Cite taught me a new word: camouflet Camouflet - Wikipedia, so thanks double.
It the space cleared by the bomb after penetration which does not breach the surface (which is a plain old crater). Obviously important for bombing underground nuclear facilities and contamination.
But that’s a different thread. I think.
Yes, but that was really just showing off (and they required in-flight refueling). Nearly all B-2 sorties to Iraq were from Diego Garcia or UK bases.
The problem with the first thing is that flying over or loitering in other countries’ airspace becomes a big political exercise requiring permission from those countries. I recall that the US airstrike on Libya back in the 80s required some really long indirect flight path because the US couldn’t get permission to fly over several of our European allies.
The second pert … fighters sometimes fly “Combat Air Patrol” (CAP), loitering to intercept incoming attacks. I haven’t heard of a corresponding term for bombers waiting to be assigned a target, though I believe they used a similar strategy of ground support during the Vietnam war.
Thanks. Although I never thought of “bombers–>ground support” before.
B-2s are no faster than airliners, and probably slower. So it’s leave Missouri on Monday, arrive over the target on Tuesday, and be home for the Wednesday evening news. With no landing but lots of aerial refueling enroute. In the recent thread about official use of “drugs” in the military this is one of the plausible scenarios where amphetamines might well be being used.
They keep the B-2s in Missouri rather than forward basing them simply because the basing infrastructure is very expensive for them and there hasn’t been enough call to build a forward operating base (“FOB”) in Europe or an on-side Middle Eastern country.
“Loitering” is all the rage in air war against insurgencies and less-than-peer conventional adversaries. It admits that by and large, we aren’t attacking fixed immobile infrastructure, the traditional *raison d’ etre *of strategic bombers.
So the idea is to fly over EnemyLand and just hang out there. Sometime over the next few hours some bad guy somewhere will highlight themselves as a target. Maybe artillery or SAMs will come out of a cave and into view of a spotting drone. Maybe a convoy will try to run what amounts to our aerial blockade of their road network. Maybe HUMINT will discover that Omar the Overly Evil is hiding out this afternoon at some particular address. Etc.
IOW, we know from experience that the next 12 hours will expose 20,000 bomb-pounds worth of targets. We just don’t know where or when they’ll be. Ground attack aircraft patrolling for targets of opportunity was standard WWII doctrine, but was mostly done by fighter bombers (e.g. P-47, P-38) or light bombers such as the British Mosquito. The difference between then and now is whether targets are found by the attacker’s eyeballs or by the global ISR network he’s plugged into.
Naturally, loitering requires two things: lots of fuel capacity and the ability to survive long term in enemy airspace. Survival is easy over current IS areas, Afghanistan, Yemen, etc. It will be much more problematic in a WWIII or even a *Trump bombs Iran *scenario.
**LSLGuy **can probably answer this better, but for ground attack aircraft ISTM that loitering is only necessary for close air support.
ETA: oh look, he already did. 
When bombers are loitering until they’re assigned a target, it’s quite often it’s a ground support target. Either some of our tropps are being atacked, or they’re going somewhere and run into opposition. If the bomber had a target or targets to start with, they’d have no reason to loiter.
Now I remember a WWII term. There were standing patrols (make that 2 terms!) of fighterbombers that were called “cab ranks” that would hang out looking for German tank columns and other vehicle convoys appear on the roads where they could be hit.
“armed recce” was another term from that era. Fly around and look for something tasty to kill.
We still did it into the 80s (and may still do it) in the context of counter insurgency / low intensity conflict ops. In my era we’d use dedicated Forward Air Control aircraft. In later years the A-10 (in OA-10 guise) would do the same thing. And rather than use strategic bombers as the bomb trucks, we’d get fed a drip feed of fighter bombers; F-4s, F-16s, F/A-18s or A-10s. They’d be scheduled to arrive at a rate that matched our expectations of findable worthwhile targets.
Here is a good book on how it was done in Viet Nam: Amazon.com : a lonely kind of war. At the big picture level little has changed in 50 years. The airplanes are faster & better, the enemy hides differently in deserts than they do in jungles, but the essentials are eternal. As they’ve been since before the Mongols swept out of East Asia.
Leo, do you mind this tangent? I figured you might like it so I’m having it in this thread but if you don’t like it, just tell me and I’ll start another thread or ask a mod to haul my posts over.
AIRCRAFT DESCRIPTION:
Since the terms “low” and “high” are ambiguous, I should have made clear that when I said “low range”, I meant “typical combat range of jet fighters” so 500-1000km. By “high payload”, I meant something along the lines of the B-52’s payload; about 30 tons.
To give a summary numerical description of the plane I have in mind: empty weight of 15-20 tons, combat range of 1000km while carrying a payload of 30 tons.
5 turbojets with a thrust of 200kN (dry) and 250kN (wet) each or 5 turbofans of 150kN (dry) and 200kN (wet).
Any idea what military 100-200kN turbojets and turbofans cost?
And yes, I realize that it would look something like this:
It may very well be a bad idea and many explanations provided so far have educated me and refined my cognitions for which I thank the contributors.
Lift comes from the interaction between lifting surfaces and speed, no? You can give the aircraft a thrust/weight ratio of 2 or more. That would give it high lift but low range* because of its high speed. There are advantages to a fast airplane on a bombing mission as LSLGuy says:
Bolded ellipsis mine.
I disagree that it would be pretty useless for anything else. If it had a high thrust/weight ratio, would it not have good potential for anti-air, SEAD, and the more dangerous types of interdiction & EW? Being able to get within an envelope, launch its payload then get out quickly helps survivability. Presuming it’s loaded with few a tons of payload for anti-air, the plane would have a T/W of 4-5.
It would indeed be bad at any task that required extended loiter. High loiter time tasks are best handled by turboprop planes with lots of lifting surfaces for their weight.
About how long can multirole jet fighters loiter if they don’t have drop tanks or in-flight refueling?
You make a good point regarding efficiency and short production run aircraft.
I disagree with your basis for comparison though. According to these**(
and
) the B-1 is a semi-stealth aircraft which very much drives up its cost. A fairer comparison would be with either the F-35 (about 100M$) or the F-15SE with an average planned cost of 100M$ McDonnell Douglas F-15E Strike Eagle - Wikipedia
From what I have heard though, including from LSLGuy, the cost of most systems is less in the initial acquisition than in the cost of running it which lies primarily in labor. Also, avionics probably vie for #1 position with stealth as the most expensive aspects of a war plane. The more planes, the more avionics sets.
*Provided you don’t use in-flight refueling. If you do, you have high payload, high speed and high range. Provided a military has in-flight refueling and can make some airspace sufficiently safe for the tanker, long range aircraft may not be that advantageous especially if that range comes at the cost of speed or payload.
**Whose sources I’ve lost which should be easy enough to find, sorry.
Big, heavy aircraft are not good for air-to-air combat no matter how fast they are. The F-14 is about as big and heavy as you can make an interceptor before it becomes a liability in combat. The Navy and Air Force learned that well with the F-4, which was basically supposed to be a high-speed missile launch platform. BVR weapons and high-off-boresight targeting are great, but never infallible.
Okay, the F-15SE is a fairer comparison - but it’s still basically a third of the cost, and most operators will save even more because of simplified training and maintenance (assuming they already operate other F-15 variants).
Anyway, the point is this: if it was really a good idea, the Israelis would build one.
Far be it from me to suggest that the aircraft I’ve described be only a BVR missile platform. I mentioned a few missiles because that’s the part of the payload that would weigh the most. I should have also mentioned guns but thought that went without saying for a plane doing air-to-air.
Wait, don’t air superiority fighters tend to be bigger and heavier than their multirole counterparts? E.g.: F-15 vs F-16, F-22 vs F-35?
I’ve asked several times how large size and weight can be disadvantageous and, unless I missed a reply, no one has explained why. When LSL mentioned the square-cube law, I immediately got why big planes would be advantageous (beyond stealth). I’ve haven’t read any principle-based explanation concerning why big would sometimes be a disadvantages outside carrier-based operations. I am eager to learn of those reasons and infer how those different factors interact for particular use cases.
One of their proto-prime ministers split the sea but Israelis aren’t magic. They largely rely on getting US hardware for relatively cheap and giving it better avionics and mods. They wouldn’t make the kind of plane I’m describing. UAVs and EW, yes. Big powerful airframes and engines, that’s 'Murica’s specialty, not Israel’s.
Their wisdom on military procurement can be doubted; They used to use the M-16A1 for G-d’s sake! List of equipment of the Israel Defense Forces - Wikipedia
The F-16 wasn’t really meant to be a multirole aircraft; it was supposed to be a pure (cheap) air superiority fighter. Like most aircraft of the era, it was adapted for ground attack later in life. The US (at least during the Cold War) could afford dedicated strike aircraft (F-111, etc.) so multirole capability wasn’t a concern.
The F-35 is smaller than the F-22 because it’s designed for carrier use, including the Marine Corps’ and the UK’s small carriers (the UK is now building big carriers, but it didn’t have any when the UK joined the F-35 project and didn’t expect to build any). The F-22 is solely an Air Force system so its size is only constrained by hangar space and runway size. It certainly isn’t anywhere close to the size you’d need to carry heavy bomber payloads, anyway.
The reason I mentioned Israel is that (1) the original discussion of a short-range heavy bomber was because it fits Israeli needs, and (2) the US doesn’t need one. The Israelis probably couldn’t afford to develop that sort of aircraft themselves, but they could certainly cooperate with other friendly countries that would theoretically be in the market (like India).
Michael - don’t take this as annoyance at your interesting questions, but let’s just break down what you’ve asked about/proposed:
So if those are the requirements, DoD would look at the DOTMLPF first before determining a new system is needed to do the things that you’re asking for. This analysis would surely result in the answer, “Just send two strike fighters which meet requirements 1, 3, and 4, and accept a little risk in 2 by having them fly at 0.9 Mach.”
An F135 engine costs somewhere around $17 million, IIRC.
Those unobtainium turbine blades are a lot more expensive than I thought.
Sure, with the current fleet already in possession, it wouldn’t be worth it to produce what I’m describing; the marginal cost would be higher than the marginal gain. I am wondering why they weren’t made bigger originally.
I am not taking it as such. Perhaps it is not annoyance but frustration? We may be talking past each other. I am not describing this aircraft because I think someone in DARPA will happen upon this thread, recognize my brilliance and develop it. I am trying to learn about the more general principles involved in these matters.
I don’t know if you were being diplomatic when you called my questions interesting but if it was said in earnest, they are interesting because they require someone trying to answer them to inquire & reflect on the principles involved.LSL made the case that bigger can be better when he brought up the square-cube law. What I am doing right now with my questions is applying that principle thoroughly to see what other principles are involved. There must be some advantages in being smaller aside from those related to carrier operations.
Why weren’t the F-16 and F-15 made bigger and heavier than their current specifications? It’s not a rhetorical question; There must be sound reasons but I am unsure of my hypotheses and would like to know what the more knowledgeable people here think.
RNATB says: “Big, heavy aircraft are not good for air-to-air combat no matter how fast they are. The F-14 is about as big and heavy as you can make an interceptor before it becomes a liability in combat.”
Are those two statements true? If so, for what reasons?
Big, heavy things are not manouverable. It’s the same reason monster trucks wouldn’t be competitive in NASCAR even though they’re far more powerful.
I disagree. It’s all in the design. With enough power and fuel and a control system, you can make a brick supersonic. It may have a range of 10 miles and a payload of 10 pounds, but if you’re willing to compromise lots of other performance specs, you’re gold.
But once you’ve chosen your goals and designed the plane to do it, making it serve other roles can be difficult or even impossible.
There’s a phrase used historians and engineers that says a design, as it is developed and modified over time, gets to “the limits of its design potential.” For example, when the P51 Mustang was developed (and using the same engine as the British Spitfire), lots of people thought the Spitfires range could be extended to something similar to the Mustang’s. But it turned out to not be possible because the Mustang’s wing was structurally sound enough to load it with fuel and tanks. The Spitfire’s wing wasn’t. Redesigning the wing would require so many other changes that it wouldn’t really be a Spitfire anymore. And for the 2nd half of the war, the Spitfire was more or less sidelined. They couldn’t get to the enemy like the Mustangs could.
More recently the Navy was getting a lot of pressure on their budget, and TPTB decided they no longer needed a dedicated fighter/interceptor, and the F14 Tomcat was on the chopping block. The Navy responded by repurposing it as a fighter/bomber they called the Bombcat. But it wasn’t real good at bombing and suddenly the question became, “Why does the Navy need two fighter bombers?” The F18 was already deployed. The F14 was eventually killed.
Hello. My name is Leo Bloom, OP, and I approve this tangent.
BVR?
DOTMLPF?
I can’t find that link to that abbreviation library.
Beyond visual range. Shooting missiles at radar blips.
Doctrine
Organization
Training
Materiel
Leadership
Personnel
Facilities
I think “DOTMLPF” pretty much means “what we got and how we do things”
While I grant that my concept would take more distance and time to decelerate than a lighter design, I’m pretty sure that NASCAR cars have more power-to-weight than monster trucks. What would happen if you took a NASCAR car, gave it a monster truck engine and made it carry more weight but still have more power-to-weight than a NASCAR car? I don’t know myself.