Totally agree, especially about the need to develop longer ranged and more capable missile tech. The US is so used to being the top dog (or allied to the folks with the top shelf weapons, tech and training) that we just haven’t pushed on this vector of technology. To beat us you don’t go head to head against our strengths but instead focus on what you CAN do juxtaposed with our own weaknesses. No one is going to field a bunch of cheap but capable fighter drones because if you build a drone capable of taking on a top tier air craft you’ve probably spent nearly as much as it would cost you to build the top tier air craft, and no one can afford them (including the US…like you said, if we could afford them and build the things we’d be doing it already). You’d lose a ton of the things and the cost to benefit would almost certainly still be in the US’s favor, since we have a budget of $600 billion dollars+ for the military while most other countries have substantially less.
Alternate idea : let’s invest in turboprop driven drones - fleets of them. Each drone aircraft will have an anti missile defense gun (a gatling gun or LED pumped laser).
The drones will fly in computer controlled formations, and each will have a phased array radar onboard. While these are some high tech parts, they can be mass produced with acceptable defect rates since you don’t have any pilots onboard.
Concept is, the drone fleet flies in a swarm, in a gridlike pattern, and they defeat stealth by shining their phased array radars in coordinated patterns with each other, looking for the sidescatter reflections and “holes in the sky” that indicate something is there. Any missiles fired at them, they shoot down. If someone tries to close to dogfighting range, every drone in range fires at them with computer controlled guns or lasers, bracketing the enemy jet with bullets or laser beams in a way that maximizes the probability of hit. None of the drones try to out-dogfight human pilots fighters, they fly in nice straight lines or do slow curves, but every drone has a gun turret or 2 that can hit 360 degrees so there are no blindspots anyway.
The coordination between aircraft is tightly coordinated via computers, but human operators are in charge of the overall swarm, can authorize targets to be bombed and weapons to be armed, etc.
Let’s just skip all that an go to flying monkey technology. It’s probably more doable.
Well, leaving aside that this would cost the world to develop and produce, even if the unit cost might be low sometime down the road, I could think of several brute force counters to such a thing right off, and I’m guessing that so will the US (who would be the only one with pockets deep enough to initially develop such a thing in the first place), let along countries like China who take ‘brute force approach’ as a matter of course.
Again, why go through all this complicated stuff and expense when you could just build a ton of longer range ground to air missile defenses for a hell of a lot less?? It’s as if people think drones are some sort of magic bullet that cures all ills or something.
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Let’s just skip all that an go to flying monkey technology. It’s probably more doable.
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They are rather hard on the bottom, er, line…
This issue is vastly more complicated that a simple comparison like this, but even this comparison really makes no sense at all. “An F-35 can’t beat an F-16 in a dogfight” is not far removed from saying that today’s U.S. Marine couldn’t beat William Wallace in a sword fight. It’s true, but it’s not an accurate representation of how those combatants would actually engage in battle.
A better analogy, actually, would be the endless debate around how the Allies were so stupid to build and use Sherman tanks in WWII when the brilliant Germans had the superior Panthers and Tigers. Which would be a great point if, in fact, warfare in France in 1944 was characterized by individual tank duels between Shermans and Panthers, a scenario in which the Panther would certainly be dominant, and also a scenario that happened so infrequently the Allies quite rightly did not see it as an economical problem to solve. What USUALLY happened was Shermans blew up German infantry or shot up smaller, lighter armored vehicles and strongpoints, because that’s mostly what the Germans had, their much smaller and unreliable tank force rarely being around.
Mind you, I’m not saying F-35 is a great idea. It may, in fact, be a gigantic turkey. Other military aircraft have not turned out well in the past, and there’s no reason it can’t happen again. It certainly may be the wrong choice for Canada, where the entire thing is now regarded as an immense fiasco. The idea, though, that you can fight off better fighters with a Hollywood movie scenario of immense numbers of slightly worse fighters and drones that look just like them is in ignorance of the economics of the situation. That just isn’t going to work; a country like Iran does not have the resources to do something like that AND hide the facts of the plan from the USA AND simultaneously achieve its other military goals with a realistic allocation of resources.
Yeah, but wouldn’t the stealthy features of the F-35 factor into the equation? I mean, if a large, powerful ground-based radar is expected to have trouble getting targeting locks on F-35s, why would a relatively small missile be any better at solving that problem?
I’m not convinced that we’re terminally behind in the missile category; we may be in some sort of lull in the procurement cycle, and/or not really expecting a lot of warfare with similarly armed adversaries. I mean, if we were expecting to fight other developed nations, we’d be seriously working on improvements and follow-ons to a whole slew of weapon systems developed and initially fielded in the 1980s and 1990s. Instead, in general, we’re incrementally improving those systems, and putting off follow-on systems as much as possible, and rearranging our forces to be more geared toward fighting smaller wars.
The main reason we’re seeing the F-22 and F-35 is because the F-22 was just about literally the last major weapon system of the Cold War (the YF-22 was chosen in 1991!), to replace the mid-1970s F-15 fleet, and the F-35 is slated to replace the early 1980s F-16. Airframes, especially those of high performance fighters do wear out, unlike say… a tank chassis or ship hull, and they do need to be replaced more often as a result.
Plus, depending on what they’re hitting, they don’t have to get all that close- the SLAM-ER (Navy) and JASSM (USAF), along with the JSOW (both), all have long ranges- something like 270 km for the SLAM-ER and upwards of 1000 km for the JASSM-ER variant, and the JSOW has a range around 70 nm.
Stealth features certainly do factor in the equation but the equation stays the same. Here is the equation: http://www.radartutorial.eu/01.basics/pic/formel13.print.png
An active missile, if it gets close enough, would very much benefit from being closer since the echo diminishes at the inverse 4th power of the distance between radar and target.
Also, an anti-air missile may well attack the F-35 from above and I’m not sure fighter stealth is optimized to counter illumination from above.
Whether that would be enough to make up for the greater radiated power, antenna gain and processing power of the ground-based radar, I don’t know.
ETA: And you’re quite right that distance are getting pretty long.
Right concept, but no need for bombs and missiles. the Chinese have already prepared for the coming cyber war. they have seeded the USA with Lenovo-made PCs, which contain the virii and worms needed to disable the internet.These are “sleeper” bots which will spring to life upon command. Cheap and effective, and very little bloodshed. The economy will shut down, and banks will be unable to process transactions.
Out of curiosity, what do you suppose that would do to the Chinese economy??
Ah, the good old combat box just updated for unmanned bombers. I imagine it would be just as vulnerable to ancient, low-tech flak as the B-17 fleets in WWII were. Plus, you’d have to have enough power or ammo on board to take out every missile fired at it- having strike aircraft fire unguided rockets at the formation so that it would expend its ammo, and then following up with actual interceptors would probably take care of it pretty easily.
Personally, I’d think that the real advantages of drones in combat are either due to their ability to stay on station for a LONG time, their relatively small size and the consequent difficulty in detecting them, or the potential for extreme performance.
Some excellent comments here on both sides I must say… I don’t presume to know I’m right I just wanted to start a discussion.
I do believe the F35 will be obsolete within 5 years of its introduction as a combat aircraft against near peer states, simply put the enemy knows too much about it, if its not radar advances or drone swarms they will figure out another strategy against it.
You might be right. Depends on what the enemy team has. In real life, I think the stealth versus detection battle can only end one way - with aircraft detection equipment that is impossible to evade. Whether it uses radar, lidar, IR sensors, or a massive grid of all 3, stealth is ultimately a dead end. (the laws of physics frown on you being able to emit huge amounts of waste heat and fly a chunk of metal through the air without there being easy ways to detect this)
And if stealth is a dead end, such that you can always detect “the bomber”, ground based weapons have an inherent advantage in that they can be much larger and heavier. There are heavier more advanced ground based weapons than anything actually used in warfare, like lasers and railguns, that have enormously more range than anything using gunpowder. That is, we know now that buck rogers ain’t happening, but you can build a railgun emplacement the size of a few 18-wheelers that will have a range of hundreds of miles. (old school flak shells can fall back to earth)
And, the shots won’t miss - especially not laser beams. You can put guidance fins in the flak now with a circuit board to control it the size of a stick of gum, and have the shell make corrections to counter the aircraft’s evasive maneuvers and wind currents)
So the classic “the bomber will always get through” may just be an artifact of a particular era of technology. Heck, if German flak in ww2 had computer guidance and didn’t miss, and there was unbroken coverage, bombers would have almost never gotten through.
Arms races are a fact of warfare from time immemorial. Formations, weapons, tactics, etc…all change, and are countered.
People were saying that the shaped charge and guided missile made tanks obsolete in 1975. Except, not long after that, armies started fielding composite and reactive armor, swinging the pendulum back toward tanks. Then tandem charge, top attack and EFP submunitions are/have swung the pendulum back toward the defensive measures somewhat.
Stealth is just another swing in the game, as far as aircraft are concerned. We had aircraft, then AA guns, and after that radar, then missiles, and now stealth. They’ll figure out some way to negate it, either fully or partially, and then someone will develop something else.
Where this game gets ugly is when the state-of-the-art nations deploy their gear against adversaries a generation or two back, or where the tactics haven’t adjusted with the gear; the results can be horribly devastating. Think early WWI, where horsed cavalry charged machine guns, or Gulf War I, where US tanks were firing at and destroying Iraqi tanks before they were even aware of the US tanks, or even the Napoleonic tactics during the Civil War being fought with rifled muskets and Minie balls.
Right, but is there anyone in this thread that believes stealth will still be a useful tactic for the next 30 years? And if not, can the 1.5 trillion spent on the F35 program possibly be worth it?
Of course it isn’t worth it. Yes, the USA probably ought to purchase some new jet fighters. They shouldn’t pay a trillion bucks for them. They don’t cost that much when other nations get em, and the fighter they’ve bought isn’t worth a trillion bucks. Also, there’s no competition and no options - one fighter is supposed to basically do it all. That’s bad engineering and bad design practice. There should be several independent manufacturers each doing their best to solve a smaller subset of the problem, and the airforce should buy some and test them, and then buy a lot more of whichever aircraft turns out to actually be really good.
The F-35 purchase should never have been approved based on “paper” studies - before committing to buy thousands of them, the air force should have gotten their hands on a real aircraft that actually **works **in the real world, and then bought more. They should have paid a half dozen contractors enough money to create those aircraft, with some kind of incentive scheme that encourages aerospace companies to have some stake in the game.
What the Russians are doing makes a lot more sense. Start with a battle-proven airframe, or one derived from airframes that actually worked in the real world. Add on modern thrust vectoring engines, clean up the aerodynamics of the wings with help from modern modeling software. Install new avionics that take advantage of new techniques like phased array radars. Don’t bother with 1 trick ponies like stealth, make a fighter that can fight and win.
Reducing the distance at which one’s air and sea assets can be detected/tracked/targeted may be worth it, yes. Whether it actually will be worth it will be known in hindsight just like many military technologies. It is, however, a reasonable option based on the information we have.
Of course the US should use stealth. But it already has a fleet of stealth bombers (B-2 spirit) and a fleet of very capable stealth air superiority fighters (F-22) plus cruise missiles and drones with missile capability. Making every single fighter that the Air Force, Navy and Marines have stealth is IMO unnecessary and the money could have been far better spent elsewhere. If advances in radar do make stealth ineffective in the next 10 years then the US has spent 1.5 trillion for a fleet of slow fighters that can’t dog fight.
Sure, but ultimately decrying their lack of dogfighting ability is not too far off from complaining about the modern infantryman’s paucity of bayonet or fighting knife training. Yes, that sort of combat still happens, but it’s not the point, and very, very rarely something that pilots intend to do.
You are assuming that A) such a technology could be developed, and B) such a technology could then be put into production and brought out in sufficient numbers to make a real threat against the US stealth air craft, and C) that it would be so wide spread that it would render the entire system obsolete in all cases including where the US would most likely be using them, and D) that there would be nothing the US could do to upgrade or mitigate this new technology (which the US would be most likely, or as likely in any case, to develop in the first place)…and that all of this would happen in 10 years. Seems pretty unlikely to me. If we get, oh, say 20 years out of the current generation of air craft, even if we can’t upgrade or mitigate and continue to use the current air frames, well, we will probably not get all our money out of these systems…but they will still be dominant until that happens and other countries catch up and deploy the new systems. In the mean time, I’m guessing we won’t just be sitting back doing nothing and not bothering to design the next gen of fighters.
The F135 engine that powers the F-35 is indeed probably more or less at the limits of the performance that can be squeezed out of it. There is a notional idea that the F-35 could be re-engined in a decade or so. The Air Force is investing in new engine technologies that could have a very substantial benefit to F-35 performance, but this is still a good ways away from being a real upgrade.