Mr Liberson : Our current assessment that we speak of is: greater than 6 to 1 relative loss exchange ratio against in 4 versus 8 engagement scenarios—four blue at 35s versus eight advanced red threats in the 2015 to 2020 time frame.
So why did we give LockMart all that money to develop the F-22? Should we not be retiring it, and spending the giga$ programmed for its upgrade on a new AAM for the F-35?
I try not to do math in public, but this sounds like 4x F-35s with a total of 16 AIM-120s versus 8x Su-35s with 48-64 AAMs (R-77 + R-73, both in advanced versions).
On the basis of claimed and demonstrated performance, T/W, wing loading &c, aircraft performance = advantage Sukhoi.
In this scenario (and people who fly these things, jump in and correct me) I presumably want to use my datalinks &c to target each bogey with two AIM-120s, because if I fire everything and do not win decisively, any one of the surviving (and
ed-off) Sukhois can kill all of us like a fox in the chicken run - the "run" in this case being fenced in by kinematics.
That means an average Pk around 0.5 for AMRAAM (very rough - some of my AMRAAM pairs will both kill the same target and some will fail) which is quite reasonable as long as the targets don't do anything effective - but the more the targets anticipate, evade and jam, the closer you have to get to achieve that kind of Pk.
So the key factors in getting that 6:1 are how close the JSFs can get without being detected, and whether/when/how the targets respond to the attack. That's when you have to start guessing about the capability of the Su's radar, IRST and EW suite.
Conclusion 1: The results of such sims are highly dependent on assumptions based on guesswork and analysis, regardless of classification level.
Conclusion 2: The CLER will be extremely sensitive to detection range. For instance, if improved IRST detects and tracks reliably beyond the missile's high-Pk launch range, the JSF may be entering a world of pain.
Conclusion 3: The aforementioned gigabucks being spent to keep the F-22 alive and up-to-date says that the USAF doesn't believe this 6:1 malarkey.