I’d argue that happened, for all intents and purposes, during WW2. The problem was that pilots were not.
Only because we tend to care about insurgents demands. We overwhelmed Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, so the drones don’t make our tactical advantage that much more significant. The issue is always about the peace after the war.
North Vietnam didn’t hold off the US, we just were unable to rule a hostile populace, that’s hardly the same as ‘holding off’. If we want to walk troops anywhere in the world, we can except maybe the interior of China and Russia. It’s a matter of softer objectives that robots are irrelevant to that can cause a loss such as in Vietnam.
This may be a stupid question, but where does one draw the line between a fighter drone and a missle? I mean there are some obvious differences like the missle is designed to smash into it’s target, and a drone is reusable.
I guess what I’m getting is a manned fighter armed with long-range autonomous high-performance fire-and-forget missles just as good as a drone warplane? Sure the drone has higher performance than a human piloted aircraft, but it doesn’t have higher performance than the missles. And the human aircraft can fire those missles from miles away, well before they get into a Top Gun style dogfight.
msmith537 Precisely because of what you have described there is no such thing as a dogfight any longer. Fighters are bomb/missile platforms so the term ‘fighter’ is a misnomer. A cheap drones carrying missiles would probably be a much more effective platform than an F-22 which has an $ 85m price tag and a multimillion dollar pilot.
Because the F-16 isn’t a stealthy aircraft and the F-22 is, and in the modern electronic countermeasure environment, having an aircraft like that is very valuable, especially for night operations. We had the F-117 as a decent first effort for a stealthy fighter plane, but by accounts I’ve read it wasn’t especially fast or maneuverable, and now it’s been retired. Enter the F-22, which is stealthy, fast, manueverable and very capable.
And completely useless in today’s battlefield theater… Please highlight for me the advantage the F-22 gives us in the fight against Al Qaeda?
Sure based on what? Your intuition?
In war games excercises and simulations, modern SU-27s with good pilots kill F-15s at a greater than 1:1 ratio… across different scenarios it averages something like .7 SU-27s dead per F-15.
In the same scenarios, the F-22 kills SU-27s at a ratio of around 20:1., almost 30 times more effective.
The F-22 isn’t some marginal improvement - it’s dramatic, it keeps the US fighter forces ahead of the entire world. By cancelling the project we’re looking at parity against many parts of the world rather than superiority, at least in terms of capability for the fighters.
An upgrade to the F15 or F16 wouldn’t give them nearly the same capabilities as the F-22. We’ve already spent the money on developing the F-22, creating the tools to produce it, and it’s already in production - most of the money of the project is a sunk cost. So cancelling now is stupid - we’re just wasting our sunk costs by not exploiting them.
The F15 started development in the late 60s. It’s very old - both in terms of its design and the actual airframes. The latter will cause maintenance to become progressively more expensive too.
To say that we’re in a world that no longer requires fighter planes is naive. Armies are always preparing to fight their last war - there’s no guarantee that we’ll fight nothing but asymetical insurgencies from here on out, and the development and production time for modern weapon systems is such that you won’t have the luxury of starting a program when a new threat emerges - you’ll have to be prepared against a wide variety of threats before they present themselves.
Part of the reason that conflicts with countries like China are so unlikely is because they’re so far behind technologically. But they’re investing in catching up. The F-22 would keep us ahead by decades - they’d never test us in a regional conflict because we could wipe their air force out nearly effortlessly - but they might feel they could achieve enough success against our current fleet to be worthwhile.
Right now it’s a couple of things, I would guess. One is payload. Currently there aren’t any drones that are nearly as big as a modern fighter/bomber, which means they cannot carry as much ordinance as a piloted plane. I think the original Predator could only be equipped with one bomb or one or two Hellfire missles.
Another is control of the craft. I am still going to hold to the belief that a manned warplane is more capable of evasive manuevers, anti-jamming and such. And they are much faster than drones (for now). And I doubt the ability of a remotely controlled aircraft being effective at engaging an enemy aircraft like a piloted warplane can.
I still wonder about the lag situation, too. We have drones flying along the Pakistani/Afghani border that are controlled remotely from a US airbase (in Arizona?). I find it hard to believe that control of these drones is instantaneous, and the bigger the drones get and the faster they go, that’s going to become a bigger issue for civilian safety, let alone costly crashes.
The F117 was never intended to be a fighter plane, it’s designation was for counterintelligence purposes.
One of the big issues with drones that hasn’t been raised in this thread is that as long as you have a human in the loop you’re suspectable to jamming. Are you confident enough in your software to allow robots to operate autonomously in the event of jamming?
And who says that AQ is the sum total of the battlefield that the US may need to participate in for the foreseeable future? The way you seem to think the US shouldn’t bother to develop any new generation weapons systems…after all, since all we’ll ever fight is AQ (and since fighting is all we’ll ever need to do, as that deterrence stuff is for the birds), our old weapons systems are good enough.
How did that work out for the French in WWII btw?
-XT
Its a bit of a side-track. But it seems to be pretty short sighted to plan you military around the fact you will always be fighting turbaned fanatics with out of date ex-soviet small-arms.
I’m no fan of an out of control military industrial complex, but at some point we will have to fight someone slightly better equipped than that.
And why don’t you highlight the advantage of lightweight body armor in air to air combat?
Wait, are you going to say that nobody is saying that body armor is supposed to have a role in air to air combat?
If that’s what you were going to say, then I might point out that nobody is arguing that the primary purpose of the F-22 is to bomb Al Qaeda caves.
If the F-22 has no role in today’s war, and on that basis you say that we should not have any F-22s, how do you feel about ballistic missile submarines? How many terrorists have they killed lately?
It can eliminate hard targets or groups of enemy fighters faster and more completely than a drone can. It can be upon them before they knew what hit them, given reliable intelligence. Drones are slow, painfully so, and the Taliban are well aware of them and what they sound and look like.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t use UAV’s, because they have been proven effective within their limited scope. And I’m sure that technology will make them better and better over the years.
What I am saying is that we need both going forward. And upon review, what SenorBeef said.
The french actually had some of the best weapon systems in the world and a very modern army by most standards of the day, so I’m not sure that’s the example you want to make to support your case.
Ok, then here, give me a link to the last dogfight using state of the art fighter planes.
Ok, so in scenarios the F-22 is more effective against an Su-27. When was the last time there was a dogfight with an Su-27?
Ok, what is the advantage of superiority?
Yes, it’s already in production. I’m not talking about not producing them now, the bulk of the cost has already been bought and paid for, but the problem is the thinking where people believe we need this massive technological advantage in fighter technology. Why must we be so much more advanced in fighter tech?
Well as has been pointed out before, new airframes can be built.
Yes, and fighter planes are a preparation to fight their last war. Not even the last one really.
There are other reasons besides fighter jets that are far more important to the Chinese. Like the fact that they are so heavily invested in us and going to war with us would ravage their economy.
And it’s thinking long-term to believe you’ll always be fighting the Soviet Union who are keeping up with us in an arms race?
Yes, and how many cheap drones armed with cruise missiles could have been developed for the budget of the F-22?
Predators are painfully slow, why not develop a fast drone? And what advantage against Al Qaeda does the F-22 have over the F-16 or F-18?
Likely so.
Well I guess when the Soviet Union comes at us we’ll be ready.
I’m not so sure about that. A quote from Wikipedia: “During the Persian Gulf War in 1991, the F-117A flew approximately 1,300 sorties and scored direct hits on 1,600 high-value targets in Iraq[1] while flying 6,905 combat flying hours.[30] The F-117 comprised only 2.5% of the American aircraft in Iraq yet struck more than 40% of the strategic targets.[31] “During their mission, the F-117A pilots delivered over 2,000 tons of precision-guided ordnance with a hit rate of better than 80 percent. Although the 37th Tactical Fighter Wing Provisional and its 42 stealth fighters represented just 2 1/2 percent of all allied fighter and attack aircraft in the Gulf, the F-117As were assigned against more than 31 percent of the strategic Iraqi military targets attacked during the first 24 hours of the air campaign.”[30] During the war, it performed poorly dropping smart bombs on military targets, achieving a success rate of only 40%.”
Edit: And I did raise the concern about jamming in post #68.
Just saying. Nice signing on Hood today! We were hoping to land him as a #3CB.
I feel a need to point out that just because we may never fight a war with China does not mean we may not fight a war against some nation armed with Chinese super-aircraft.
Nevermind that it’s not even an actual response to what I said, because nowhere in my argument do I even touch on the idea that we shouldn’t develop new technology. XT not only gave a horrible example for his argument, but his argument wasn’t even a rebuttal to what I said.