That's what happens when you go in open electronic.Greg wrote:You should be more careful where you put your dong.
True. The catch with buying the shit that's useful (or will be useful for more than a few years) is tricky and lends itself easily to the wish fulfillment nonsense.It's an interview, with an interviewer who is trying to keep him on topic... so you can't blame him too much for not digressing as far as you'd like. But my take on it is that the 'high' end of a hi/lo mix becomes an excuse to have a wishlist-gratifying gold-plating wankfest, whereas the 'low' end becomes the useful aircraft you buy after the money runs out. Which is indeed pretty much how it works out, except for the Navy where the 'low' end is a gold-plating wankfest too, just what you're gold-plating is smaller.
The grownups might want to stop with the hi/lo wish fulfillment games, and just go straight to buying the shit that's useful.
I'd take that one with a grain of salt. Although I wouldn't put it past anyone to do something like this, which jet was nerfed (or in exercises, put under ridiculous ROEs) to make other jets look better is often the subject of heated debate. Especially when a squadron gets its ass kicked at something. But hey, at least they've got the APG-68 now.When you realize that the F-16's radar was deliberately nerfed to make the F-15 look better and not threaten the F-15 buy, it kind of changes things there.
I wasn't cherry picking; he said "of its day," so I was looking at jets introduced and/or still in active service around the same time. The F-105 could go on the list, I suppose, but it was already in the process of being phased out in 1970.You forgot the F-105, etc. Try looking for things that were expected to be good at ACM and check again. Cherry pick less. Oh and Russian fighters got XBOXHUEG because that was the only way they could get any range. Russian fighter aircraft size always is range-dependent, otherwise their tradition is to make them as small as possible.
Although now that I think about it, I did miss a couple others, like the Harrier, which was comparable to the F-16 in weight now that I look it up.
He seems to be saying his faction lost and the F-15 did in fact wind up overburdened with junk, which is bizarre.Do you know who SAID 'not a pound for air to ground'?
The problems there were well-documented with visual confirmation ROEs and the AIM-7 being a total piece of crap. Both of these were considerations in the radar's design with the ability to specifically ID targets and incorporating IFF directly into it for the ROE issue, and beefing up the output to make the stupid Sparrows actually see what they were supposed to hit. Considering the AIM-120 wouldn't enter service for another 20 years, these were hardly unreasonable. Giving up or compromising BVR was never going to be an option.Think about the PK of BVR missiles in Viet Nam. Our most effective planes there, air to air, barely even HAD radar. When you realize the only reason the F-15 is as large as it is, is to be able to fit a meter-wide radar aerial, he might have a point. The big radar on the F-15 sure is useful for the air-to-ground modes of the F-15E, though.
At this point, yeah. But the overall size was never a real drawback in real-world situations, and there are other benefits to having a big radar set with a lot of processing power. It's just that most of them only come into play in scenarios that have become remarkably less likely since the end of the Soviet Union.Yeah I've always found him to be a little doctrinaire. F-15 almost certainly didn't need to be as big as it was. F-14 had a reason to be as compromised (as much of a whale) as it was, to carry a radar (and missiles) that big. F-15, with the tech of the day, not so much. And even now, PK of AMRAAM in actual combat, against an opponent that actually has RWRs or isn't a very rudely surprised friendly, is horribly low. When he talks about the big radar not getting you much (on anything that isn't specifically designed to hunt bombers and cruise missiles for a living), much as I hate to admit it he's got a point.
Yeah. And non-fighters. Given the right roads most of our fighters should be able to handle it, except the F-16 with its extremely low-mounted intake. Then again, with a really overscrupulous adopt-a-highway program...Roads sometimes exist. There are modern fighters designed to operate from them.
Oh, no argument there. What bugged me about it is that there are so many other ways the F-35 is lacking up close despite the actual neat stuff it has that even the F-22 doesn't. (The budget to add HMCS et al keep getting dropped.)He's quite right about the dogfighting thing. Your counter is to offer a technological counter. Except that you can have those same technologies on some other plane that costs say 1/4 (as of now, but the trend for F-35 isn't looking good) as much *and* can dogfight. The maneuvering ability is a plus. So why F-35 again?
(snip)
That was a bit of a wakeup call. But the HOBS/HMS combination has limits, and when everyone has them then being able to maneuver is a nice way to differentiate yourself. And it's still no justification for an expensive airplane....
I mean, we've got this big grotesque mess of contradictory capabilities and flaws where it's so jacked up, even the things it's actually good at don't even matter. Instead, he's doing it from the WW2 point of view and talking about wing loadings (which mean nothing to most people). It really makes it sound like he doesn't actually know what's going on with this thing.
Well, they can be. It is absurd that we haven't replaced the B-52 with something with half the engines.Remember it's an interview, and everything is squeezed down to sound bites. You're not going to get a long detailed argument. This all kind of hinges on your definition of CAS, so things are going to get messy and meta.
Sure if you're talking (as Bill Whittle put it) 'God button' CAS, as in somebody on the ground points at something (anything stationary) and presses a button and a minute later that thing blows apart... yeah sure anybody can drop a JDAM. Bomb trucks are cheap.
Something like it, at least.When things are a little more messy and fluid... Sure modern radars are great at picking out vehicles no matter the camoflage. Not so good at IFF, though. He's got a point, in a more traditional CAS scenario going lower and slower is better and that's a problem with more than just F-35, though not being able to go low and slow enough to be effective would seem to be a valid criticism. (Haven't we had that discussion enough already elsewhere?)
The problem is that there is no one-size-fits-all CAS platform and things get weird when you never quite know what exactly will be called for. As a CAS platform, the F-35's limitations are similar to the F-16's: Short legs and small loadout. But, we've had A-10s waved off in favor of F-16s because the ground commander liked the F-16's newfangled laser JDAMs better than the A-10's 30mm.
How am I wrong? I never said they didn't build them. They certainly didn't do it because they predicted stealth aircraft, and they sure as hell haven't managed to render stealth obsolete with them.No, you're simply not right. He is correct, they never stopped building VHF (and HF) radars. Used them for long range air search.
"Low band radars are not a panacea for the defeat of VLO (Very Low Observable) aircraft. Their angular accuracy has been until recently poor, and the required antenna size results in ungainly systems which are usually slow to deploy and stow, even if designed from the outset for mobility. The size and high power emissions of these radars, in types with limited mobility, makes them much easier to detect and destroy than typical mobile systems operating in the decimetric and centimetric bands, which can relocate rapidly after a missile shot."But they always had limitations. AFTER Desert Storm, the Russians have certainly continued to build VHF radars but they've also put a lot of effort into working around the limitations. They've made them nicely portable, especially.
Here's something I found that doesn't seem too incoherent.
http://www.ausairpower.net/APA-Rus-Low-Band-Radars.html
It's a threat, but it hardly reduces stealth to a "scam."
...yeeeeeeeah, this guy's, um.Should probably throw this in somewhere, too.
http://defenseissues.wordpress.com/2013 ... -the-f-35/
I'll just say that he wants us to take his word on a lot of assumptions. Grain of salt, etc. acoustic stealth, really
Eh, sorry. I meant that he's making crappy predictions that are highly reminiscent of Jones' doomsaying. Which, given how utterly disastrous the JSF program has been, is saying something.Not sure why you have a problem with predictions. Testable predictions are *the* main way you can tell if someone was/is full of shit or not.
European priorities and marketing; of course he wants it in the European style because they mostly haven't bought into stealth. The Typhoon isn't exactly stealthy and doesn't use vectored thrust, so they tend to emphasize its other features like relaxed stability. To hear them talk about it, an intentionally unstable aircraft requiring computers to keep it in the air is absolute insanity that proves we are truly living in the future. Considering that the F-16 did it first, I'm not surprised Sprey thinks we need to have their priorities; fighters begin and end with dogfighting.What the hell are you talking about now? No insult, I just haven't any clue at all what this is supposed to mean, and how it has anything to do with the content of the interview.
Yeah, but as a direct result we'll all keep racing to see how many C's we can stuff into ECM until the heat death of the universe.It's a pretty good demonstration of a main counter to 'stealth'. Use longer wavelength radars for detection, and cueing for your other systems. Practice will only make perfect. Serbs aren't idiots but they really did *not* have particularly good gear. (IIRC they shot down the F-117 with a missile whose best days were the Yom Kippur war.) 'Not idiots' with better gear and more practice can be expected to do better.
Sure. But if we're ever going to get past the F-35, it needs a better popular video than "old man yells at cloud." Everything he says that's correct about the F-35 is devalued by the losing argument he's been having for decades.Maybe he needed to add 'anyone who's not an idiot'. ANYTHING works against idiots. And I don't like him either, but whether you like someone or not has precious little to do with whether he's right or not.
Well, if they can scramble slick F-16s from somewhere close enough with fuel... sure.Yeah that was kind of the point. When you look at the PK of BVR missiles.... he might be on to something there.
Yeah, that's part of the reason I picked the E-model for that one.When one is trying to bomb something, and the other is trying to keep that something from being bombed... it's really not that hard for it to happen.
(The other being that being painted dark gray while flying over the desert, with CFTs and externals added, make for dramatically decreased capability in a dogfight).
