F-16 Replacement

[Fuchs]

It's not about the range, but about avoiding to close in, because that's risky.

An AEW&C aircraft may reliably detect VLO fighters at let's say 100 km. A F-22 combat air patrol could then escort it and go on supercruise to engage every attacker who's spotted at that distance.
A long-range missile would enable the attackers to shoot at the easily detectable AEW&C aircraft from 150-250 km away, avoiding the risky air combat.

(The figures were just examples, meant to only explain the dynamic.)

[carl]

A F-22 combat air patrol could then escort it and go on supercruise to engage every attacker who's spotted at that distance.

That's the rub. There won't be many F-22s.

[Fuchs]

That's probably exactly the right thing.

The F-22 is already partially obsolete. It lacks some important features that were introduced about 30 years ago (IRST, helmet mounted sight) and has troubles with some utterly standard air war features (datalink).

Very low observability ("stealth") technology is at a maturity point, whereas signal processing and various counter-VLO technologies make still huge improvements. The F-22's design concept has been publicly known since at the latest 1991 (YF-22) and is really a 80's concept (actually, it dates in its philosophy back to about '71!).
All competitors were developed to defeat it and its ilk, as were some air defence systems.

(The F-22 is a parallel to the F-4: Expensive, large, impressive in its technology, dependent on one specific approach to air combat and most likely very vulnerable to opponents who deny to play along (the F-4 boasted great speed, unparalleled radar effectiveness, a second crew member, a medium range air combat missile and was supposed to defeat the enemy many miles ahead - but then obsolete MiG-17s began to close in, fly circles around it and shoot at it with supposedly obsolete guns!).
Similarly, the F-22 boasts stealth, supercruise, limited thrust vectoring, a very high combat altitude and is supposed to defeat the enemy with dash & run at high altitude and over long distances.)


A fighter weakness is the best motivator for the development of a better fighter (or whatever takes over a fighter's functions) and might thus be very beneficial in the long term.
It's better to have 300 F-22 successors in 2030 than 500 F-22s.
This reduces the period of uncertain air superiority to about 2020-2030 unless the bureaucracy fails to launch and manage a timely successor program.

[carl]

It's better to have 300 F-22 successors in 2030 than 500 F-22s. This reduces the period of uncertain air superiority to about 2020-2030 unless the bureaucracy fails to launch and manage a timely successor program.

We won't have anything close to 500 F-22s, just that 187 or so. In light of our history, we won't have anything in 2030 but an artist's concept and a prototype that is confidently expected to make it's first flight sometime in the near future. The F-22 may be flawed as you say but it is the best we have and there aren't very many of them.

That period of uncertain air superiority is likely to last a long time.

[Cliff]

My 2 cents, in reverse order from Fuch's post:

A fighter weakness is the best motivator for the development of a better fighter (or whatever takes over a fighter's functions) and might thus be very beneficial in the long term.
It's better to have 300 F-22 successors in 2030 than 500 F-22s.
This reduces the period of uncertain air superiority to about 2020-2030 unless the bureaucracy fails to launch and manage a timely successor program

Fuchs I agree with Carl, it is unlikely there will be an F-22 replacement in the timeframe you discuss... the Next Gen Bomber was announced as being a priority again, meaning the bulk of funding in the timeframe you refer to (2020s) will be going to that, hence not a lot of $$ for R&D of fighters.

187 F-22s is not a lot (numbers wise).

The F-22 is already partially obsolete. It lacks some important features that were introduced about 30 years ago (IRST, helmet mounted sight) and has troubles with some utterly standard air war features (datalink).
(The F-22 is a parallel to the F-4: Expensive, large, impressive in its technology, dependent on one specific approach to air combat and most likely very vulnerable to opponents who deny to play along (the F-4 boasted great speed, unparalleled radar effectiveness, a second crew member, a medium range air combat missile and was supposed to defeat the enemy many miles ahead - but then obsolete MiG-17s began to close in, fly circles around it and shoot at it with supposedly obsolete guns!).
Similarly, the F-22 boasts stealth, supercruise, limited thrust vectoring, a very high combat altitude and is supposed to defeat the enemy with dash & run at high altitude and over long distances.)

While the F-22 doesn't have an HMD, that doesn't make it obsolete. It was a conscious decision to save cost and not put an HMD in the Raptor. Some of the issues you mentioned will be fixed in upgrades that are coming up.

While stealth and supercruise are a big part of the effectiveness of the F-22, it also is one of the most maneuverable jets ever. It can win a close in fight as well as kicking butt BVR. Pilot training still matters, but the good thing is that F-22 pilots are still among the best trained in the world.

Bottom line, I would take the "cold war obsolete fighter" hype that some folks seek to spread about the F-22 with a huge grain of salt.

V/R,

Cliff

[William F. Owen]

the F-4 boasted great speed, unparalleled radar effectiveness, a second crew member, a medium range air combat missile and was supposed to defeat the enemy many miles ahead - but then obsolete MiG-17s began to close in, fly circles around it and shoot at it with supposedly obsolete guns!

Mate! That is not good history or analysis. A MIG-17 could do nothing better than an F-4 except sustained turns at low speeds <450kts.
Yes the F4's lack of a gun, was criminally stupid, but that was corrected at east with the F-4E.
In the history of Air Warfare, the F-4, like the P-51, is a notable aircraft. The MIG-17 isn't.

[Fuchs]

Mate! That is not good history or analysis. A MIG-17 could do nothing better than an F-4 except sustained turns at low speeds <450kts.
Yes the F4's lack of a gun, was criminally stupid, but that was corrected at east with the F-4E.
In the history of Air Warfare, the F-4, like the P-51, is a notable aircraft. The MIG-17 isn't.

Hardly. A F-4 costed many times as much as a MiG-17 and had no real chance (other than retreat) against two of them. The MiG-17 was fast enough to close in with bombers and fighter-bombers and force them to emergency drop their loads.

The F-4 is rather notable like the Bf 110 or P-38 than like the P-51 (the P-51 was an efficient airplane which was able to engage all enemies on equal footing).

In fact, the F-4 had quite exactly the double purchase cost, maintenance hours/flight hour, fuel consumption, crew requirement of a Draken, Mirage III or Mirage F.1 - but it wasn't better than them in air combat, even in the later versions. The lower cost F-8 was also a better fighter.

The F-4 was meant to be a bomber interceptor for the navy's carriers, complemented by the dogfight-capable F-8 Crusader.
It was forced on the air force as a fighter because the air forces' '100' series had yielded no useful fighter (F-104 was utterly useless for all but short range nuking or photo reconnaissance). As an air force fighter it was OK at low or no visibility and at high altitude, but it was terribly inefficient as a fighter in support of a land war.



Likewise, the F-22 is best at tactical dancing - supersonic launch of AMRAAM at target, turn and run at supersonic speed to avoid incoming missiles, repeat.It's like a boxer with long arms who ties to throw jabs all the time to keep the enemy at long distance because he's not good in the infight. He needs to have a great leg work and needs to cede ground all the time.
This mode is an impossible luxury if you need to protect assets, for the enemy could keep pressing forward and could only be stopped with a more decisive engagement (a launched AMRAAM doesn't equal a kill at all).
The F-22s will therefore be forced into a suboptimal combat style whenever they need to protect assets, such as a ground target, a fleet, slow support aircraft or a strike package.
Again, this is similar to how F-4s had to leave their preferred medium range engagement fantasy and were forced into dogfights in which they weren't good despite their high cost.
(The F-22 is superior to F-16s in dogfighting thanks to TVC, but afaik that advantage dwindles when the F-16s have HMS and AIM-9X).

[Cliff]

Have to disagree on historical grounds...

Hardly. A F-4 costed many times as much as a MiG-17 and had no real chance (other than retreat) against two of them. The MiG-17 was fast enough to close in with bombers and fighter-bombers and force them to emergency drop their loads.

Fuchs, not true. The F-4 had the ability to take the fight vertical, or extend, disengage, and then re-enter at high speed.

The big issue was training. Early on, the USN and USAF pilots were not adequately trained and tried to fly the F-4 like it WAS a P-51 or F-86... not smart. Later on, when TOP GUN and USAF Fighter Weapons School had refined the tactics, thigns went better.

OBTW, at the end of the war the F-4 was able to employ BVR again based
Combat Tree. That's how Steve Ritchie became an ace. With Tree, the F-4 was again dominant - as they could employ BVR and hold their own WVR.

Every aircraft has advantages and disadvantages. The key is knowing how to fight your jet where you have an advantage and the other guy doesn't. The smart fighter pilot will also evaluate the enemy's tactics and use tactics the other guy probably hasn't seen.

A good book to read is Fighter Combat: Tactics and Maneuvering by Robert Shaw. He takes you through how an F-4 can beat the MiG-17, or even two MiG-17s.

The F-4 is rather notable like the Bf 110 or P-38 than like the P-51 (the P-51 was an efficient airplane which was able to engage all enemies on equal footing).

Your opinion. The P-51 had issues just like any other fighter. For example, low caliber armament and a vulnerable cooling system.

In fact, the F-4 had quite exactly the double purchase cost, maintenance hours/flight hour, fuel consumption, crew requirement of a Draken, Mirage III or Mirage F.1 - but it wasn't better than them in air combat, even in the later versions. The lower cost F-8 was also a better fighter.

What are you basing this assertation on? F-8 may have been a better dogfighter, though even that is questionable if you look at the E-M diagrams... Draken/Mirage - no way. Especially the F-1... piece of junk.

The F-4 was meant to be a bomber interceptor for the navy's carriers, complemented by the dogfight-capable F-8 Crusader.
It was forced on the air force as a fighter because the air forces' '100' series had yielded no useful fighter (F-104 was utterly useless for all but short range nuking or photo reconnaissance). As an air force fighter it was OK at low or no visibility and at high altitude, but it was terribly inefficient as a fighter in support of a land war.

Again, what is this based on? The F-4 had decent loiter time, a ton of weapons, and could take a lot of punishment. Yes, back seat vis was not as good as other fighters... but that was later fighters, not those of it's generation. The Mirages you sight had horrible vis!

Likewise, the F-22 is best at tactical dancing - supersonic launch of AMRAAM at target, turn and run at supersonic speed to avoid incoming missiles, repeat.It's like a boxer with long arms who ties to throw jabs all the time to keep the enemy at long distance because he's not good in the infight. He needs to have a great leg work and needs to cede ground all the time.
This mode is an impossible luxury if you need to protect assets, for the enemy could keep pressing forward and could only be stopped with a more decisive engagement (a launched AMRAAM doesn't equal a kill at all).
The F-22s will therefore be forced into a suboptimal combat style whenever they need to protect assets, such as a ground target, a fleet, slow support aircraft or a strike package.
Again, this is similar to how F-4s had to leave their preferred medium range engagement fantasy and were forced into dogfights in which they weren't good despite their high cost.
(The F-22 is superior to F-16s in dogfighting thanks to TVC, but afaik that advantage dwindles when the F-16s have HMS and AIM-9X).

Fuchs, you forget the part where the F-22 uses the oldest tactic in the book, the unobserved entry, to roll in at the F-16's six and gun its brains out. Stealth is a pretty sweet capability. While you're right on the pK of the AMRAAM, you discount the ability of the Raptor to use it's advantages (stealth, supercruise) to get to a position of advantage.

The F-22 is superior to even an F-16CCM with HMS and 9X. If the pilot knows what he is doing, he will have no issues - even if outnumbered. I've fought the Raptor with the weapons above, and it is the toughest opponent I've ever faced.

Like I said before, the F-22 is not the end-all, but it is the best fighter in the world, at least for the next 10-15 years. Training is still almost as important though, like I said before.

V/R,

Cliff

[Fuchs]

There's of course the advantage of a faster aircraft over a slower one- like P-38 vs. A6M. This advantage is largely dependent on the ability to surprise, though. The higher/faster-flying fighters pick those targets which seem to be unaware, hit them and regain there relatively safe higher/faster setting asap.
This isn't very relevant in certain missions such as escort or low level attack, though.
You cite the book (have it, but didn't read all of it yet) for how a F-4 could defeat two MiG-17s (not going to happen with equal quality crews imo). You also stress the importance of pilots, training and tactics. What you didn't mention is that the F-4 had no LD/SD capability to speak of (before Germany upgraded some with APG-65 and AIM-120) and two MiG-17s were thus able to deny a F-4's BVR capability whenever they were protecting mobile (army) targets that couldn't be attacked from high altitude.




About mock combat vs. F-22s; surprise becomes rather rare in large formation air combat. As WW2 aces said; loss percentages were lower in great air battles (wing vs. wing) than in small ones (flight vs flight). Few fighters were able to surprise anyone in large air battles, and surprise was involved in about 80% of the air/air kills of the time (80% of kills happened without target having seen the attacker). It's difficult to surprise a F-16 from behind with a visually huge F-22 if there are multiple other F-16 plots able to see that position.

Mock air combat in NATO - even Red Flag - is typically about rather small engagements afaik. That favours surprise tactics.
There's rarely a training like a pulse (saturation) attack of 300 combat aircraft at once on a 200x200 km area. I doubt that VLO/LO characteristics help much in such a situation, and IIRC a RAND study published in 2010 about F-22 capabilities over East Asian waters pretty much reinforced this point.
Again, I doubt that real peer/peer air war would look anything like the preferred scenarios for F-22 employment. The F-22 may face especially great obstacles on offensive missions (over red territory). Fighters are merely a component in a combined arms effort these days, after all.


There's also the issue of contrails. Certain atmospheric conditions create contrails reliably (at high altitude) and there's little chance to surprise anyone in WVR combat in such a zone if fighter pilots cooperate properly. Sensors (such as certain missile warning sensors) can even be programmed to detect contrails at large distances and direct extra sensor attention to the contrails' ends. The USAF doesn't do this, of course (afaik). It doesn't attempt to defeat a F-22.

It doesn't give its other aircraft the tools to defeat a F-22. Even West Europeans don't do that (at least not much). The Russians and Chinese on the other hand try hard to defeat it, and that's all-important for the appraisal of a F-22's quality.
A small anecdote for illustration:
An engineer/physicist team developed a radio proximity fuze for 5" shells in WW2. An engineer from another lab asked them if countermeasures were possible - the answer was a very sure "no". The lab itself had failed in its attempt to defeat its own product. Said engineer was puzzled, thought about it and two weeks later his laboratory had patched together a jammer. It was tested and defeated the proximity fuze reliably.

Now think about it. I hear all the time from the U.S. (the lab that invented the thing) about how great it is and how its own attempts at defeating it fail.
At the same time I have a Flug Revue issue from 1991 (!) on my desk with a big article on the YF-22. The Russians probably had espionage results on the program back in the 80's. Two decades of high priority countermeasure efforts (some of them already known, as truck-mobile search radars with wavelengths that pretty much prevent even LO characteristics for aircraft of the F-22's size through sheer physics).

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I based the comparison of F-4 and Mirages etc on the fact that
fuel - twice engine power = roughly twice fuel consumption
maintenance - 30-50 hrs/hr vs. 15-20 hrs/hr
crew - 2 instead of 1
Granted, the Draken was ill-armed with its Falcons and single gun, but the Mirages were very capable for their time AND capable of more sorties/day. Israeli Mirage IIIs did cut the time for loading fuel and weapons down to ten minutes. Ten minute breaks between sorties!
The F-4 had an almost double probability of one engine requiring urgent maintenance and its electronics required more care as well.
You seem to compare these 60's fighters too much to modern fighters in regard to visibility and "crap".


We also need to remember that kill statistics are questionable when discussing the F-4's qualities. The North Vietnamese exaggerated their kills (and had an impressive array of supposed aces) and the U.S. did most likely exaggerate air combat kill statistics as well. This happened in WW2 unintentionally and even with strict rules up to a factor of about two. BVR combat hasn't exactly made BDA more simple post-WW2.