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F-35 Cancelled, then what ?

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F-35 Cancelled, then what ?

Old 17th Apr 2019, 06:23
  #11821 (permalink)  
 
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Attack is the mission; Air to Air is a contingency you plan for.
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Old 17th Apr 2019, 13:03
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Originally Posted by orca
Attack is the mission; Air to Air is a contingency you plan for.
until you are tasked with OCA or DCA, both of which the F-35 is adept at performing?
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Old 17th Apr 2019, 17:04
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OCA is a contingency plan for A-A when the mission is Attack.

DCA I’ll give you...and concur about the platform.
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Old 17th Apr 2019, 18:18
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I think it depends on the campaign. OCA might be the first phase, to make the way for attackers. Or SEAD might be the first phase, and certainly into-c-cubed
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Old 17th Apr 2019, 19:51
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Salute!

From the Colonies, and with current doctrine, we look at OCA with lottsa SEAD for the first move unless on the defensive. And starting out on the defensive is one aspect of warfare we should prolly look at.
Pearl Harbor still rings in our old, poor ears.
If we are on the California or Virginia coast and meeting hordes of carrier-based somethings from some power nobody knows about, the F-35's will earn their keep due to the low number and basing of the Raptors. And then there's the horde of Vipers and Hornets to contend with. So it's the "protected" places associated with treaties and pacts that pose the problem. Great subject for its own thread, huh?

From this old warrior and Ops Plans weenie of the first F-16 wing, the allocation of assets depends upon the scenario. Number one is self defense. If there's an associated land battle, the goal is to achieve air supremacy over the beach head or border or whatever. As far back as Normandy, no Allied grunts had much to worry about from enema airpower.
My Israeli students had been thru Yom Kippur and one had been in the 1967 blitz. They can talk about protecting the grunts.
I gotta tellya that I like the F-35 for first day SEAD, with maybe a few flights loaded for bear with Slammers and IR missiles. Raptors would be neat, but there are too few, and those must be allocated to the highest priority of the overall situtuation.
Red Flag 19-1 stuff is interesting reading and you can hunt down stuff with a little effort. Raptors were downplayed, so the F-35 carried the load.

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Old 17th Apr 2019, 20:03
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How many times in this epic thread has someone gotten frustrated and demanded that the Military Aviation section be sealed off from the non-operational riff-raff, only to be reminded that any such action would be impracticable in an anonymous forum?

Anyway, let's be clear about one thing. A bunch of professional operators, tacticians and engineers in Russia decided that it was worth doubling down on the Su-27's already world-leading agility to create the Su-35, and their bosses decided that it was worth spending a lot of Euros to demonstrate that to potential customers. If you want to call them uninformed fanboys, go and do it to their face, tovarich. New Russian words, you will learn.

What I have heard from the Russians (and not only from Russians) is that they don't intend or expect to be detected, tracked, engaged and killed by the F-35 before they ever see it. The fundamental problem with stealth in A2A is that BVR is a game played with a ing big searchlight, and making that searchlight simultaneously functional and undetectable is not ing easy. Since we started into addressing this problem (about the time the USAF decided to bet hard on LO for ATF, in 1985), the radar-shiny side of the combat equation has (1) gotten less shiny by an order of magnitude, (2) become much, much better at detecting signals, (3) become much, much better at jamming, and (4) incorporated ways to detect a missile launch.

At the same time, F-35 is shooting weapons that, excellent as they are, are designed to fit an F-16 tip rail. Quoted max range figures are often based on co-altitude against a non-maneuvering target. Anything other than that chops the range down. Fanboy nonsense? No, it's why Meteor exists.

The Russians accordingly don't believe that the battle will be decided before the merge. Also, remember that a flying display may demonstrate capability, without necessarily using real maneuvers. The game is energy and controllability.

I was at Farnborough in 1992 when one of the early super-Sukhois was showing off. A very well known retired fighter general was dismissive: "-all use in combat." Except his view was not shared with the USAF and USN, who went into panic mode developing HMDs and the AIM-9X. One wonders what has changed today.
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Old 17th Apr 2019, 20:23
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At last - someone who knows why Meteor exists!
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Old 18th Apr 2019, 03:23
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LO

I have no idea of your background but you appear pretty knowledgeable about the subject.

My previous suggestion, since it appears your initial paragraph was directed at me, was not directed at people with knowledge and understanding. It was directed at an individual who said that the SU35 is better than an F35 because it can do the cobra manoeuvre and could therefore ‘dodge’ missiles because of it. Thereby indicating a fundamental lack of appreciation of the role and capabilities of the F35 and indeed of all matters related to fighter combat.

Even with your most empathetic head on, surely you can see that comments like that add nothing to the debate.

There is lots of information on the F35 in the public domain. Those that wish to ridicule it are perfectly at liberty to do their own research.

Just because somebody calls me out on a public forum and asks what makes the F35 so special it doesn’t suddenly make it my responsibility to educate them.

If people want to believe that F35 is a lame duck then fine. But at least have the decency to do some actual research first, before posting uninformed drivel on a, supposedly, ‘professional’ site.

I’m sure the SU35 wins against the F35 on the latest PlayStation game but that doesn’t make it real. And it doesn’t constitute a basis for real world opinion.

An uncharacteristically grumpy post from me but c’est la vie, comrade.

BV
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Old 18th Apr 2019, 09:28
  #11829 (permalink)  
 
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Originally Posted by ProPax
Su-35S is more agile allowing it to evade oncoming missiles.
Originally Posted by Stuff
That comment alone confirms what we've thought since you started posting. You know absolutely nothing about the subject.
Propax get ideas like these from the like of Bill Sweetman and co, Here's Bill professing that the SU was designed to counter stealth and will be dodging all the AIM-120, Meteors and SM-6 to get WVR. Obviously following the AIM-120 and Meteor trail back to the f-22 and f-35s. Where upon it will do a cobra and decimate the airwing. It's rubbish like this from clueless clowns that feeds the nonsense, when the SU-35 was released in 2013. Obviously the SU-57 is the hero now, just as soon as they can get a squadron of them in the air.:


Last edited by golder; 18th Apr 2019 at 10:09.
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Old 18th Apr 2019, 13:54
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Golder -

Is it, then, your considered and doubtless expert opinion that reduced RCS, missile-launch alerts, jamming and agility, on the defender's side, have no operationally relevant effect on the Pk-at-range of the attacking aircraft/AAM combination?

Do you also believe the logically inevitable conclusion that follows from the above: That the people who spec'd Meteor for improved Pk-at-range, relative to AMRAAM, to cope with an accurately predicted Super-Sukhoi threat had inferior understanding of the problem to your good self?
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Old 18th Apr 2019, 15:10
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As F-35 critics are quick to remind us (because we don’t already know - obvs) any decrease in RCS or increase in jamming and agility only reduces the Pk if it out paces the threat. So in the case of the Super Sukhoi they may have done marvellous things but the attackers’ Pk may have still increased over time.

wrt to Meteor and indeed any system - you can spec whatever you want...it’s what you actually get in your hands that matters and I would love to see how a URD specifies Pk...
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Old 18th Apr 2019, 15:12
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BV -

I understand your reaction, but as we see there are incoherent and unqualified people on both sides of the debate, and people like myself who may have limited formal qualifications but have nonetheless tracked the relevant issues for many years.

Let us never forget the name of Sir John Clerk of Eldin, whose work on naval tactics influenced Nelson and others, despite the fact that, as far as we know, he never set foot on a ship. (By the way, his great-great-nephew was James Clerk Maxwell, whose work was fundamental to the design of the F-35.)

The important thing is to not get locked into one position or the other and to avoid being fixated on any given system or solution, to the point where (as we've seen with JSF) people seem to be saying "it's an awesome WVR jet" one week and "we have stealth and fusion, who needs WVR?", the next.

And while the original Cobra wasn't a missile-evasion maneuver, it was seen by many as a credible tactic to convert a disadvantageous position into an advantageous one - and even though the post-Cobra trajectory was predictable, it was important that the MiG-29 and Su-27 could do it with much less risk of departure than Western 4-gen types: a good example of how "air-show stunts" can represent real capabilities.
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Old 18th Apr 2019, 22:40
  #11833 (permalink)  
 
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Salute!

Good admission, LO. I salute you.
there are incoherent and unqualified people on both sides of the debate, and people like myself who may have limited formal qualifications but have nonetheless tracked the relevant issues for many years.
So we get expert opinion from someone doing a lotta "literature research/review" as most of us here did that have an advbanced degree when getting ready for our thesis whether we ever flew a Piper Cub or F-16 or F-18 or Typhoon or Rafale or Mig 29 or..... Hell. What do they know?
I would rather value an opinion from someone who has yanked and banked in more than one fighter, and has actually been shot at, shot up and shot down.

Make no mistake. My opinion of the Sukhoi lineage is high. As with the French, those Russians know how to build and fly very pretty planes. Ditto for those from the Mig Bureau over the years, and I have many friends/students that encountered the 17, 19 and 21 varieties in combat - some U.S., some Israeli, some from...... Not going to get into the user qualifications of some nations flying the various planes, but look at the Mig-29 Fulcrum kills in the Storm versus the F-15 and F-18 and F-16 losses.

I would always consider the combination of pilot skill, system knowledge and aircraft performance before trashing one plane over the other. And then there's the supporting cast as we had in a few combat scenarios over the last 40 years.

Anyway, I wanna see one of those uber Sukhoi jets over here in the U.S. at an airshow.

Lastly, I am trying to find the hundreds of orders for the Su 35 and 57 by nations all over the world. Ditto for the Typhoon and Gripen and Rafale and Mirage 2000 a decade or so ago. Hmmmm...

Gotta cook dinner now.

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Old 18th Apr 2019, 23:33
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The MiG-29 was indeed pretty hopeless in DS. But as we learned in subsequent years (and as better informed sources knew), the bog-standard MiG-29 was, from the avionics and HMI standard, a typical Soviet ground-controlled interceptor. Since we kneecapped the C2 at H-plus-a-sneeze, it was thereafter remarkably useless, because Blue had an operational picture and Red did not.

The Su-35 and parallel Chinese upgrades are different animals, and the campaign (particularly in WestPac) will be even more different.
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Old 19th Apr 2019, 05:15
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I don't know where the disagreement is LO? I assume like Sweetman, that you agree the 5th gen system is going to get first look, first shoot on the SU-35. F22/F-35 have the SA of the battlespace and the SU is at a loss. You also say there is the Meteor, as an example of a BVR missile that is going on the F-35. You do disagree with Sweetman's opinion, that the SU will dodge all the Meteor/AIM-120D and other missiles and get WVR. Is it daytime or night time, are we offensive or defensive?? It really was a big ask. They could also have off-board missiles from other platforms both air and on surface, like the SM-6 available in the battlespace.

I know the RAAF said some years ago. That they had the SU covered with the FA-18F system, because of radar and the AIM-120C7 etc. So I'm not too concerned with the F-35. With more advanced missiles and the system Jericho etc.

What is available says the AIM-120D is a viable BVR missile. Australia must think so, we are buying 450 at A$1.6B of the AIM-120D. If the Meteor pans out, we do buy European missiles too. The ASRAAM for example.

An example of what is said on military sites on the AIM-120D
https://www.defenseindustrydaily.com...e-east-040010/
Pentagon documents confirm the use of smaller system components; with an upgraded radar antenna, receiver & signal processor; GPS-aided mid-course navigation; an improved datalink; and new software algorithms. The new hardware and software offers improved jamming resistance, better operation in conjunction with modern AESA radars, and an improved high-angle off-boresight “seeker cone,” in order to give the missile a larger no-escape zone. Less-publicized improvements reportedly include a dual-pulse rocket motor, for up to 50% more range and better near-target maneuvering.

Last edited by golder; 21st Apr 2019 at 12:21.
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Old 23rd Apr 2019, 06:15
  #11836 (permalink)  
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https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...pentagon-finds

Lockheed's Costly F-35 to Be Billions Costlier, Pentagon Finds

Lockheed Martin Corp’s F-35 jet, the world’s costliest weapons program, just got even costlier.

The estimated total price for research and procurement has increased by $22 billion in current dollars adjusted for inflation, according to the Pentagon’s latest annual cost assessment of major projects. The estimate for operating and supporting the fleet of fighters over more than six decades grew by almost $73 billion to $1.196 trillion.

The increase to $428.4 billion from $406.2 billion in acquisition costs, about a 5.5 percent increase, isn’t due to poor performance, delays or excessive costs for labor or materials, according to the Defense Department’s latest Selected Acquisition Report sent to Congress last week and obtained by Bloomberg News. Instead, the increase reflects for the first time the current cost estimates for a major set of upgrades planned in coming “Block 4” modifications, according to the report.....




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Old 23rd Apr 2019, 09:07
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What is the longest ranged Russian/ Chinese AAM?

Despite the "development" of off platform data linked targeting, there is the weak link in the chain, the command aircraft, be it sentry type or looking glass. [if you are thinking ground based CCC forget it the russians have already said they WILL use tac nukes to pave the way]

When you are facing numbers of X magnitude greater than your own load outs then your critical asset is doomed.

What was the flag when the F3 det had their own personal "in to the valley" charge to eliminate the command ac?

With beam riders too.
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Old 23rd Apr 2019, 10:18
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Originally Posted by weemonkey
Tip of the iceberg?
Upgrade costs money shock! Our full report on pages 3, 4 and 5 details shock revelation that upgrades aren't free!
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Old 23rd Apr 2019, 12:04
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But they aren't UPGRADES are they.

They are REBUILDS to meet operational requirements that, at present, the aircraft do not meet.
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Old 23rd Apr 2019, 16:20
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Which rather reminds me of the Aussie comment to an Airbus suit, who'd proposed that customers should pay for an 'enhanced' Mission Planning System for the A330MRTT:
"How do you enhance something that doesn't bloody work?"
Still doesn't....so I hear.
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