Quantity has a quality all its own.
 

I have lost track of how many times I’ve read posts on this forum quoting Stalin’s famous line. You know the ones. The type of post that asks why the RAF doesn’t buy a few thousand Hunters instead of those horrible new fangled F35 things.

Following the first week or two of the current unpleasantness in Ukraine can we now please put that notion to bed for a while?

As an example, Russia has reportedly (but probably actually) lost modern, capable fighters to MANPADs. Main battle tanks are being dispatched by the dozen. Can you imagine what would happen if you pitched up with Hunters? You’d run out of pilots before the other side ran out of MANPADs or Javelins.

Would any nation, let alone a risk-averse Western nation, countenance the idea of swarms of yesteryears jet aircraft with plucky pilots attempting to overwhelm the defences of an unsuspecting foe?

I’ve batted these notions away for years now (and yes I can see the delicious irony of a Stalin quote being the bat with which to beat Putin). Can we now maybe just admit that modern, capable kit is much better suited to modern warfare?

Of course, if you wish to suggest the idea of swarms of affordable armed drones then there is a conversation to be had.

BV

Agreed that modern beats antique. All the capacity you can scrape together for fighting rather than flying is always desirable.

My concern is the frontage that can be covered with small numbers of assets be that one frontage or multiple theatres. Naturally the answer is "modern kit and lots of it" with a budget to match but if it comes down to totals vs tech then a broad spectrum of capability gives a greater flexibility to the Swiss Army knife requirement that is dictated by UK foreign policy where no one platform is the answer to all the scenarios. Masters of nothing, average at all is probably where we will end up, and I think we are partly there in some respects due to overstretch.

Quantity and quality
 

Obviously if you can afford it then high quantities of quality assets is the panacea. There are very few nations who can afford that though.

Just so we’re straight, if you want volunteers to fly Hunters into a modern war zone, I’m not your man.

BV

Imagine how all the AH boys feel knowing they can't just in the wheel at 2 grand watching through the camera anymore :uhoh::E

Ahh, but you're probably not up to speed on modern anti drone tactics Bob :E

Yeah, but if you have more drones than your adversary has pickle jars, some will inevitably get through; the adage still applies (sort of).

I know back in late 1970/80,s as a BAOR Tank officer, I read an article (from memory possibly Sunday Times) that said one of the best ways to counter the huge number of Warsaw Pact armored vehicles was to arm the West German population with throw away one shot anti tank weapons, and let rip. A similar thing seems to be happening in the Ukraine, with respectable results.
Cheers
Mr Mac

Another good way to stop them is prevent them from refuelling.

Indeed, many an ex Russian Tank Commander in heaven is singing " I fought the NLAW, The NLAW won."

The problem with the whole "Quantity has a Quality" is that - while you may eventually come out on top, you're going to experience horrendous casualties in the process. Maybe when you outnumber the other guy ten to one, and it takes 8 of yours to take out one of theirs, you'll eventually prevail. But you're still taking 8 times the casualties. In this day and age, not many western leaders would accept that.
I think back to WWII - the 50,000+ American Sherman tanks eventually overwhelmed much smaller numbers of German Tiger and Panther tanks due to weight of numbers. But American and British tank crews paid a horrendous price for the relative inferiority in quality of their tanks.

I would offer that you are seeing exactly that “quantity has a quality all of its own” in Ukraine right now? The multitude of SAMs, MANPADS and hand-held Anti-Tank weapons are having a huge effect on higher end Russian equipment - I see a Su-34 FULLBACK was taken down the other day, at least 3 Ka-50 HOKUMs and also quite a few T-90 tanks with reactive armour. It would appear that all of these higher quality types have been overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of weapons as they would likely survive against small numbers.

I think we are also seeing a return to the kind of losses that high-end war fighting brings rather than the small, limited and fairly one-sided skirmishes that TELIC and HERRICK represented. Whilst not quite total war, this isn’t far off at all and the West needs to get used to what that means again (why do I say that? Ukraine is not counter striking Russia in it’s own territory).

As for flying a Hunter? Yes, with a suitable set of improvements (DASS, datalink, upgraded weapons and supporting avionics), then the Hunter would make a pretty damn fine ground attack aircraft even today. The problem being after you’ve hung all those bits on it and done all of the various test flying and certification/qualification of the systems then it probably wouldn’t be that cheap anymore!

Best fly it in manual, in case the single system hydraulics takes a round.

is it not more nuanced than that:

Yes Tiger and Panther were more than a match for the Western tanks on the battlefield.
But they were very hard/expensive to produce – very unreliable – hard to maintain.
also oversized and too heavy for a 1944 western Europe road net- so they could not use a lot of bridges – got stuck on narrow roads and streets etc etc.

So they often were not on the battlefield where and when they were needed
The Germans would have been much better having less ambitious designs.

While I agree With Bob’s premise – we in the west are often in danger of swinging the pendulum too far toward quality and end up with too complex/expensive – then too few.

If you designed an F-15 replacement again would you come up with something as advanced as F-22 – then end up with so few?
Perhaps they would have got 1:1 replacements if they had plumped for something like Typhoon? Top drawer but not a generation too far?

While it is obvious quality is important for combat aircraft it is less so with other platforms and often how do you define ‘quality”?

Would you pay for the quality of a NH-90 over a Mil-8/17? It’s still the same squad of infantry that is delivered
But one helicopter has 37% availability the other only need Vodka to fly (and so does it’s pilots)

Clarification
 

Despite the fact that I wandered into taking about armoured vehicles in my opening premise it really is combat aircraft that I was referring to.

Waves of cheap aircraft in a proper shooting war nowadays are really only going to produce lots of dead pilots. Decent aircraft with decent weapons (ie don’t use an SU-35 with low level, dumb bomb deliveries) are definitely the order of the day. Or leave them at home.

BV

Bob:
Not just nowadays. Back in the 60s I did 2 tours on Hunter DFGA. Our war options included the NATO Central Region, and the opposition included such things as SAM6 and ZSU-23, both in large numbers. Our assessment at unit level was that we might have lasted most of the first morning if tasked against Soviet armoured formations. We considered that their field army air defence was very good. We thought they would perform much better than they seem to be doing in Ukraine at present.

Tiger ones originally had a snorkle so they could wade rivers underwater to get around the bridge issue and as for Western tanks not being a match, the British upgunned version of the Sherman, the Firefly with its 17 pounder onboard did.

That sound very theoretical to me. How many rivers have embankments with angles and firmness that would allow a tank to climb out successfully ? Think back to those Bradley acceptance trials where the triials were "successful" when the vehicles entered a specially constructed concrete tank at about 1 mph to fulfill the "amphibious" requirement.

https://www.historyhit.com/facts-about-the-tiger-tank/


https://cimg6.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....87f08088f8.jpg

Modern tanks still use the idea

https://www.milweb.net/news.php?type...7&item_id=6921

Look at the second tank snorkle and gun barrel only showing


https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/pprune....268fcf6464.jpg

German Leopard 2 with extended cupola

True of other WWII German military programmes:
... "those of us who were seriously engaged in the war were very grateful to Wernher von Braun. We knew that each V-2 cost as much to produce as a high-performance fighter airplane. We knew that German forces on the fighting fronts were in desperate need of airplanes, and that the V-2 rockets were doing us no military damage. From our point of view, the V-2 program was almost as good as if Hitler had adopted a policy of unilateral disarmament".
Freeman Dyson

Yes, I see that Nutty, but how many of the rivers in that area of Ukraine have such reinforced and engineered banks ? Looking back though, I see your comment was solely about German tanks and not advances in this area of Ukraine, which is what I initially thought - mixing up a couple of different posts.