Well, hang on a sec. The F-15, F-16, and F-18 all represent massively successful multi-role designs. There are plenty more quotable examples of useful and successful multi-role aircraft going all the way back to World War II.
And your second paragraph emphasizes the need for multi-role aircraft. Their value is that military planners don’t know what they’ll need in the future. They often get criticized for this, but really, what do we expect? Fortune-tellers? Strict adherence to “specialization is best” risks building fleets of aircraft that are never used, or used for tasks that they’re completely unsuited to (hello Vulcan bombers trying to land direct hits on a single runway in the Falkland Islands). Multi-role designs provide the value of being better able to handle future contingencies which are inherently unpredictable.
Maybe your “El Dorado” is the hope for a multi-role weapon system which is somehow flexible, yet also the best at everything it does. Fair enough. But I don’t think that invalidates the value of the concept.
That story remains one of the most memorable from my teenage period of reading every Sci-Fi text I could get my hands on.
I’d like to echo those thanks. great short story.
schurem
1696
The funny thing is that all successful multirole aircraft were intended as single role specialist machines. The F-18 is an outgrowth of the YF-17, which lost out to the YF-16 for a competition about a Lightweight Day Fighter. It was meant as a better, more agile and more powerful F-5 (or MiG-21). Bombs were an afterthought. The thing was made to bring sidewinders to their MEZ.
The F-15 was built as a pure air superiority fighter. Not a pound for air to ground. But it turned out to be a pretty dang neat bomber in the -E version.
The F-4 was built as a fleet defence interceptor. It was to CAP for hours and then run at and intercept threats to the CVBG. That it later turned out to do just fine at bombing, SAM surpression, etc was … coincidence?
The Focke-Wulf Fw-190 was made to fuck up bombers. It turned out to be monstrous in ground attack as well because it had power to spare, was agile and built like a brick shithouse.
The pattern here is that a fighter that is good as an air-to-air fighter has everything it needs to grow to be good at multirole. But a good thrust-to-weight ratio and flightsurface-to-weight ratio are the sine qua non for a fighterplane. Without those it just won’t turn.
So the lesson here should be to build an exceptional fighter and overengineer it. Leave room for some black boxes and structural improvements. Don’t sweat the multirole stuff from the get-go because it is an eldorado, a pipe dream to think you can build a swiss army fighter.
What made the viper so great is that it started out as a lightweight hotrod. The viper has thrust for days and is aerodynamically slick as an eel. It has a fairly generous wing area and is designed such that the fuselage shape help lift and the tail helps turn.
It was so freakin hot that even 30 years of added black boxes and software cruft couldn’t make it suck. Compare that to the panther that was designed against a conflicting bunch of requirements that should give even victorinox a headache.
The F-16 itself was the product of an almost guerilla movement at the Pentagon, the Fighter Mafia.
Sounds familiar…
The Fighter Mafia was a controversial group of U.S. Air Force officers and civilian defense analysts who, in the 1970s, advocated for fighter design criteria that challenged the conventional thinking and ideologies of the time. Their assertions were that:
- Air Force generals established the wrong criteria for combat effectiveness, ignoring combat history.[1]
- High technology and the focus on “higher, faster, and farther” increases costs and decreases effectiveness. The mafia argued for cheaper and better planes.
- Air Force bureaucracies were corrupt as they did not conduct honest testing on weapons before buying them and deploying them in the field.
- The focus should be on close air support and the use of combined arms to support maneuver warfare rather than interdiction bombing.[2][3][4]
- Multi-role and multi-mission capability compromises the plane.
- Beyond visual range combat was a fantasy.[[1]]
I guess if you build a great plane, you’ll find more uses for it.
Good points, though here I am using multi-role in the sense of planes designed to do several things from the start, and to do each thing equally well, not planes that end up having a lot of versatility. We used P-51 Mustangs in ground attack roles, but no one designed the plane to do that or expected it to perform as well as a dedicated ground attack/CAS plane. Being able to do a thing really well, and also able to do other things acceptably, is a good thing certainly. Trying to make a plane that can do all things at the same high level is a recipe for disaster usually.
My question is do we really need a new air superiority fighter. Maybe spend the money on great SAM for the possible but unlikely war against China and Russia. While continue to build CAS planes that have sufficient Air to Air to take out Mig 23, Su-27 of smaller countries.
I don’t know crap about fighter tactics. Still, this seems like an odd position.
In the 70s they were dealing with the problem that there was a generation of fighter planes built without guns because missiles were supposed to take care of the enemy before they even got within visual range. They had to add gun pods to those fighters because they were losing dogfights over Vietnam.
It sort of does, but there is valid history. During Vietnam era the Air Force and the Navy both invest heavily in radar guided missiles like the Sparrow and then the F14 Phoenix, in order to shot down enemy planes long before they could be seen by the naked eye. If you could shoot down a plane 100 miles away like the Phoenix could, you didn’t really need the F14 to be super maneuverable, nor did you really need to train the pilots to dogfight well (Remember Top Gun).
As far as I know in the last 50 years only a handful of planes by any air force, US, UK, Russian or Israel have been shot down outside of visual range, which is why the short-range heat seeking Sidewinder is still the primary missile 60 years later.
Have there been that many air-to-air shootdowns, in general, in the last 50 years? My puzzlement is more about how absolute and doctrinal (“a fantasy”) that statement is, at least compared to the rest of the more factually specific bulletpoints.
vyshka
1705
Probably the biggest to look at would be the fight between Israel and Syria over Bekaa Valley in the 80s.
F-15 has about 100 AA kills. Most of those were Israel’s until Desert Storms I and II.
One of the issues is that the conditions where you’re popping off dozens at missiles at extreme range at incoming targets hasn’t actually manifested itself in the real world. Things like Soviet bomber wings going after CVBGs at sea.
There’s so much civilian air traffic that often the ROE is to visually ID your bogey, and if it turns hostile you’re already in the knife fight.
ShivaX
1708
We had one: The F-22.
Which they immediately decided they didn’t want once it was finally in production.
rowe33
1709
Imagine how much better this country would be if we hadn’t spent trillions of dollars on projects that ended up to be complete shit. (Just kidding, they would have just grifted the money another way.)
We could have so much more Wall.
schurem
1711
Or healthcare… or maybe education that’s actually any good.
Menzo
1712
Or a colony on Mars.
Or solve the homeless problem, feed every hungry child, and have world-class schools in every neighborhood.
