F-16 Replacement

[Cole]

There were rumors that this exact plan would happen, but for F-35 folks.... fly F-35 for the high end, have LAARs or AT-6s for COIN/FAC roles... This would require 2x the planes, and also 2x the maintenance... not exactly affordable in today's day and age.

It would mean fewer total pilots if F-22 aces flew both, augmenting their under 20 Raptor hours per month. Suspect they could more safely practice some air-to-air maneuvers/TTP in the LAAR as well. Just one squadron of 24 LAAR might be shared by three squadrons of F-22s. Maintainers for the 24 LAAR are essential regardless, so it is a sunk cost no matter who flies them.

Unfortunately, the Russians and Indians plan on fielding PAK-FA by 2013.

See my previous post... the US is producing its 189th (actually 186th operational) F-22 right now. China, India, and Russia are all producing air-to-air fighters still... the US will be producing 0 in a few months. At some point, numbers start to matter. See the link to the DoD report in my previous post for words on the effectiveness of SAMs against our aircraft... unfortunately, the threats have some pretty effective SAMs.

We are producing F-35s that surpass anything China is producing and will beat PakFA in BVR. Suspect EODAS and AIM-9X coupled with helmet mounted displays would do just fine in WVR, as well. Why do you guys never mention that half the day is at night when WVR won't matter too much anyway.

I buy the argument that F-22 and F-35 will run out of missiles, but doubt the "quantity has a quality of its own" numbers will kill too many of our stealth aircraft as they are heading home to rearm. We and allies will get their numbers down rapidly enough to matter. You don't need to win the air war in a week when the longer blockade lasts for months.

Completely agree on the air-to-ground... the problem I am talking about is air-to-air and SEAD/DEAD... F-22 is much more effective than F-35 in the air-to-air role... F-35 only carries 1/2 the number of missiles... again it comes down to numbers.

You mentioned the missile quantity disparity repeatedly. Suspect from informed forum comments that eventually F-35 will have 6 internal missiles. Its larger numbers of aircraft make up for half the missiles per aircraft and in many non-CAP mission both F-22 and F-35 will have just two AMRAAM.

Let me start by saying that I totally agree that the folks on the ground are bearing the brunt of the current fight. I have nothing but respect for all of those who have placed themselves at risk around the world... they are all heroes.

Agree 1000% but sickened when things like FCS unmanned ground and air vehicles that could lead dismounted troops through IED fields/roads are not given the same emphasis as air/sea power. We fixed the HMMWV problem with MRAP/M-ATV but not the dismount problem.

F-18 is not as effective as F-22, and can't survive double digit SAMs. ISR/C2 and datalinks are key for sure.

Suspect that with towed decoys and other countermeasures, helmet-mounted displays not on F-22, a fair amount of stealth, and EA-18G support flying more sorties than F-22 closer to Taiwan and thus outside S300/S400 range, and an eventual AIM-20D...it could hold its own against Chinese aircraft.

It's unfortunate that the USAF, USN, and USMC's successes in the air in the last few conflicts have made people think that we will always have an overmatch in the air.

Since the advent of the F-15/F-16 have we or allies lost more than one fighter in air-to-air? Don't believe so, and F-22/F-35 stealth is a leap ahead beyond either with threats not currently being able to duplicate that stealth.

Hmmm... I don't think it is in any one realm that power projection is suffering- they all are. We are dependent on sea and air LOCs for any power projection... and that is ALL services, the whole joint force. Without LOCs, no one can fight... so everyone needs to be concerned about Anti-Access threats.

The Navy has ample stationing in Hawaii and elsewhere adn plenty of back-up carriers. The USAF needs few C-17s and little time to move fighters to Guam/Hawaii/Alaska/Diego Garcia/North Australia/and South Korea/Japan after missile threat is gone.

South Korea has only Strykers able to rapidly reinforce it, and double hulls won't solve all their survivability problems and lack of firepower. Have more confidence in the ability of a C-17 to airland or JHSV to sealand in South Korea or on the east side of Taiwan with mountain-masking prior to their hard-to-miss border crossing or amphibious assault preparations then have confidence in EFVs, amphibious/maritme prepositionings ships, and airborne forces launching a forcible entry after the PLA already controls Taiwan.

[Cliff]

It would mean fewer total pilots if F-22 aces flew both, augmenting their under 20 Raptor hours per month. Suspect they could more safely practice some air-to-air maneuvers/TTP in the LAAR as well. Just one squadron of 24 LAAR might be shared by three squadrons of F-22s. Maintainers for the 24 LAAR are essential regardless, so it is a sunk cost no matter who flies them.

The other issue, Cole, is training- F-22s focus on air-to-air, and they need to with the limited numbers. F-35s make more sense since they will be primarily A-G. That said, I would love to be in either an F-22 or F-35 squadron and have a squadron of LAARs to fly! The pooling idea could work, but again I think is not fiscally workable unless the economy improves a lot.

We are producing F-35s that surpass anything China is producing and will beat PakFA in BVR. Suspect EODAS and AIM-9X coupled with helmet mounted displays would do just fine in WVR, as well. Why do you guys never mention that half the day is at night when WVR won't matter too much anyway.

NVGs allow day-style tactics at night... WVR still matters based on technology like EW that makes BVR missiles less effective, and numbers (lots of targets so you will have to use IR missiles and perhaps the gun). Just because it's night doesn't mean you will never go to the merge.

I buy the argument that F-22 and F-35 will run out of missiles, but doubt the "quantity has a quality of its own" numbers will kill too many of our stealth aircraft as they are heading home to rearm. We and allies will get their numbers down rapidly enough to matter. You don't need to win the air war in a week when the longer blockade lasts for months.

A longer conflict would be tough for us as well... we are going to have very limited numbers of platforms. If I lose 10 F-22s that is 10% of the combat coded force... Our kill ratios will need to be in the 20 to 1 neighborhood to win.

See above for discussion on F-35 missile numbers.

Agree 1000% but sickened when things like FCS unmanned ground and air vehicles that could lead dismounted troops through IED fields/roads are not given the same emphasis as air/sea power. We fixed the HMMWV problem with MRAP/M-ATV but not the dismount problem.

My understanding was that FCS was canceled to buy things like MRAP... I think if FCS had counter-IED tech that was extremely effective it would being the force right now... I don't think money has been as big an issue as you think, at least not in the Gates years. The impression I get from my Army peers is that they have gotten most of what they have asked for...

Since the advent of the F-15/F-16 have we or allies lost more than one fighter in air-to-air? Don't believe so, and F-22/F-35 stealth is a leap ahead beyond either with threats not currently being able to duplicate that stealth.

Just one, the Navy F-18 in Desert Storm. Then again, we haven't fought anyone who could be termed a near-peer competitor numbers or tech wise. It's a little silly to me to argue that we should stop trying to keep our advantage in an area that helps us so much...

The Navy has ample stationing in Hawaii and elsewhere adn plenty of back-up carriers. The USAF needs few C-17s and little time to move fighters to Guam/Hawaii/Alaska/Diego Garcia/North Australia/and South Korea/Japan after missile threat is gone.

The Navy doesn't have a lot of extra... see here.

South Korea has only Strykers able to rapidly reinforce it, and double hulls won't solve all their survivability problems and lack of firepower. Have more confidence in the ability of a C-17 to airland or JHSV to sealand in South Korea or on the east side of Taiwan with mountain-masking prior to their hard-to-miss border crossing or amphibious assault preparations then have confidence in EFVs, amphibious/maritme prepositionings ships, and airborne forces launching a forcible entry after the PLA already controls Taiwan.

I agree about our ability to see the enemy moving, and that the ability to move by air helps, but again how many C-17s/5s do we have, and how many can we lose to SAMs/Naval SAMs?

Again, I'm not saying it's a crisis... just that we're accepting a lot of risk. The problem is deterrence... if folks think that they can beat us, then our ability to deter them is hurt. We are at about the minimum level now...

You are very right about the allies, but remember that there is not a formal NATO-style agreement among the nations in the Pacific... so the ability of an agressor to divide and conquer is there. China is not trying to win... yet. They are trying to get to a point where they can deter us or make it too costly for us to continue, forcing us to let them do whatever it is they set out to do. Finally, I am not saying lots of our folks in F-22s will be shot down.... I am saying they won't be able to kill all the threats before they can get to and kill folks on the ground or on ships.

I think everyone in the US military has forgotten the hard-learned lessons about air superiority from World War II... which was really the last time we faced a peer competitor Air Force. A lot of things we depend on (just in time supply, ISR, drones, sea and air LOCs) depend on having air superiority. Hopefully our accepting risk in this area isn't challenged in conflict.

Finally, one point that I sometimes make to folks- 5,767 US Military folks have been killed since 2001 in Iraq and Afghanistan - 9 years.

Al Qaeda killed 2,819 folks using 4 airliners in 102 minutes. Think about what someone could do with actual military aircraft...

I don't point this out to say that one is worse than the other, or to be flippant, only to show that the consequences of losing air superiority are pretty severe.

Thanks for the good points, hopefully I made some intelligent contributions.

V/R,

Cliff

[Cole]

The F-18s will be closer... but again they have a short range (369nm legacy, 520 Super Hornet - and both of those are with 3 external tanks!). The better the Chinese Navy gets, and the more anti-ship ABMs become credible, the less help the carrier can be - because you end up spending more and more effort protecting the boat and less effort projecting power. CFTs on F-35 are unlikely as it would ruin the stealth.

Not sure legacy F-18C/D matter that much and believe ASBM can be defeated through a combination of multispectral smoke (littoral combat ship dispensing smoke in front of carriers?) and the same smoke over island bases in the Pacific on the outer edge of missile range.

http://www.usnwc.edu/getattachment/1...-of-Obscurants

Wonder if the USAF should look at the F/A-18E/F (or F-35C) for rotating Pacific island-basing and stateside homeland security. Use smoke to defeat ASBM radar/IR sensors, and jammers to locally disrupt Chinese-GPS to eliminate pinpoint targeting. Then employ concrete shelters over catapult launch and recovery to provide passive countermeasures to survive missile attacks while staying within reasonable range and escorting/augmenting KC-X aerial refueling. Marcus Island? Wake Island? Midway Islands? As you mention, up to 29,000 lbs of fuel can be transported internally/externally in a Super Hornet in 5 tanks which when added to KC-X top-off would leave a near perpetual fuel supply and protection escort for KC-X. Add a mini-boom to the F/A-18E/F and have 3 refuelers on station at a track or anchor.

Agree on the effects. Not sure on the numbers... China is producing F-10s, F-11Bs, and FB-7s... Our first IOC F-35s are in 2012, with the first deployment in 2014 at best...

I think there is a window of risk over the next 5-7 years. I think you are overestimating our advantage, and underestimating the work other folks have done.

Forgive my display of old-guy bias and I truly respect the mature/respectful arguments you are making. But a J-10, J-11B, and FB-7 are no more capable than an F-15/F-16/FA-18E/F and we already acknowledged how few of those have been lost in the past 30+ years...and the experience-level of the PLAAF or PLAN in the next 5-7 years is not likely to be considered near-peer.

While the 1970s-1980s military shared none of the austere repeated deployments and extraordinary ground risk of service today or in the Vietnam war, there was a far more extraordinary "window of risk" in the European theater with double digit thousands of Soviet tanks/BMPs more than capable of rolling over NATO. The related nuclear risk was far higher, as well. So when considering China, with much to lose economically and little to gain over the next 5-7 years by attacking Taiwan, it is hard for me to feel much concern.

And as much as we portrayed the Soviet air and ground threat as 10' tall back then, with the exception of numbers, they truly were not much threat (other than numbers far more in disparity than today's threats) to M1s, Bradleys, F-16, and F-15...but would have posed a serious threat to M60s, M113, and F-4s that were slowly being replaced. THAT was a window of vulnerability! Yet it was addressed with a 50,000 lb Bradley that also proved more than up to task in OIF before being uparmored at which point it remained only in the 60-70,000lbs range...so why does the GCV need to be 100,000-140,000 lbs? Why is it unacceptable for F-35s to take on Pak FA's that lack stealth? China will never own any because the Russians have gotten wise to their repeated attempts to backward engineer.

While respecting any Soldier's loss, find it hard to get very alarmed by the loss of 125 combined-arms rusty Israelis regulars and reservists against a determined Hezbollah foe that had years to dig in and prepare. Where was the smoke to defeat ATGMs/RPGs? CAS (was doing EBO)? Artillery prep? In most realistic future uses of U.S./allied heavy armor and airpower, we would be addressing a threat preparing to or in the process of invading someone else, therefore giving them little time to prepare a proper defense. In addition, the very act of invading would make it difficult to hide advancing armor in slow-go terrain, thus leaving them vulnerable to airpower and ATACMs, and Apaches.

Bradley/Stryker/LAV III survivability in OIF, current air-deployment of 25% of supplies to Afghanistan, the air movement of Strykers and M-ATV there, and the success of 60+ sorties in inserting armor/airborne forces into Bashur, Northern Iraq should be far more revealing to us than any lesson of Lebanon in 2006. Adding belly armor to a GCV should not exceed 80,000+ lbs to retain the key benefits of C-17/C-5M air-deployment of heavy-light mix air deployment facilitated by the current trend of placing HBCTs and IBCTs at many of the same division-home bases.

[Fuchs]

To be honest, the MiG-29 with its helmet mounted sight and the super-agile AA-11 with its off boresight seeker created a Sputnik shock in 1990 when Eastern German NVA equipment was studied. The West had dropped these technologies in the 70's after tests and was on a very different path (ASRAAM).

The MiG-29 was inferior to F-18 and F-16 in simulated gunfights, but ceteris paribus they were superior in WVR missile fights. We were lucky to not lose many combat aircraft after Vietnam; no Western air force had to go to war against a near-peer during that time.

The same applies to Su-27s; they were clearly superior to F-15's in the 80's and their huge range without any drop tanks was a huge operational advantage.


The Russians only fell back again in the 90's when they weren't able to match avionics improvements and lacked funds for everything.



Everything that was produced in the 80's (= most NATO combat aircraft) is technically inferior to the best the Russians have to offer, probably even to the best the Chinese have to offer.

Western high end quality combat aircraft are limited to about a thousand aircraft, and even these about thousand aircraft have huge quality differences between batches (especially Eurofighter and F-22).
The most capable F-16s and many of the most capable F-15s were exported beyond NATO's members.

[carl]

Very interesting discussion.

Combat radius was what I actually meant to say when I asked my question but of course my brain didn't pull it up. Related to that, I have another question. Things get very very complicated when figuring radii. Is fuel fraction (clean) a more useful benchmark to use when figuring how far these airplanes can usefully go on missions? Is that data available for the F-35 versions and the F-22?

Another question I have regards the F-22 altitude capability. I have read that it can fight from way high up there. Can the other planes under discussion fight from that high up and is that altitude capability of very great of very small use?

One other thing I only learned about last year that may have some bearing. I don't think the vertical launch missile magazines of the carrier escorts can be replenished at sea. Once they're out, they have to drive back to the big base to get refilled. That would probably have significant bearing on planning I would imagine.

The only other thing I would say is if planning on fighting somebody you figure is almost at good as you, you had better plan on some surprises. If we were to, God forbid, get into a full on tussle with China, I think it would be prudent to expect to lose a number of carriers. Could we carry on if that happened?

[Cliff]

Things get very very complicated when figuring radii. Is fuel fraction (clean) a more useful benchmark to use when figuring how far these airplanes can usefully go on missions?

Yes and no... the big issue is that the different aircraft have different mission profiles, so while the fuel fraction is important (Su-27 carries a lot of fuel for instance) it is not the end-all be-all...

As an example, your average modern airliner is very fuel efficient. This is because it flies at optimized (higher than legacy) altitudes and has very efficient high-bypass engines. Power changes are minimized and routings are as direct as possible... yielding better range.

If I'm flying a mission in combat, however, I have to maneuver in relation to the threats, so I can't necessarily fly a fuel optimized profile (although I will try in between times when I'm fighting!).

Combat radius is probably the best number to compare, as long as you look at the assumptions involved and check that they make sense. It usually takes into account the expected profile for a mission (hi-lo-hi etc).

Another question I have regards the F-22 altitude capability. I have read that it can fight from way high up there. Can the other planes under discussion fight from that high up and is that altitude capability of very great of very small use?

In general, higher altitude gives you better fuel efficiency and a longer range on your weapons. There's a dated (but still relevant) interview with Lockeed test pilot Paul Metz here that discusses this. F-15Cs can get up to similar altitudes, but can't turn as well as the F-22 up there. F-16s and F-18s have a hard time getting into the upper 40s when combat configured. According to one expert, the altitude advantage means that the F-22 is twice as effective - see here.

One other thing I only learned about last year that may have some bearing. I don't think the vertical launch missile magazines of the carrier escorts can be replenished at sea. Once they're out, they have to drive back to the big base to get refilled. That would probably have significant bearing on planning I would imagine.

Magazine space and reloading is definitely an issue for the Aegis ships. As I said, numbers matter at some point.

The only other thing I would say is if planning on fighting somebody you figure is almost at good as you, you had better plan on some surprises. If we were to, God forbid, get into a full on tussle with China, I think it would be prudent to expect to lose a number of carriers. Could we carry on if that happened?

We could and would carry on, but it would not be pretty. We have been lucky that our last few opponents have been either really dumb or really over-matched. With the exception of 9-11, we have not been hit hard in any one engagement. Hopefully we can continue this streak!

V/R,

Cliff

[viper__40]

One other thing I only learned about last year that may have some bearing. I don't think the vertical launch missile magazines of the carrier escorts can be replenished at sea...

The MK41 VLS comes with a modular crane option allowing reload at sea. Weight is the key though with the heavier weapons unable to replenish.