Why doesn't Israel/[insert country] have jet bombers?

[MichaelEmouse]

Ragu & LSL, thank you for your informative answers.

A related datum to OP is that with all that’s been said about the low utility of big bombers for the IAF, it doesn’t mean that Israel has something against big airplanes. The IAF uses the 707 Re’em for EW which is a modified 707. Being a big plane allows it to carry a good amount of personnel and electronics for many hours.

AWACS and EW are two situations where having the plane equivalent of an 18 wheeler is useful and since that’s critical to Israel, it does use a big plane for that. It must still be said that it seems to prefer repurposed small civil jets and turboprop planes for both those roles.

@Really_Not_All_That_Bright

You mean the Su-24. The Su-27 family was solely designed for air superiority and interception until the Su-30MKI was introduced with some (relatively minor) ground attack capability.

This make me think: With advances in bomb accuracy and range and the general decrease in bomb weight, I wonder how grey the difference will get between a light bomber and a multirole fighter with a deep interdiction capability like the SU-30.

@Raguleader

Flying at low altitude leaves them vulnerable to a wide variety of smaller air-defense weapons, including artillery, rapid-fire cannon, vehicle and man-portable anti-air missiles, and things like trees, telephone poles, power lines, and terrain.

Would a fighter or the FB-111 in its days really be going a lot faster than a bomber while doing nap-of-the-earth (NOTE) flying? Wouldn’t they be equally exposed to trees/phone poles/power lines/terrain?

@Raguleader

This is done with dedicated hunter-killer planes performing “Wild Weasel” missions

Which planes do this? I presume they use flying decoys and HARM missiles but what else?

@LSLGuy

To be sure, that exposed us to small arms & un-aimed HMG/autocannon barrage fire.

Maybe I underestimate the danger of ground-based weapons that can get you while flying below 100m AGL. It just doesn’t seem that they’d be that big a deal outside flat terrain.

@LSLGuy

Absent stealth, if you’re tracked you’re doomed

@LSLGuy

if you drop into a valley that has enemy ADA/SAM in it, you’re gonna get shot at. With real high Pk.

I can see that getting tracked in wartime or going into the valley with modern AA would be scary but if a plane is flying low, the engagement time should be short and DRFM, DIRCM, decoys, chaff & flares should make the target rather less than doomed, no? Wouldn’t pulling off the radar’s various gates significantly reduce the Pk?

I’ll admit that IR tracking would quite likely go unnoticed by the target and that the delay between an IR-using weapon firing and hitting would be very low. I doubt that the kind of AA a plane would likely encounter while flying NOTE would have LPI radar that would allow it to delay DRFM and gate pull-offs, though.

@LSLGuy

As to FB-111 & SU-30, it was mostly a matter of aircraft size & design priorities. All else equal, a bigger aircraft will have longer range. It’s a manifestation of the square-cube scaling law.

Ah, yes, the good old square-cube law. It’s counter-intuitive that a bigger F-22 would be both more capable in terms of range & payload and also stealthier against L, S and C bands. I wonder just how big multi-role fighters (that don’t have to land & takeoff from a carrier) could get. What would be the disadvantages of supersizing the F-22?

@LSLGuy

Nowadays with effective lookdown-shootdown radars

@LSLGuy

And if the bad guys have counter air, low altitude is no sanctuary at all.

As an aside, if two fighters went at it with one high altitude and one low, given broadly equal technology, do you think the decibel reduction for the fighter looking down would be significant enough to give the lower-altitude fighter an edge?

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

@MichaelEmouse

This make me think: With advances in bomb accuracy and range and the general decrease in bomb weight, I wonder how grey the difference will get between a light bomber and a multirole fighter with a deep interdiction capability like the SU-30.

It’s not so much about increases in technology as decreases in pressure to spend on the military. Most countries are no longer inducting highly specialized bombers into their armed forces because they’re just too expensive. Everyone’s buying multirole fighters instead.

[Leo_Bloom]

[ETA hijack: What’s up with jet naming, even in America? I’ve even seen the pilot’s name on some U.S. ones. (Israel is so much the other way, forbidding photos, seeing a person’s face in an Israeli cockpit in one of those photos in the article was a first for me.)

[Leo_Bloom]

Ahem. Civilians in the audience here.

IR and AA we all get, and AGL Above Ground Level, I presume.

…would be scary but if a plane is flying low, the engagement time should be short and DRFM, DIRCM, decoys, chaff & flares should make the target rather less than doomed, no? Wouldn’t pulling off the radar’s various gates significantly reduce the Pk?

Digital Radio Frequency Memory
Directed Infrared Countermeasures
Kill Probability (for dyslexic memories)
Pulling off gates:

I doubt that the kind of AA a plane would likely encounter while flying NOTE would have LPI radar that would allow it to delay DRFM and gate pull-offs, though.

LP1: I got nuttin’.

Referenced:
Wright Patterson Airforce Base
ARFL Acronyms
http://www.wpafb.af.mil/library/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=5987
AFRL: Air Force Research Laboratory (which I had to look up in itself, a meta-search)

[ref MichaelEmouse post above.]

[AK84]

@tomndebb

Where would they use them?
They have KC-707 refueling tankers to get their F-15s to any target that would actually threaten them.
They, unlike the U.S, cannot (virtually) guarantee unlimited air superiority, so they would have no way to send slower bombers over Iran or Pakistan without losing them to the air defenses of those countries.

What direct strategic or geo-political conflict are Israel and Pakistan locked in?

Indeed what far away country is Israel in direct strategic competition with, to justify such platforms?

[Leo_Bloom]

[Snark incoming…]

In New York City politics, an old saying is you can’t get elected mayor unless you visit the three I’s, the three countries of the major ethnic voting blocks: Israel, Italy, and Ireland.

Hint: It’s not one of those, but has something in common.
ETA: Just realized you already had the answer in your grasp…

[MichaelEmouse]

DRFM is a bit like casting an illusion spell on the enemy radar using its own radar emissions. DRFM listens to the other radar, records its emissions, modifies them and sends them back which hopefully makes the radar believe that the false signal is the true echo. You can mess with the radar that way.
Pulling off gates: A radar, especially a missile guidance radar, puts on “blinders” to focus on narrow values of speed/distance/angle and not get distracted by what lies outside these ranges. A jammer can fool a radar into adjusting those blinders according to the values of an illusionary target. The jammer can make the radar chase ghosts or it can switch off the jamming which requires the radar to go through the track acquisition again which can take very previous time.
LPI= low probability of intercept. LPI radar is like a stealthy flashlight that allows you to see with it without enemies being aware that you’re shining it on them. It is possible to detect if your radar warning equipment is sophisticated enough but it takes some time for the radar warning to realize that it’s getting lit up by an LPI radar. During that time, the LPI radar allows you to detect, track and perhaps engage the target without the target knowing anything is happening.
ETA: Yes, “AGL” is “above ground level”. Sorry for the alphabet soup, I didn’t want to make my already long post even longer to read.

[AK84]

What? Indonesia? India :rolleyes:

If you are talking about Iran, then no, Tel Aviv to Tehran is almost exactly 1000 miles, well within range of IDF-Aircraft and most strategic, economic, political and populated targets of Iran are also within that distance.

ETA: To Leo Bloom.

[Leo_Bloom]

@Really_Not_All_That_Bright

It’s not so much about increases in technology as decreases in pressure to spend on the military. Most countries are no longer inducting highly specialized bombers into their armed forces because they’re just too expensive. Everyone’s buying multirole fighters instead.

@AK84

…
Indeed what far away country is Israel in direct strategic competition with, to justify such platforms?

Well let’s get back to this. In OP I threw in England on a guess.

What far away country is England in direct strategic competition with?

So who has bombers-yes-those-kind-of-bombers, and who plans/wants them, besides us and the Rooskies?

[Boyo_Jim]

What are the OP’s criteria that define “bomber”? There are plenty of countries that have bombers, in the sense that they only drop bombs and have no anti-air weapons, but they aren’t ginormous like US and Russian bombers.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

Argentina.

[GreasyJack]

So, semi-serious question here, does a subsonic heavy bomber like the B-52 really have a fundamental advantage over, say, something like a 747? It seems like on paper the payload and performance specs all seem pretty similar. Since the consensus here seems to be that these sorts of bombers would be pretty useless without air superiority and a lack of ground defenses, it seems like if you were the defense minister of some small country that might conceivably need a strategic bomber you’d get much better value for the money adapting an old cargo plane or airliner than coming up with a whole purpose-made airframe.

[Leo_Bloom]

@Boyo_Jim

What are the OP’s criteria that define “bomber”? There are plenty of countries that have bombers, in the sense that they only drop bombs and have no anti-air weapons, but they aren’t ginormous like US and Russian bombers.

Exactly. Despite OP’s positing of such a thing, part of OP, and continuing even more in light of the SD being liberally passed around in the subsequent comments, your question is on the table.

[AK84]

@Leo_Bloom

Well let’s get back to this. In OP I threw in England on a guess.

What far away country is England in direct strategic competition with?

So who has bombers-yes-those-kind-of-bombers, and who plans/wants them, besides us and the Rooskies?

Argentina has been mentioned. Plus, The huge Russian landmass. And the UK (not “Engand”) has not had long range bombers for 20 plus years now.

Right now the countries which have long range heavy bombers are 1) The US, 2) The Russian Federation and 3) The Peoples Republic of China.

India, Pakistan, the UK, Egypt, all had medium to long rang bombers which they have given up in the last 20 or so years.

[gnoitall]

@AK84

What? Indonesia? India :rolleyes:

If you are talking about Iran, then no, Tel Aviv to Tehran is almost exactly 1000 miles, well within range of IDF-Aircraft and most strategic, economic, political and populated targets of Iran are also within that distance.

ETA: To Leo Bloom.

Indeed. One of the few examples of a strategic airstrike carried out by the IAF in recent history was Operation Opera: the 1981 bombing of the Iraqi Osiris-type reactor near Baghdad. With unmodified F-16As.

The difference between a strategic bomber and a tactical bomber is the target, not the weapon.

[Ravenman]

@GreasyJack

So, semi-serious question here, does a subsonic heavy bomber like the B-52 really have a fundamental advantage over, say, something like a 747? .

The main advantage of one is that it has doors on the bottom of the fuselage to dump “luggage” out over enemy territory, and the other relies on ground crew to lose the actual luggage before taking flight. But seriously, putting big ass doors in an airplane is serious business. The Navy P-8 is based on the 737, but it required an extensive bit of engineering to put some doors in the bottom where torpedoes can fall out from.

Suggesting that one out bomb bays in a 747 is kind of like suggesting putting an F-150 bed on a Town Car because they have similar dimensions.

I do not know for a fact why Israel never obtained a heavy bomber, but it seems to me in the years before precision guided munitions that perhaps Israel never expected to need to dump 50 tons of bombs on one sortie. And then after the PGM era arrived, they saw no need to dump 50 tons of bombs on one target.

[AK84]

Who were/are they going to hit? There are some targets in S Egypt which they might want to visit, but these could easily be dealt with by employing aerial refuelling or drop tanks. It’s not like they have huge Ocean areas to patrol like Indonesia or Australia, or have very large nuclear armed neighbours like India and Pakistan.

Why spend the huge amount of resources that such platforms demand.

[Leo_Bloom]

Good stuff here:
The Next Generation Bomber: Background, Oversight Issues, and Options for Congress

March 7, 2008

Anthony Murch
Congressional Research Report

http://assets.opencrs.com/rpts/RL34406_20080307.pdf

[LSLGuy]

@Really_Not_All_That_Bright

You mean the Su-24. The Su-27 family was solely designed for air superiority and interception until the Su-30MKI was introduced with some (relatively minor) ground attack capability.

Good catch. I did indeed mean Su-24 Fencer Sukhoi Su-24 - Wikipedia .

[LSLGuy]

@GreasyJack

So, semi-serious question here, does a subsonic heavy bomber like the B-52 really have a fundamental advantage over, say, something like a 747? It seems like on paper the payload and performance specs all seem pretty similar. Since the consensus here seems to be that these sorts of bombers would be pretty useless without air superiority and a lack of ground defenses, it seems like if you were the defense minister of some small country that might conceivably need a strategic bomber you’d get much better value for the money adapting an old cargo plane or airliner than coming up with a whole purpose-made airframe.

This has been debated in the industry for years.

There are a couple issues. If you’re attacking a huge country with a hard to defend perimeter, e.g. Russia, you may sneak a good ways in. Against a much smaller country with a defensible perimeter you won’t.

Bombers overflying targets and dropping gravity bombs is a holdover from the 1950s. The future is launching standoff missiles.

If launching standoff missiles from outside the enemy country you may not need the superior battle-worthiness of a dedicated military design. A repurposed civil design is probably good enough in that regard. But …

Right now Boeing is suffering stupid (and potentially ruinous) degrees of cost overrun on the KC-46 program entirely because they and USAF failed to communicate clearly on how much of the aircraft was to be a civilian box stock 767 and how much was to be redesigned and rebuilt according to mil-spec for a combat aircraft. I suspect both sides were doing a lot of wishful thinking, i.e. just hoping the other side didn’t notice.

Even after you get past that issue you still need to modify the aircraft with a way to get the missiles from inside storage to the outside for launch. That’s a non-trivial modification. The whole arrangement of structure, plumbing, air supply, etc. are all different whether you’re building an airplane which is almost entirely pressurized versus one where only, say, 10% is. Sawing an extra bomb bay door in a DC-4 and calling it a B-9 is a lot simpler than doing the same thing to a 777 or 747.