via WOTR.
“Physics probably favors detection and the ultimate demise of stealthy systems.” So predicted the Hart-Rudman Commission in 1999. Sixteen years later, it’s time for the Department of Defense to ask tough questions about whether to continue investing scarce resources into stealth technology. Foremost among those questions is this: Are we sacrificing too much capacity in a quest for an exquisite capability, a capability that may not offer the edge it once did and whose efficacy is in decline?Read it all here.
Finally. Questions that should have been asked five years ago are being asked now.
"...Exquisite capability...whose efficacy is in decline?"
I love it!
Sidenote: Pay careful attention to the talk about the LRSB. You heard it here first. That plane will not make it into production. I guarantee it.
What a bullshit.
ReplyDeleteLRSB is a major component of USAF all the way to 2050s and even past that.
Its likely that next-gen heli or tank doesnt see the light, LRSB is as vital as Ohio replacement.
Hot off the oven : http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/air-space/strike/2015/01/18/air-force-bomber-industry/21805275/
As to F-35 - the reason why Russkies and Chinks arent working at it as hard as US - simples, they are decade behind technoligical development of something as complex as RAM.
Besides, stealth mostly comes from shape,no RAM coating will help you if engine inlets are exposed, if nozzles arent properly managed etc.
Instead PAK-FA will be ''supermanueverable'' and they`ll stress that as some sort of achievement or capability that F-35 doesnt have - and doesnt need. Sorry, BVR baby - they`ll be awesome to impress civilians and make nice gifs and webms.
They rival the F-22 only in "dog fighting" due to their maneuverability. Which is to say, they're great at something which will never actually happen. When people say Russia mostly produces aircraft fit for stunt shows, this is what they mean. They are absolutely un-optimal for beyond visual range (BVR) engagements, which is what would actually happen in combat.
BVR? but the Russians and Chinese have better missiles than the US and they rival the Meteor! how are we going to win a BVR fight if we can't hit them at distance and when we get close enough to use our missiles we're within range of their IR stuff?
Deletethe Ohio Replacement will go forward. a new toy for the USAF? nope! not after the F-35 debacle! i'm still waiting for people to go to jail over this program. it will be studied for centuries when people talk about corruption, wasteful spending and pentagon stupidity.
Russkies developed the mathematical formulas for stealth and you can be certain that both Ruskies and Chinese how it works , but you have to understand that they might not be willing to go full retard and have planes that need lots of work to maintain the Ram coatings and other handicaps that come with full stealth .Ruski airplanes have mudguards and intake barriers so that the can operate justa bout enaywhere while westeren planes need people walking down the runway to pick up stones any other debris. Other thing you need to understand is they have different needs ,US needs to bomb someone half a world away posibly in well defended airspace while they are more or less certain to operate close to home and most likely under their own SAM umbrella.
Delete(mig 31 was the first fighter with phased array radar first western fighter with this type of radar came 20y later in Japanese F2)
As for BVR ruskis have developed more missiles in field of BVR than the west(mig 31 was the first fighter with phased array radar first western fighter with this type of radar came 20 y later in Japanese F2) which is kinda stuck with Aim-120 ,helmet slaved missle cueing has been a staple of theirs for last 3-4 decades while F22 is still without and F35 helmet doesn't work.
RAM is evolutioning forward.
DeleteThe one that B-2 has cant be compared to less maintanence heavy F-35 skin.
Its getting better
Good luck locking on F-35 with those rumoured radars, at most they`ll be able to tell that something is out there without knowing where exactly X is, nevermind tracking and actually firing a missile on it.
Radars matter, you can have best BVR missile but it wont do much if you yourself is getting tracked and locked before the enemy appears on your radar.
Latest photo evidence shows little imporvement on inlets and engine nozzles on T-50 and as it seems, they are giving up on VLO big time.
the answer to the issue is long range IR missiles. if a ground pounder can figure that out then so can the Chinese and Russians. they won't need an exact lock. just a bunch of missile trucks that can launch toward a general location and saturate the skies with missiles that will lock onto heat sources. as soon as the F-35's turn to get away the plum from that big ass engine is a beacon for everyone in the area and suddenly you have mach 2.5 fighters chasing slow, dumpy, fat ass F-35's.
Deleteif it was a fist fight it would be like putting a 300 pound fat guy in the ring with Mike Tyson in his prime.
Have you had a look at the F35 recently compare that to JSF plane hit puberty and is full of pimples and bulges so outside of LM PR many have doubts about claimed stealth. From what we can tell realisation is sinking in that stealth is no silver bullet and that counter stealth is progressing fast . Dont you think that if F35 tiny radar can detect T-50 at BVR range that a radar array ither ground or ship based with many times the size and power and possibly even at varius wavelengts can be duped all the time by F35 limited stealth.
DeleteWhat the US should do is instead of depending on stealth to win the BVR fight is to go back to the concept behind the F-14 and the Phoenix missile. That is to have a not stealthy capable dogfighter for if things do go bad you can engage in a within visual range fight but also to have a long range air to air missile that can accurately hit the enemy while the plane firing the missile is still out of radar detection range of the enemy fighter.
ReplyDeleteIt is this that has me convinced that in their time the F-14/Phoenix Missile combo were the best in class for BVR combat. Hell even for today the phoenix has longer range than the meteor by 90 Kilometers, it out ranges the AMRAAM by 120 Kilometers, it out ranges the Vympel R-77M by 30 Kilometers and it has a longer range than the PL-12 by 90 Kilometers. It also travels at a much quicker speed than any of those missiles by nearly 1200mph.
Also let us not forget that the AIM-120 and meteor the main BVR missiles fro the west are classified as medium range missiles. Simply based off of that using them as the main BVR weapons is unwise.
Any good links on this magical Phoenix missile? And how many an F14 could carry and how were they to be used?
DeleteSarabvir, 6. And from very, very long range. Normal load was usually 4/2/2 though. 4 AIM-54, 2 AIM-7, 2 AIM-9
DeleteThe official designation was the AIM-54. I'm not really sure if it is going to be as good as what Charlie says, because it had a huge, powerful radar for a missile, which while good for guidance, also lit up warnings like a fireworks display.
Now a LPI AIM-54... scary.
The AIM-54 Phoenix had a range of 184 Kilometers and flew at a speed of Mach 5 or 3308 miles per hour.
DeleteNavy Fact File: http://www.navy.mil/navydata/fact_display.asp?cid=2200&tid=700&ct=2
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DeleteThe AIM-54 Phoenix had a range of 184 Kilometers and flew at a speed of Mach 5 or 3308 miles per hour.
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Egads, no. The AIM-54 was called 'The Buffalo' because it in fact did it's nominal best range (72nm, from a 110nm launch) in roughly 3 minutes (midcourse average of Mach 2.62) on what was essentially a slow burn, all boost, Rocketdyne Mk.47 motor.
This was only achieved through an autopilot loft maneuver which, when it was set up at Pt. Mugu on the A model max range test, took the engineers a full night to tweak the gains for. And even then, the weapon would have _missed it's targets_ had they simply done a tacturn and dogleg pumped out 20nm to either side of the ground track because the AIM-54 steers like a monorail at height.
And yet that height is also _crucial_ for not just maximum range (low drag) but also for the endgame when the weapon snaps down. Here is where the 'Mach 5 speed' comes in, just like a V-2.
The problem with a fast terminal being that you can overspeed the weapons ability to sustain a G pull at a point where the seeker is looking at a target trying to vanish under it's nose and getting only minimal help from the AWG-9 because the latter is having to interleave Hi/Lo PRFs to get best mix of range and range rate calc _just to see the target_, before A-Pole handoff.
Again, if the jet dives down, the weapon and the AWG are going to see a target whose velocity gate goes through the roof even as it's range rate seemingly holds still in midair with only analogue Kalman filters to make up for the lack of Medium PRF.
The missile, with monopulse active, will pull _negative lead_ (steering back against it's own trajectory) on what looks like a retreating dot and then, as the fighter pulls up into an orthogonal roll, be forced to deal with a threat that is both spiraling out the sides of it's antenna gimbal limits and seemingly precessing against it's own lead angle, back the other way as closure goes through the roof.
Combine this with a 16G maneuver limit on the weapon and various EXCM/Jamming from the jet and you have an all but guaranteed miss condition as the weapon goes stupid and starts bedebebebebe twiddling it's lip.
This is the largest part of the reason why most USAF vs. USN FleetEx's (I'm thinking of one out of Moron AB in Spain in particular) in the mid-70s had the mass debrief begin with those immortal words: "Ignoring the Phoenix shots." This vs. F-4C/D deployed from Spangahlem as I recall.
Now, the AIM-54C, C+ (Sealed) and C++ (ECCM) were incrementally better. Largely because we lost everything to the Soviets on the AIM-54A after Iran and the interim B was a lashup, leaving the C to be virtually a new weapon under the skin. That meant a digital radar signal processor, reprogrammable (inflight) autopilot and a mixed impulse (Boost:Sustain) Aerojet Mk.60 motor which cost about 15% of top end range in trade for a much more formidable mid-game. Maneuver limits went up to about 25G and the warhead also got better with new fusing.
But it's still a condor killer in a mosquito war.
Who says the Russians or Chinese have to reinvent the wheel? Looks like the hack was a lot worse than what was publicly admitted. The big assertion now from the F35 fan boys is that the Chinese still can't manufacturer the technology so we have nothing to worry about.....
ReplyDeletehttp://rt.com/news/223947-snowden-pentagon-china-hack/
While I generally agree with the author, in a way he supports the concept of the LRS-B: "In this paradigm, the United States would retain a small nucleus of exceedingly capable stealth systems for striking the most protected targets, achieving and maintaining air dominance..." The LRS-B would form that nucleus, along with whatever replaces the F-22 (a version of the Navy's F/A-XX hopefully - not some absurdly expensive new USAF design.) While he is correct that fighter sized aircraft focus their RF suppression tech against UHF / X band radar - the frequencies used by on-board missile seekers (size and weight constraints) and fire control radars (resolution,) newer networked and mobile VHF radars can track fighter sized targets, and associated systems can optically/IR guide missiles to hit their targets. The physics of larger aircraft like the LRS-B are inherently protected from both VHF and UHF radars, so they have an advantage over tactical fighters in the penetrating strike role, plus have a huge advantage in unrefueled range, payload, and the variety of weapons carried. What is wasteful is insisting on an all-stealth force. Simply building the LRS-B - which looks to be smaller than the B-2 - instead of the F-35, and upgrade existing - or even buying new versions of F-15/16s - would be my solution. Fat chance getting that in an air force dominated by single cockpit fighter pilots. USAF culture is effed.
ReplyDeleteYou are all forgetting that F-35 is getting nuclear by 2020.
ReplyDeleteSure, and I will be president of Burundi! Wait and see, dont belive.
DeleteExcept that the contract has been awarded and its happening.
Delete@Eldererr - I haven't forgotten. Few things are as useless as a tactical nuke.
Deletethere is no such thing as a tactical nuke. launch one and you might as well launch them all. a tactical nuke strike will lead to nuclear war...unrestricted nuclear war. don't be fooled by the people in the puzzle palace. whoever has their soldiers vaporized on the battlefield will DEMAND that retaliatory strikes be carried out.
DeleteI think he means it will be Nuked
Delete
ReplyDeleteDo you want real stealth?
Bring the Growlers to the fight and Super Hornets with internal cannon, two Amraams under the engines without pilons and Aim9X on the wing tips, instead of a chubbi bomber with two aim-9X and gunpod hanging from detectable pilons.
RICHARDO TRAVEN F-35 VS F-18 SUPER HORNET STEALTH…: http://youtu.be/9E1sDYYgY5E
JSF 35 vs F18 superhornet: http://youtu.be/IUf_hhxngK4
Hey look, Boeing lobby strikes back!
DeleteF-35 or F-18 Super Hornet: It's really not that c…: http://youtu.be/IWJeqrvoF6M
DeleteThe Super Hornet: http://youtu.be/VR8wxQrJwVM
DeleteRegardless, we can't have it all. We need to go with a hi-low mix of not just aircraft, but tanks and ships as well.
ReplyDeleteWould it make sense to make every infantryman in the army a Ranger? Or a SEAL/Delta/whatever? You gold-plate the tip of the spear, not the shaft.
The F-117 was perfect for its day. A specialist strike aircraft that could take down enough air defenses to let the rest of the non-stealth aircraft in our forces gain air superiority. But now every new aircraft we buy has to incorporate stealth? At a time when our adversaries are figuring out multiple ways (long-band radar, IR sensors, networked sensors) to defeat it?
Nope. You build each plane to perform a narrow band of mission types. Stealth strike craft should be one of those, but not the only one. Or even the most numerous.
@SandWyrm. Agree completely with you. We should have kept stealth as a silver bullet and replaced the F117 one for one and that's it. Including LO in every USAF fighter is really a waste of money, why do you need stealth to drop a bomb on some goat herder in Iraq or Yemen? Actually, why do you need 3/4 quarters of what something like the F35 brings to the fight for most of these combat missions if a freaking Predator/Reaper is capable of doing it? We need to go back to balanced, high-low mix fleet.....where stealth has a place and role but isn't the entire fleet.
ReplyDeleteThe F-117 sucked buttermilk. Whatever idiot who decided that a jet needed to do overflight laydowns with SAL ordnance in _European Weather_ without radar as an alternate means to deliver through-clouds (EO seekered or DME = proto differential GPS) weapons was a fool.
DeleteIn this it is essential to acknowledge that the WARPAC IADS was fully 'network compliant' back in the 1980s and even 70s and thus the ability of a jet to ingress with P-18 radars all over the place, never knowing it was flying over a radar-quiet SA-2-3-4-5-6-10-11 (medium altitude capable) battery was only made possible by dedicating HUGE amounts of EW to the task of lowering the S/Nr on these radars which wasn't easy because low band is a lot more powerful.
Had we ever gone hotwar in Europe, the Spark Varks would have been repeatedly, endlessly, driven offstation by the likes of MiG-25 and MiG-31 using loft-SARH and AA-ARM attacks and the result, with Cockroaches over the fence, would have been lethal to the 117 drivers.
The F-117 was _not_ the be-all panacea it was stated to be. It was, at most, a productionized prototype capability attempt to get the maximum possible utility from a new weapon concept before it was outmoded by Soviet radar advances and in particular the rise of TVM/GAI type, 'aided SARH/ARH' SAM as represented by the Grumble and Giant.
Unfortunately, nobody bothered to consider what a constant running scud from 3-5K and a solid overcast at 15-20K meant as a function of 'getting under the weather'. And right into the trashfire.
See: Kosovo and backlit Black Jet goes BOOM!
If you want to fight the intermediate/deep SEAD battle, do yourself a favor and invest in ELO drones in massive numbers and use their coordinate point geolocation indexing to cue TACMS II or similar missiles with RADAC and a rapid image conversion video capability similar to Iskander.
Now it doesn't matter if the threat sees the weapons inbound because it's arrow-vs.-arrow and compression counts for more as you try to use SAMs to knock down Mach 3.5+ S2S missiles.
Rapid Onset Speed + Saturation beats Sneak everytime in effects delivery. Targeting is the issue.
The ultimate graph:
ReplyDelete"Deepening the commitment to stealth, a 25-year-old technology, for the next 30 to 50 years is not wise given the rapid pace of technological advancement. Ultimately, overinvestment in technologies that deliver marginal improvements at high costs will not allow the U.S. to maintain its technological overmatch in the coming decades. By exploring alternatives and complements to stealth systems as discussed above, the U.S. would regain the first mover advantage that it enjoyed when stealth was introduced."
This reasoning is particularly applicable to potential foreign buyers of F-35 who have no need of a questionable over-priced stealth first-strike capability, and without foreign sales the F-35 is a dead duck. Countries like Netherlands, Denmark and Canada with limited resources and no aggressive world ambitions simply don't need it even if if it were effective and affordable, which it isn't.
More F-35 problems on unreleased congressional report.
ReplyDeleteBasically, Northrop's DAS doesn't work.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2015-01-16/f-35-debut-hobbled-by-flawed-software-pentagon-tester-finds.html
* The aircraft’s weight when empty increased 82 pounds (37 kilograms) since August 2011 and now is within 1 percent, or 337 pounds, of its weight limit.
* A system of six implanted sensors made by Northrop Grumman Corp. (NOC) for 360-degree day and night navigation, in-flight awareness and anti-aircraft missile warnings “continues to exhibit high false alarm rates and false target tracks and poor stability performance, even in later versions.”
* Current versions of the program’s automated logistics system, which schedules aircraft maintenance, monitors in-flight aircraft condition and marshals spare parts, remains behind schedule and has deficiencies that render it “cumbersome to use and inefficient.”
The Distributed Aperture System is touted to be one of the best, if not THE best, system on the F-35. They talk abolut it like it actually exists.
DeleteLM propaaganda from SecendDefense: (quotes)
The Distributed Aperture System (DAS) is a new and unique sensor.
The DAS is comprised of six staring focal point arrays.
These are infrared cameras flush-mounted on the skin of the airplane, which detect the entire sphere around the airplane – that’s 4 pi steradians for the mathematically inclined. The entire sphere is about 41,000 square degrees whereas the radar sees about 10,000 square degrees.
There is an intersection of the two sensors however. Where they’re both looking through the same angular volume of space, fusion will work them synergistically, and they can queue each other.
Fusion really does the queuing. As soon as one sensor detects something, fusion then queues every other sensor to look along that line of sight and try to find information about the track.
The impressive thing is that this occurs without pilot involvement.
When fusion recognizes a DAS track is in the same angular space as the radar it will indicate to the Radar: “Radar, go look along this line of sight and get range on this track that DAS found.”(end quotes)
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DeleteNorthrop's DAS doesn't work. One reason is that testing couldn't start until a couple years ago because the software was not delivered. And then came more problems. These are test report excerpts on DAS for the last three years, latest to earliest.
Delete2015
...fusion of information from own-ship sensors, as well as fusion of information from off-board sensors is still deficient. The Distributed Aperture System continues to exhibit high false-alarm rates and false target tracks, and poor stability performance, even in later versions of software.
2014
The DAS has displayed a high false alarm rate for missile detections during ownship and formation flare testing. The inability of the DAS to distinguish between flares and threat missiles makes the warning system ineffective and reduces pilot situational awareness.
2013
The Block 1B configuration was designed to provide an additional 35 capabilities; however, the program delivered only 10 prior to the delivery of the first Lot 3 aircraft. The program is in the process of upgrading Block 1A aircraft to the 1B configuration; however, no additional capabilities were delivered with the Block 1B configuration. Examples of expected capabilities that were not delivered include air vehicle and off-board prognostic health management tools, instrument landing system (ILS) for navigation, distributed aperture system (DAS) video displaying in the helmet, corrosion data recording capability, and night vision imaging integration with the helmet.
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ReplyDeleteWhen the requirement for the ATF (which eventually became the F-22) was drawn up, a red-force team looked at future threats and determined that stealth, for stealth's sake, was not enough. You needed high speed, high altitude and full performance. You see the F-22 in the air show doing fun things. But, like the SU-3x, these rapid turns and performance also allow you to, at high altitude and high speed, do a 5G turn that will break the no-escape-zone of what just fired at you. Performance also allows you to determine when and how to enter the fight. This has not changed since WWII when an ops guy for the IJN first carrier air wing stated, that when the Corsair and P-38 came into the Pacific, the Zero could no longer determine if it wanted to refuse the fight and/or enter a fight on its own terms. Add export friendly stealth, a Joint Operational Requirement Document for the JSF what was written in the 1990s and signed off on at the beginning of the last decade which....assumed broken down post-Cold War threats AND plenty of F-22s, and the F-35 is in deep trouble. Emerging and some existing air threats will be firing downhill. The F-35, uphill. The F-35 is likely to get shot down if it faces a real threat.
ReplyDeleteF-22, Sep 2014
Delete“We’re at that point that we need to be thinking about replacement for capabilities we have today, because 15-20 years from now the F-22 will be 30 years old,” Col. Tom Coglitore, air superiority core function team chief at Air Combat Command, told Defense News. “These platforms are sometimes pulling 8 or 9 Gs a couple times a day. We stress the heck out of them.”
F-35, now
Maximum g forces for continuous turns are now projected to be 4.6 g for the F-35A, 4.5 g for the F-35B, and 5.0 g for the F-35C. Current flight restrictions due to the bum engine are 3.2 for test and 3.0 for operational training aircraft.
http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/land/army/2015/01/19/isis-iraq-canadian-sof-fight/22011993/
ReplyDeleteThe article did mention a French and British effort for Stealth aircraft? Anybody know anything about this ?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/aesa-upgrade-battle-heats-up-for-fa-18-hornets-408074/
ReplyDelete