Just today I found out that there is a new bookreleased on robotics and war: Wired For War. Appears to have received excellent reviews too; maybe I will pick it up sometime.
Not when there are only 64 aircraft in existence. And they cost around $120 million a pop. And again this was against a small civil-war ravaged eastern bloc country (and it’s AA defences were super-power quality compared to what we’ve faced since then in Iraq and Afghanistan).
What is an “acceptable” casualty rate when the number of aircraft is measured in the dozens, and each has a price tag that represented a reasonable sized chunk of some countries GDPs ?
Nitpick: the F-22 carries ordnance in an internal bay to avoid exactly this problem.
You don’t understand why “if we lose one of these aircraft, the entire project is a failure!” is a ridiculous standard to hold a combat aircraft to? It probably has the 2nd lowest casualty rate of any combat aircraft in history (behind the B-2). If we built 1000 of them instead of 64, and we lost one even with the same amount of sorties, by your standard it’s a far more successful aircraft… even with the exact same record.
I don’t know what the planners who make the flight plans consider to be an acceptable chance of a loss - but I can guarantee you they don’t view the loss of one aircraft as a complete failure of the program.
I’d have to say that, assuming Ravenman’s stats are correct, a 200+ to 1 kill ratio is hard to dismiss as a failure…especially considering the air craft that went up against it (F-15 and F-16 fighters).
ETA: Even if we build no more than a hundred or so the plane would still be a success because of all the stuff we learned building the thing. We now have a hell of a lot of data on building next generation fighters that could be used in new designs that would be less costly but more capable than current generation fighters.
-XT
He was talking about the F-117 actually, not the F-22. We lost one in Serbia because we got arrogant and kept using the same routes to a target over and over and they shot one down. He says that since we only produced 64 of those aircraft, the loss of one (since it represents about 1.5% of the total) indicates that the program was a failure.
Same point then (though I missed that the discussion was about the F-117…apologies). We learned a ton about stealth technology in a fighter air craft, what could and couldn’t be done. So, it’s pretty difficult to call the program a failure.
-XT
No of course it does not make it a failure, I never said that. But it does represent a fairly significant casualty rate when you consider it against 1960’s era soviet SAMs. And those obsolete Serbian SAMs represent the most dangerous thing they had to fly against, at least since the first Gulf War (nothing in Iraq invasion in Afghanistan came close). In the future we are going to face something better than that, and at that point the concept of having a handful of incredibly advanced, but very expensive planes (and equally expensive and hard to replace pilots) might not seem such a good idea after.
Sure a state-of-art 21st century Russian/Chinese/Indian AA system is not going to wipe out a squadron of F22s or even do that much to prevent a squadron of them from completing their mission. But when you are dealing with that few planes it does not take that many downed planes to make the whole project look like a failure. Just 13 downed F22s (i.e. a bad couple of days in Vietnam) would represent a 10% casualty rate on a fleet of 130 or so F22s (yes, you’re right that’s probably the wrong term, technically speaking).
There’s no value in evaluating casualty rates by the percentage of aircraft ever made killed. If they’d instead built 500 aircraft that flew the same amount of total sorties, the casualty rate would be .002 and yet there would be no difference in loss rate even though the total loss as a percentage of available aircraft decreased by 7/8ths.
Those planes flew dozens if not hundreds of combat sorties - if the number is 50 sorties per plane, we’re looking at 3200 sorties for the aircraft. Of which one was lost. Which gives us a loss rate of .0003 per sortie.
That is exactly my point, it is much better to have 499 planes left than 63 left (and of course the cost of that one lost plane would have a been alot less). When you are talking about tiny number of planes there is indeed relevance in the number of planes lost versus the total number in existence.
Which would be not really much better than the rate in Vietnam which was 0.0004:
Interesting. I just pulled the number 50 sorties per plane out of my ass - I really have no idea.
But you don’t see how you have ridiculously high standards? Only one aircraft was lost in its entire operational history. The only way to go is losing zero aircraft during its operational history.
Even with the 1.5% number, it’s not a big deal. Ok, so 98.5% of F-117s ever built survived their entire operational history, making it to retirement. That number is bad?
I think his point is that one of our most advanced fighters was shot down using old crappy air defense systems. The problem with that is that you can always get lucky. They call that a golden BB, and it can happen no matter how good your fighter is or how bad the air defense system is.
-XT
My orignal main point is that these figures (when you consider what they were up against) shows that the stealth aircraft are aren’t invulnerable to AA. It wouldn’t take a complete revolution in radar technology to inflict fairly serious casualties on a fleet of aircraft the size of the F22 fleet, just someone who knows what their doing, with up-to-date technology, rather than 50 year old ex-soviet crap.
If you have 10,000 B17s (and are building more every day) you can afford 50+ percent casualties on a single raid. If you have a 130 F22s (and stopped production of them years ago), even losing one or two on a single raid would be a big deal.
Well…afaik WE can’t really do that ourselves. What makes you think that any potential antagonist of the US will come up with some way to do so? Even if they do, they would still need to actually get up there and fight those F-22…and, frankly, if our own F-15’s and F-16’s are getting their asses kicked in job lots (with US technology and pilots), I’m finding it hard to credit that anyone except perhaps the Euro’s or Japan would do any better. And I’m thinking we probably won’t be going to war with either of them in the foreseeable future.
-XT
All we have to do is wait for the mass produced Chinese model then?
Well, yeah, it’s always a big deal if you lose out on a pilot and a nearly $100 million aircraft. But that wouldn’t diminish their effectiveness over thousands and thousands of sorties. We could always buy more if we had to.
So what’s your point? Don’t bother to build new weapon systems unless we plan to have 1000+?
Because our new plane might suffer X casualty rate, we should stick with our old ones that will suffer 10 or 20 times that casualty rate?