On the F-117, the General Accounting Office did a study several years ago that analyzed the effectiveness of various weapons systems during Desert Storm. To briefly summarize, I think the conclusion was along the lines of: “The F-117 did very well, but not as well as the over-the-top publicity about it would lead one to believe.”
On the plus side, no F-117 was lost or damaged, had a lower cost per sortie rate than the F-111, the A-6, or the F/A-18, and had a better rate of destroying its targets than even the Tomahawk cruise missile.
On the minus side, the F-117 had the highest program cost of any of the aircraft evaluated, flew the fewest sorties per strike aircraft, and its rate of fully destroying its targets was not terribly different than other strike aircraft (with the complicating factor that it was generally used to fly more dangerous missions).
I’m not aware of any more recent analysis of the F-117’s effectiveness (eg, in Kosovo), nor any study like this for the B-2.
The Air Force uses F-117s and B-2s to neutralize (“schwack”) air defenses before sending in less-stealthy aircraft to hit conventional targets. The stealth pilots can fly in at a moderate-to-low risk, kill a few air defense radars and communications hubs, and greatly reduce the danger that foreign air defenses pose to our conventional / second-wave attacks. Doing the same mission with conventional aircraft would be a very high-risk proposition.
I’m not certain that they’ve paid for themselves quite yet, but once you factor in the total cost of losing an aircraft (pilot’s life, pilot training costs, increased maintenance costs as fewer planes fly the same sorties, morale, possible intelligence exploitation) they’ve come pretty close.
Yes, they’re bloody expensive, and yes, they’re an overspecialized tool designed for a very specific mission. But now that we have them, I’m glad.
We don’t really want war materiel to “pay for itself” do we? That would require that we get lots of used out of it by getting into lots of situations requiring the use of war materiel.
I believe the very first proof-of-concept model built by Lockheed (which was not compromised by the need to be actually built or do anything useful) had a radar signature roughly equal to that of a grasshopper, but it still showed up if you looked hard enough. British planes tracked F117s in the Gulf, and plenty of modern radars can do the same, but the effective range is much reduced and much of the older equipment prevalent in the third world is totally unable to cope.
If radar stations are 50 km apart, and stealth means they can only detect you from 15km away rather than 25km, you have just made a 20km hole in the radar coverage to fly through whereas before there wasn’t a gap. That’s the basic premise, not total invisibility.
Yes, but only where they are really needed. Too expensive to risk a birdstrike on takeoff or a hit from the Golden BB
Do stealth fighters do what they were supposed to do?
If they were designed to do fly-overs before Nascar races and the superbowl then your answer would be yes!
First, it’s a common misconception that stealth planes were designed to be “invisible”. Of course they’re not invisible. They certainly can be detected in a variety of ways, the most obvious being the human eyeball.
However, modern antiaircraft weapons are heavily dependent on radar. That means, you use radar to find out where the enemy is, then shoot at him based on where the radar tells you he is. The better your radar is, the easier it is for you to detect the aircraft.
You can compare detecting planes by rader to detecting planes visually. A plane painted haze gray is going to be harder to detect than a plane painted neon orange. A plane with running lights is harder to detect than a plane with no lights. A noisy plane is harder to detect than a quiet plane. A small plane is harder to detect than a large plane. And so on.
So a stealth plane isn’t “invisible to radar”, it just uses lots of tricks to reduce its radar visibility. The big advantage is increasing the work needed to detect the plane, and reduce the range at which the plane can be detected. If you have a SAM radar that can detect normal planes 50% of the time at X kilometers, it could only detect a stealth plane 50% of the time at X/Y kilometers, X and Y being top secret values. But the idea is to reduce your observability so much that you fly wherever you like and never get within detection range of these SAM sites. And you are able to detect the location of the SAM sites, but they can’t detect you until it’s too late.
Stealth planes flown conservatively are able to bomb countries with third world air defenses with impunity, barring a golden BB. How they would have fared against the Soviet Union is a good question, no one knows for sure. Likewise no one knows how they’d fare against a modern air defense system, and we’re unlikely to ever find out since we’re not likely to be bombing London, Paris, Berlin, or Tokyo any time soon.
There’s also the domestic political factor to consider.
One thing we discovered in Vietnam, and again in Gulf War I, was that Americans will only support a war if the number of American casualties is small. If there were stories about American pilots flying conventional (non-stealthy) aircraft losing their lives taking out RADAR units, you’d have an excuse for protestors to march on Washington, burn their bras, etc… And you’d also have a public outcry to put those pilots in the high-priced stealth fighters.
Stealth fighters might be a good idea. But I was reacting to kanicbird’s post. Nothing is ever as simple as it implied - every action that is taken means some other action isn’t taken. You have to look at what the alternatives are and were before you know if you made the best decision. And you hardly ever know you made the right decision.
The best military tool is one that is so overwhelmingly powerful that no one dares challenge it. “Peace is Our Profession” wasn’t just the somewhat ironic motto of the Strategic Air Command–prolifically visible in Dr. Strangelove–but the underlying mentality of the strategic philosophy of the Air Force during the Cold War. It’s a tenuous and fundamentally flawed argument at best–it assumes that all parties are capable of making rational decisions based upon a realistic assessment of the consequences of action–but it has also been the guiding principle with regard to the extravagant budgeting on weapon systems during the latter half of the 20th Century. This makes it hard to establish a baseline, i.e. what would be the impact on our tactical capabilities if we adopted more technologically modest weapons? How to you make an evaluation of cost vs. reward?
With regard to the F-117–a system which has been used in numerous conflicts to great success–I don’t know how to assess its relative value, but it has proved highly successful and almost untouchable, albeit not the magic sceptre that press releases and Tom Clancy novels would have you believe. That it does not operate in all conditions and isn’t perfectly invisible to the entire spectrum of EM radiation including visible light, as the cited Mother Jones article whines on about, is an absurd arguement; for the mission it is designed to fly (tactical night bombing) it operates very well.
The B-2, on the other hand, is not only a boondoggle, but was strategically unnecessary even while it was in development; it was an attempt to keep SAC in the strategic bombing business instead of being replaced by caretakers to the ICBM force. It wasn’t intended for tactical or even theatre-level bombing use; it’s singular mission was to deliver large nuclear weapons in an undetectable and noninterceptible manner, not to carry out repeated sorties. Now it’s just being flow to justify having purchased the damn things to begin with (21 units out of the originally contracted 175).
One might as well ask if we got our money’s worth of the Minuteman program (the size and scale of which is comperable to the Manhattan Project), given that we’ve (thankfully) never launched one in operational capacity. Of course, the development of the Minuteman led directly to compact semiconducting microcomputers, solid fueled boosters, large composite structures, and a variety of other technologies used throughout industry today, so the benefits extend past the ambiguous deterrant value. With the Nighthawk, we certainly gained experience at building composite-framed aircraft and gained capabilities that give us a superior edge against most forces we might face, but whether we “got our money’s worth” begs the question of our priorities with said money.
While I can’t speak for the entire article, I can point out at least one inaccuracy.
The B-2 flies missions during the day. It’s black (well, grey, but I’ll call it black for simplicity’s sake) for a different reason.
The reason it’s painted black is the same reason that when you look up, airliners are brightly illuminated. Light from the atmosphere gets scattered up on to the aircraft, illuminating it from below. It tends to get brighter at higher altitudes (to a point, I’d imagine). Apparently, even at their ceilings, the U-2 and SR-71 are both visible to the naked eye (as bright dots), thanks to this phenomena.
The B-2 supposedly has a special light senson on it, that will sense this illumination, and (though some pretty funky calculations) come up with an altitude for the pilot to fly at, so the aircraft blends in with the surrounding sky (not darker, not lighter). The F-117 doesn’t fly that high, so it doesn’t need it/can’t use it, so they restrict it to night missions)
Unfortunately, I don’t remember the cite for this, as I don’t remember it’s exact source… It was from an article I read on active visual camoflage for aircraft, but unfortunately, I cannot remember the magazine it was in. Though I am leaning towards Popular Science.
I don’t know how light and sound behave in your world, but here on Earth flashing lights and loud whooshing noises are much easier to detect than absence of same.
In the Tom Clancy Book Debt of Honor they do IMHO a pretty good explanation of this using B-1B’s feeling out air defense radars. One of the members of the crew is constantly monitoring incoming radar strikes to determine likelyhood of detection and looking for the path with the worst radar coverage/least likelihood of detection.
Jack Handey: “Instead of trying to build newer and bigger weapons of destruction, we should be thinking about getting more use out of the ones we already have.”
