ddtibbs
3016
How many a2a kills did the US have between 1919 and 1941? It’s not a thing until it suddenly is one.
How many conflicts was the US in during that time span, though? We’ve essentially been in a state of constant war since 1989, certainly since 2001. The intensity and sometimes the foes change but we’ve been fighting someone pretty constantly for decades.
Not that your point isn’t valid–just because we haven’t seen something doesn’t mean it won’t happen or doesn’t exist. Personally, I tend to agree with those who feel manned aircraft are on the road to extinction, but the time frame remains elusive.
schurem
3018
We’ll see. Man in the loop is paramount from an ethical perspective imo.
KevinC
3019
Not against anyone with an air force, really. I mean, how many tank kills did we get with Javelins in all our years in Afghanistan? Ukraine is probably glad we didn’t look at that data and conclude their time was past.
Different conflicts require different weapons. HIMARS is critical for Ukraine in a way it would never be for the US, for example. A2A has been pretty meaningless for us this century but that’s also related to who our opponents have been. Insurgents don’t tend to have a lot of aircraft, after all! :)
I’m very wary about drawing conclusions from any single conflict, like when people argue that the tank is obsolete based on how many Russia is losing.
Oh, definitely, but my point is that any given spread of time is in itself irrelevant; it depends on what was going on in that span of time. The fact that most of our fighting has been grossly asymmetrical also tells us something–even the most powerful military on the planet does not want to fight a near-equal power because, well, that kind of fighting sucks.
The two things are not mutually exclusive, sadly. I agree with you on the ethics. I don’t think that will stop folks.
Watching some Growling Sidewinder on youtube, some credible people think that stealth technology can lead to more dogfighting. Stealth airplanes even the F-22 aren’t actually invisible. In air-to-air you get occaisional locks, pings, and signals that are insufficient for a missile to hold on to long enough to take down the opponent. These pings do drive them closer together where the radar signature can lock on, but also increasing possibility of dogfighting.
Aside from that, I tend to think that the economic side of stealth aircraft won’t be worth it for most opponents as the US has already outspent them. So it’s more likely stealth aircraft for show, SAMs for actual conflict. But that also leaves the US the bill to pay to maintain the deterences to some extent? Anyway a fun topic when seperated mentally from Ukraine.
schurem
3022
It gets even more complex when you consoder that radar stealth is very much a question of geometry. Usually frontal aspect radar signature (RCS) is lowest, and rear aspect highest. Most stealth aircraft are designed to have their best (lowest) rcs when looked up at. You want to be high in an F-22.
Intercept geometry favours a frontal attack. This gives missiles the longest reach and negates enemy speed advantages. But you may want to pincer something like a J-20, in order to get side aspect or make it present its ass to one half of the pincer, allowing it to datalink targeting to the frontal half’s missiles.
Stealth complicates air combat, but going to the merge and not blowing through still counts as a horrible tactical failure that highly likely ends up in a tit for tat trade in kills.
Here’s a blast (literally) from the past: The Christmas Bombings (Linebacker II).
For some this is as ancient history as Thermopylae, of course. For others, it’s something we saw on the news. Either way, it illustrates I think how times have changed. Those sorts of losses today? Unthinkable outside of a major power conflict. And flattening a city? We are rightly excoriating the Russians for their missile strikes; our bombings of Hanoi do not look any nicer from the perspective of fifty years.
Yeah, it’s pretty terrible stuff. Especially the cynicism of it, the idea that it was necessary to ‘bring Hanoi back to the bargaining table.’ The North Vietnamese would have accepted a deal along the lines of the final one at any time during the entire conflict. “What, we declare a cease-fire and you GIs all go home and those folks in Saigon are on their own from here on out? Where do we sign?”
KevinC
3025
Not to go off on a tangent, but that’s what really gets me about Republicans. They Freedom Fried their way through so many morally questionable (to say the least) conflicts and if you didn’t toe the line you were a fucking traitor and how dare you not support the troops and why don’t you just leave the country anyway? They ran the Dixie Chicks off country radio for the crime of having said they were embarrassed about Bush / the Iraq invasion – on foreign soil, no less! Scandalous!
And here comes the most black and white / good vs evil war in my lifetime and they balk. “Ukraine is corrupt!”, “Why aren’t we spending this money on our own country” (as if they would actually want to spend it on anyone here), “NATO started it!”. They’re all a bunch of peaceniks now?
I mean, I guess I have to hand it to US conservatives: they are consistently on the wrong side of every single fucking issue.
I wonder if maybe they aren’t profiting here? Or just aren’t excited because there isn’t any oil???
KevinC
3028
Putin is their bestie and Russia our friend because of Trump, apparently. That and anything a Democrat president does must be opposed. So if Biden is supporting Ukraine, then their position has to be to not support Ukraine. They are the political equivalent of a toddler shouting “No!” at everything.
Oppositional Defiant Disorder is an excellent description of the GOP “policy” plank(s).
To be fair, the GOP had no monopoly on blind faith in the early days of the Vietnam War. It wasn’t until after 1968 really that the Democrats shifted more or less towards an anti-war stance.
fdsaion
3031
That game was a bitch to win
(life force)
JonRowe
3032
I mean, I take DCS youtube people with a grain of salt. I know DCS is a capable simulator, but it is also not the real world, with real lives and millions of dollars on the line with each decision being made. These exercises are for some “what-if” fun. They are also attempting to simulate some extremely classified information, like stealth tech and radar capability.
DCS can only estimate what stealth will look like on modern radars. The F-22 and F-35 are not official mods (along with the J20 and SU57), and most people making videos with them do some tweaking of the radar and stealth settings to make them as “accurate” as they think they should be. What they might be seeing in the simulator might be miles away from what would happen in the real world. And we haven’t even gotten into the EW (electronic warfare) packages installed in the Gen 5 planes, this could do crazy radar jamming things we don’t know about.
That being said, even with the possibility of stealth making close encounters more likely, I would assume the doctrine would be, do not risk the plane and your life, do not “chase” after a stealth radar ping etc. We don’t have an infinite supply of these planes, and using them to “hunt” other stealth planes is probably not the best use of their costly flight time. War is messy, so I am sure some of these encounters will happen anyway, but I would expect them to be limited. As cool as a thrust vectoring fueled dogfight would be, I just don’t see them happening.
It is also a bit of a weird thought exercise as well, because, in my opinion, there are only 2 fighter planes with revolutionary stealth capability. The information from Russia on the Felon and from China on the Dragon are already magnitudes lower in stealth capability than the F-22, and even the F-35 (though less so, and specifically the USAF variant), and we don’t know how much they are even lying about it yet. It is only a matter of time before these militaries catch up, but right now there isn’t really a peer to the F-22, and to a lesser extent the stealth mode F-35A
abrandt
3033
My worry is that they’ll never need to catch up because someone will figure out a reliable alternative to radar that will, at the very least, drastically decrease the usefulness of stealth. I think it’s the Russians that have talked up low frequency radar “defeating” stealth, but it remains to be seen how much that’s true, and my understanding is that you aren’t getting much from such a radar other than being pretty confident there is a plane in that general area. Closer in infrared seems viable at some range since you’re never going to get away from these planes generating significant heat. That combo seems a long way off from being really effective(I doubt China and Russia would still be trying to catch up if they thought it was pointless) but who knows what happens with tech in the next 20 years.
Clearly the solution is vans filled with psychics.
