype form today. To be deployed in a couple more years. Getting the man out of the lead fighter is the very next step. The future of combat aviation will be very different than even the recent past.
Not as long as we still have pilots who aren’t afraid to break the rules (and their aircraft) pushing their planes past their designed performance limits on missions that make no tactical sense.
