Late edit: There’re some real confusing typos and missing words in those last two paragraphs. Hasty editing strikes again. Try this improved version instead:
Another difference between Russia v. China compared to Iran v. Iraq is that in I v. I both sides were receiving at least some support from their allies. On both sides it was not as much as they wanted and served more to sustain the carnage rather than to allow a decisive grasp of the upper hand.
Conversely, in the hypothetical case of R v. C neither side would have anyone to turn to for material help. Said another way, both sides would be fighting alone with their backs to the wall. That is not fertile ground for contained sustained attrition warfare while there are escalation options available.
Back to I v. I, the cynic in me believed at the time that the US & Russia had made a deal, implicit or explicit, to run this as a proxy war fought to the last Iranian / Iraqi with the hope of pacifying that part of the ME region for decades to come. For sure neither the US nor the Russians were keen to put so much logistic support into the war as to trigger counter-escalation from the other side. A cozy fire is nice; a blazing inferno is not. And either the US or the Russians could adjust the damper whenever they chose.
Getting back to the original question, I decided to try to find out how long it takes to crank out a commerical airliner. The answer is83 days, including about 30 days of testing.
Note that it says “from the first part.” But a lot of components are fabricated in other places and then shipped to the Boeing plant for assembly, so that time is actually longer. And this is for an established design with a perfected production process.
A fighter is not a 777 and obviously you could always build more production lines to produce more. But it looks like there’s a certain amount of time that it takes to put stuff together – and a modern fighter has a lot of stuff in it.
This is as nonsensical as if the New England Patriots were to say, *“This is the Super Bowl; we’re going up against the No. 1 defense in the league, we therefore can’t risk Tom Brady, the best quarterback in the game, because he might get injured. We’ll play our backup QB instead.”
*
During World War II, did the U.S. Navy refrain from using aircraft carriers against Japan? Carriers were valuable weapons. Did the US refrain from using B-29s against Japan? Those were expensive, sophisticated bombers.
LSLGuy, re the B2 do you really think USSTRATCOM would be ok with such a major strategic asset being used for conventional strikes. The B2 is really the only platform which can reliably destroy some Russian deep command centers and have a chance to take out dispersed mobile Topol launchers. (i.e the “coincidental” B-61’s, capability, ostensibly designed for Iran)?
[QUOTE=MichaelEmouse]
What types of targets would B-2, F-22 and such go for at first? I have a few hypotheses but I’d like to hear you first.
What did the Israelis tend to go after first from '67 onward?
[/QUOTE]
An interesting thing is to consider Russian doctrine v USAF doctrine. The US believes in air dominance over the entire battlespace; the Soviets and now the Russians believe in air supremacy in corridors, basically over their own troops advance and using Air Defences to counter enemy attacks outside the corridor. And by Air Supremacy in corridor, I mean they believed in using everything, from ground attack planes, to Medium Bombers, to rocket attacks on airbases. When the balloon goes up and Russian airpower is pounding Allied ground troops, would the USAF be able to keep up attacks on Command and Control, especially when the ground pounders are screaming for help.
The Israel example is pertinent, in 1982, the IAF won famous victories in the air,yet Syrian tank hunters took a measurable toll on the IDF armoured columns, especially gunships. (Alessan would know more, but I remember reading an Israeli account of the war, where a confrontation at IDF HQ is described, the air chief is crowing about the air battles and the shootdowns and the division or corps commander is saying “then why the fuck are we still being hit”)
To simplify what some others have said: the big problem with holding back assets for later in a modern war is that the likelihood there will be a “later” is small and probably rapidly diminishing.
[QUOTE=Velocity]
This is as nonsensical as if the New England Patriots were to say, *“This is the Super Bowl; we’re going up against the No. 1 defense in the league, we therefore can’t risk Tom Brady, the best quarterback in the game, because he might get injured. We’ll play our backup QB instead.”
*
During World War II, did the U.S. Navy refrain from using aircraft carriers against Japan? Carriers were valuable weapons. Did the US refrain from using B-29s against Japan? Those were expensive, sophisticated bombers.
[/QUOTE]
I have no idea about American football so cannot answer the first part. As for the second, as I have mentioned time and time again, the issue is that carriers and B-29 could (and were replaced). Losses were made good and then some. The whole point of this thread is that in war, modern weapons will not be replaced. And famously, the USN did refrain from using carrier in late November 1942, when Naval forces were withdrawn from Guadalcanal, when the US was down to one patched up carrier in the Pacific after the Santa Curz battle, leaving the Marines sans air support. (the new Essex class started coming online mid 1943).
The first parts for a 777 are ordered about 2 years before the airplane they go into makes its first flight. That 83 days is now long it takes to snap together a bunch of almost complete subassemblies.
B-2s are under the Eighth Air Force, Global Strike Command, which is a force provider to theater combatant commanders. If the Commander, European Command, sought B-2s to execute a war plan, the Commander, Strategic Command does not have a veto over the implication you seem to be making that someone is taking “his” airplanes.
I think it’s perfectly obvious that B-2s would be used under European Command authority in such a situation. Seriously, can you imagine the shitstorm if we’re experiencing dozens of airmen in outmatched F-16s being killed each day and the Air Force is holding back its weapons that have the best chance to accomplish certain missions with no loss of life? Are you fucking kidding me? I would speculate that if any military commander actually did some such thing – which is just a unfounded fantasy-like idea anyway – that general officer would be on his ass in minutes, courtesy of the President of the United States.
Americans would be outraged and livid that pilots were not being given the best equipment to fight an important war – this would be a hundred times worse than the military not being able to provide armor to Humvees in Iraq circa 2003-2004. You damn well know that no Secretary of Defense or President is going to stand behind a recommendation to fight with one arm tied behind our backs, because of some hypothetical possibility that there might be another, bigger fight someday.
Firstly, Air Force Global Strike Command is under USSTRATCOM.
Secondly, I don’t know why you seem to be considering a war with Russia in Europe to be similar to the Iraq war. In a NATO-Russia conflict, Strategic forces will even sans all out nuclear conflict assume a far greater importance than they did during the Iraq conflict and leadership calculations about what constitutes acceptable losses will be very different. A component commander (and CDR USSTRATCOM is one) can ask for, that’s not a guarantee the SecDef will listen or the Joint Chiefs will agree. SACEUR was opposed to moving VII Corps to SaudiArabia in 1990, but the SecDef under advice from the Chairman Joint Chiefs did so.
It is not “redonkulous” to suggest that in a Russian war (or even a Chinese one) the CDR USSTRATCOM might advise against moving B2 to conventional strikes and that advice is listed to.
Thirdly, one of the main reasons that the B1 were removed from the nuclear role was to free up heavy bomber assets for conventional strikes (SAC was unhappy about using heavy bombers to conventional strikes in Korea, during Linebacker II in the "Nam and yes even in the Gulf War). I suspect that those will be used (they have certain L/O characteristics and probably the best US ECM, plus awsome low level penetration), for conventional strikes in the same way the Russians will pribaly use the Tu-22M.
All the USAF doctrine we’ve seen in public either written or in execution is applicable to far less than all-out war.
For a WWIII in Europe scenario, Fulda Gap and all, we’d expect “Air Dominance” to be, like the Russian’s doctrine, applicable to some times and places but not achievable always everywhere. The goal of course is to attrit the enemy badly enough that the problem does become soluble everywhere within a few days. That exponential curve again.
Until that happens USAF will be stretched real thin and yes, the Army will be crying for support in the meantime. Even as they’re glad of how much rear area mischief we’re making in the Russian ground forces.
Part of the undying support for A-10s is rooted in the knowledge that since they can’t be used for anything else, there’s not other “higher priority” mission they could be diverted to. Unlike F-16s & F-35s. IMO there’s also a healthy dollop of Army wishful thinking that an A-10 can survive over a 2016 Russian armor or mechanized infantry brigade like it could have in the 1980s. In USAF’s opinion, it can’t. What I read in the open press suggests to me that USAF has a point.
Said another way, “Air Dominance” in the sense of total permanent control of the enemy skies is a luxury we can afford to buy over Iraq-like enemies. But nobody with half a brain at the Pentagon expects to achieve that same result over the entirety of Europe or the PRC. I suspect a corollary of “Air Dominance” is that the Army is real unwilling to fight an expeditionary near-peer fight unless it can do so under that Air Dominance umbrella. The forces stationed along the front line when the balloon goes up will have no choice. Later follow-on forces and any planned counterattacks will be sharply limited to those where USAF can produce a mostly safe zone.
USSTRATCOM and B2s: Hard to say. This is an area the Pentagon is pretty quiet about.
The full B2 force is likely grossly overcommitted versus strategic targets. After all the planned 132 aircraft buy stopped at 21 (now 20). In that sense any earlier attrition is a big deal.
OTOH, given the timeline of a strategic nuclear war, the B2s will likely be flying over the aftermath of a pretty comprehensive Minuteman & Trident attack. In that sense they’re already a mop-up force. Losing some of that capability to a conventional first wave in a lesser war is probably not really a game changer for the strategic end-game.
Overall, there are two kinds of wars: the optional kind and the kind you need to win to survive. We now have 70 years’ more or less continuous practice at the first kind. And none since the 1940s at the second kind. Different attitudes to force preservation apply to the two scenarios.
As you point out, in 1942 the USN did absolutely pull back in a force preservation move after they’d suffered cumulative losses that’d take another two years (a tactical eternity) to replace.
What’s noteworthy to me is *not *that they pulled back to save the last carrier. But rather that they spent 12-1/2 of the 13 they had *before *pulling back. That’s the difference between decision-making in an optional war and in a survival war.
Which is why my expectation is that in a near-peer = survival war the US will go forward with almost everything that’s logistically able to get to the fight. That plus the exponential curve effect: He who first gets behind is doomed.
I took a tour of the F22 production line in Marietta, GA and the buildin process was amazing. The amount of wiringalone used in a modern fighter is mind boggling.
US carriers first launched strikes v the Japanese Home Islands in February 1945, with the exception of the Doolittle Raid in April 1942 where the carriers launched the B-25’s earlier than planned (resulting in the loss of all of them), far out of carrier plane range, and skedaddled when sighted by Japanese picket boats. By the time carriers were used directly against the Japanese Home Islands even fast carriers were, relatively speaking compared to either pre 1940 or now, in mass production*. Similar relative risks for similar modest gains were not taken with the 7 fast carriers available in 1942 (prior to losses), as they wouldn’t be now with 10 or 11 essentially irreplaceable carriers.
OTOH if by ‘against Japan’ you mean the whole war effort against Japan then sure CV’s were used from the beginning including taking serious risk to them (in which 4 of the 7 were lost in 1942) where there was corresponding opportunity for decisive gain, as in possible decisive actions v the Japanese fleet (which was largely erased by 1945, whereas carrier plane strikes v the Home Islands weren’t likely to do much to hasten the end of the war but the threat to the carriers v their replaceability was much more favorable then).
B-29’s were being produced in 1945 by eventually close to 200 per month to support a front line strength of 4 bomber wings in the Marianas (by around May 1945) of ~500 ‘main force’ a/c not counting special units. Total combat losses** of 118 a/c were never the key impediment to the campaign, but rather a relative lack of (perceived on US side at least) bombing results in the early months.
Contrast that to Korea where a force of 3 B-29 groups (for most of the war, around 100) had to rely on the existing (reduced since WWII) stock of B-29’s. Aversion to the risk of losses was demonstrably higher. The B-29’s were essentially driven from daylight raids by late 1951 after around a dozen combat losses up to then (several to MiG-15’s in a short time resulting in the decision to abandon daylight raids in ‘MiG Alley’). In late 1952-Jan 1953 there was a ‘crisis’ in the night campaign…over the combat loss of just a handful of additional a/c. The crisis was resolved with a combination of poorer seasonal weather for the radarless MiG-15’s guided by radar directed searchlights, improved electronic countermeasures by the B-29’s and unbeknownst to the US side at the time, the rotation of an experienced Soviet night fighter unit for a green one which never fully got the hang of this extremely difficult mission. So no more B-29 combat losses were suffered from Feb 1953-armistice that July. Which brings us pretty much the mentality of today, even with a WWII a/c 60 yrs ago: only practically zero combat loss rates were acceptable, and operations had to be restricted to achieve that.
This sort of history IMO is illustrative relative to an irreplaceable force of ~20 a/c in the B-2 (pending the B-21 some years to come, perhaps). Would B-2’s be used? They are used, but not in situations where any losses are likely. That’s a significant limitation compared to the situation of B-29’s v Japan, where there was plenty of scope for so-so results and significant cumulative losses before significant goals were achieved.
*26 Essex class CV’s (some completed after the war) plus 6 cancelled, the 3 larger Midway class CVB’s under construction, 8 existing CVL’s and two under construction, the 3 pre war CV survivors, not counting dozens of CVE’s.
**WWII a/c had hugely higher non-combat loss rates than modern ones do even in combat conditions, 216 B-29’s were lost in operational theaters in WWII attributed to non-combat causes (though some of those might have been to combat actually), which offsets a bit of the huge difference in production rates, but not a lot of it.
Maybe, during a World War III that remains conventional and doesn’t go nuclear, the U.S. government will order F-35s under the assumption that they will replenish war-depleted fleets *after *the war, but won’t arrive in time to make any difference to the ongoing war.
Fighter jets ordered for replacement-in-postwar-peace only.
Ravenman, you’re quite prescient in your view of AM for aircraft. Here’s an article published just this week about a new type of AM that is described as “growing” an aircraft. It looks like right now they’re focusing on unmanned vehicles, but it is a really interesting read :Additive manufacturing today, growing airplanes, literally, tomorrow?
AM has three big attractions to aerospace production (as opposed to aerospace research or aerospace prototyping):
It makes it cheaper to make small production runs because you’re not spending $100K to build tooling to make a dozen parts. Nor do you need to maintain and store tooling to make new spares a decade later.
It reduces the “buy-to-fly” ratio, the industry term for the fact there are a lot of parts where you start with a 1 pound ingot of very fancy expensive material and then laboriously grind off 14 ounces of it to leave a 2 ounce part. Then dispose of the 14 ounces of expensive material.
It reduces the expensive touch labor required for both 1 & 2.
A fourth advantage that’s still mostly theoretical today is the idea of designing differently in the first place. Parts would have a more “organic” free form look with fewer right angles. And probably weigh less as a consequence. Contrast the structure of a bird and of an aircraft. Both have a backbone, ribs, and spars along the wingspan. After that they’re real different.
The critical thing today is that AM is not fast. For those parts which can be produced conventionally, AM is much slower. And the reproducibility of product quality is less; mostly at the microscopic material level, not at the gross shape level. Neither are AM parts useable just as they come out of the AM machine. There is still a lot of follow-up work needed to smooth or harden surfaces, machine truly flat mating surfaces, etc. AM replaces the first few steps of complex parts fabrication, not all of them.
So it’s unclear to me that AM currently provides some magical speed-up capability. In some hypothetical future world where AM was both ubiquitous and faster, we’d still find the factories “right-sized” to have only the capacity to build their parts at the rate actually needed for peacetime production.
Having excess capacity, whether it’s cosmic AM machines or old fashioned WWII sheet metal riveting tools, is costly. And so won’t be done unless there’s a payment to do so.
There’s a fifth reason the military likes additive manufacturing: it de-convolutes the supply chain.
For example, there’s no way a nuclear aircraft carrier could carry a complete supply of all the spare parts it might need at sea. Keep in mind the aircraft spares take up space, too.
The ability to stay at sea a long time is one of the major attractions of nuclear naval vessels, so instead of carrying a wide array of, say, reactor parts, aircraft carriers have fairly extensive machine shops and metal stock to make whatever non-stocked parts the ship may need.
(I realize some forum members have actually served on nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, and I welcome their inputs and corrections).
But aircraft carriers are enormous, and smaller, mobile ground units would love to have fast access to spare parts without having to order them through a long, convoluted supply chain. For example, if a Humvee’s ends up with a cracked transmission bellhousing, that Humvee is likely out of commission until a new one is delivered, possibly via transport plane, from some far-off supply depot. A direct-metal sintering machine much closer to the action could build that bellhousing much closer to where it’s needed. This can (a) speed the delivery of the replacement part and (b) free up space on that transport plane for something less bulky and more urgent than a Humvee transmission bellhousing.
LSLguy is right about the vagaries of AM parts. There’s substantial part-to-part variability, and no one is using AM to make an automotive cylinder head without a ton of secondary machining processes to make plane surfaces plane, etc. On top of that, many direct-metal sintered parts are fairly porous and cannot contain pressurized gasses or liquids.
However, the composites industry is using AM to build tooling (molds) quickly. Rather than hogging out (machining away) a huge amount of material from a giant block of tool steel, you can make a quick-but-workable mold using very cheap AM methods (e.g., fused deposition modeling, or FDM. Most cheap 3D printers, like makerbots, are FDM printers).
You can build a one-or-five-off part using an FDM mold, or you can make an AM part that serves as a positive for the final part. You use the AM positive to sand-cast an aluminum mold that will last for dozens of parts, and so on.
Currently, AM molds tend to be used for things like custom-fitted carbon-fiber prosthetic limbs. But if the bottleneck to winning WWIII in the air was the rate at which we could make tooling, you can bet that AM tooling would be one of myriad ways we’d try in our attempts to remove that bottleneck.