No more F-22s for you!

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RLMullen
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

Post by RLMullen »

Isgrimnur wrote:Per the book (P. 398):
Secretary of the Air Force James Roche announced in 2003 that the JSF would become F-35 because the technology demonstration aircraft was designated X-35. But that research aircraft was not a prototype JSF; rather, its experimental designation is akin to that of the XV-15 tilt-rotor aircraft, which was the technology demonstrator for the V-22 Osprey series. According to the Department of Defense aircraft designation procedure, the next U.S. fighter aircraft should have been designated F-24 (The F-23 was the McDonnell Douglas competitive design to the Lockheed F-22 Raptor high-performance fighter.)
So they fucked up the designation too!? At least the program is consistent.
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

Post by Kraken »

Somebody owes us 11 effs.
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

Post by Isgrimnur »

Smoove_B wrote:F-35 cannot beat F-16 during engagement:
The full report.
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

Post by GreenGoo »

Kraken wrote:Somebody owes us 11 effs.
Lol.
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

Post by Isgrimnur »

Dogfight?! Pfft!
The U.S. Air Force has finally admitted that its new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter isn’t maneuverable enough to beat older jets in a dogfight. But despite its earlier promises that the pricey, radar-evading warplane would excel in close combat, now the flying branch insists that the stealthy F-35 doesn’t even need to dogfight.

At a conference in Maryland on September 15, General Herbert Carlisle, head of the Air Force’s Air Combat Command, described the F-35 as not as maneuverable as some of its predecessors.

“That’s not what the airplane was designed to do,” Carlisle added, according to National Defense magazine. “It’s a multi-role airplane that has an incredibly comprehensive, powerful, integrated avionics and sensor suite.”

Colonel Edward Sholtis, an Air Combat Command spokesman, said the F-35 would be able to compensate for its relative sluggishness. “The F-35 wasn’t optimized for dogfighting maneuvers, but that isn’t remotely close to saying it doesn’t bring its own advantages to the air superiority mission.”

Namely, the new fighter should be able to detect and shoot down enemy planes from long range, making close-in fights unnecessary. Plus, the Joint Strike Fighter will team up with F-22s, F/A-18s, F-15s, F-16s, and other U.S. dogfighters, each plane performing the particular mission it’s best at and helping make up for the other jets’ weaknesses.
...
In 2008, Air Force Major General Charles Davis, then in charge of the F-35’s development, told Reuters the single-engine stealth jet was four times more effective in air combat than older planes were. Around the same time, Lockheed described the Joint Strike Fighter as a “racehorse” with the most powerful engine ever installed in a fighter.

And in 2013, Lockheed test pilot Billy Flynn told Flight Global that in terms of maneuverability and acceleration, the F-35 was “comparable or better in every one of those metrics, sometimes by a significant margin,” than today’s leading fighters, including the European Typhoon and America’s own F/A-18 Super Hornet.
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

Post by GreenGoo »

We've been over this. Modern planes don't need to dogfight until they do.

In any case, it was supposed to be able to dogfight. You might be able to convince some people that dog fighting is a relic of the past, but don't try to claim that it wasn't part of the design spec in the first place.

Worse, they are suggesting it perform the role(s) it's best at, while other, better planes fill in other roles. That's the exact fucking thing the F-35 was designed to avoid. It's not a replacement for specific roles. it's a replacement for ALL roles.

If you're going to support it with other planes in other roles anyway, why didn't they just design the F-35 to excel at the roles they envisioned for it, instead of making this dog's breakfast of crap?
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

Post by Carpet_pissr »

I would be curious to know when the last time an American pilot even engaged in an actual dogfight? I assume these things are recorded?

Maybe this:
Balkans conflict

During the Balkans conflict, in 1999 (the Kosovo War), five MiG-29s of the Yugoslav Air Force were shot down in dogfights with NATO aircraft. The first was on the 24th of March by a Dutch F-16AM Falcon and two were downed on the same night by U.S. F-15s. A day later two more MiG 29's were shot down by an F-16 and F-15.


So maybe 2 in the past 15 years?
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

Post by LawBeefaroni »

GreenGoo wrote:We've been over this. Modern planes don't need to dogfight until they do.
Modern planes don't need to launch missiles from the runway until they do. In Iron Eagle and Independence Day. :lol:

I agree that the F35's all-purpose promise was way out of whack and arguably impossible. Still, the ability to dogfight is really low on the list of modern combat aircraft assets.




Fretmute wrote:
LawBeefaroni wrote:The visibility thing though, when are F35s supposed to get into CQ dogfights? They're radar evading stealth fighters. If they're in a close quarter dissimilar air combat situation, something's fubar.
Especially when the latest AMRAAMs have a range of over 180 km.
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

Post by Isgrimnur »

More F-22s?
As if they suddenly came to an epiphany, the United States Air Force brass is now admitting what many of us have been screaming about for so long: We didn’t build nearly enough F-22s, and the F-35 cannot simply pick up the slack.
...
Costs were slated to have continued to drop if another lot of about 53 jets were built to meet the Air Force’s stated minimum fleet size requirement of 243 airframes. But it never happened.

Instead the F-22 was cast off and all of the USAF’s fighter chips were put into the very much unproven F-35 bucket. Gates justified chopping the F-22 as he wanted aircraft to “fight the wars we are in today, and the scenarios we are most likely to face in the years ahead.” Considering air superiority and destruction of enemy air defenses is an absolute must for any conflict (aside for ones with totally permissible airspace), this was a very near-sighted evaluation, and as it turns out, prediction of the future.
...
The F-22 was by many accounts on the verge of a cost breakthrough that would have sent its unit cost plunging well below the $100 million line. Gates later said:
We have fulfilled the program. It’s not like we’re killing the F-22. We will have 187 of them... The military advice that I got was that there is no military requirement for numbers of F-22 beyond 187.
Considering that the minimum the Air Force said they could operate with was 243, this statement seems less than true. And that number was last ditch compromise, the real bottom-line fleet size the USAF required of the F-22 was around 339 jets, which itself was dropped drastically from the original number of around 750 jets originally envisioned. At 339 examples it was hoped that the F-15C/D force could have been retired.
...
Nowadays it seems that everyone laments the premature F-22 line shutdown, from late-to-the-scene defense commentators to those at the very top of the USAF, including Air Combat Command chief Herbert “Hawk” Carlisle, whoe was quoted in National Defense Magazine as saying:

“We don’t have enough F-22s, that’s a fact of life. We didn’t buy enough; we don’t have enough.” However, the Air Force is going to make do with the Raptors it does have, Carlisle said. “You’re going to need the Raptors” for a high-end fight, he said. “So you’re still going to have to do that and we’re going to do it with the 180 or so F-22s we have.”

Because only 187 F-22s were built, with only about 125 of the jets setup for assignment to combat units at any given time, even fullfilling small detachments of F-22s to the Pacific, Middle East and European theater may be troublesome. As such, the F-15C/D force, which less than a decade ago was suffering from mid-air breakups resulting in a year-long grounding, has had to stay online to supplement the relatively tiny F-22 force.
...
Since there appears to be little will in Washington to correct the error in judgement that ended the F-22 line by putting an improved F-22 back into production, we need to learn from this very expensive mistake. This is especially relevant considering nearly $30 billion of the F-22’s nearly $70 billion program cost was spent to just develop the fighter. By better understanding what they knew and when they knew it, and above all else, where the information for their conclusions came from, we can at least try to avoid such procurement and strategy blunders in the future.
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

Post by GreenGoo »

LawBeefaroni wrote:
GreenGoo wrote:We've been over this. Modern planes don't need to dogfight until they do.
Modern planes don't need to launch missiles from the runway until they do. In Iron Eagle and Independence Day. :lol:

I agree that the F35's all-purpose promise was way out of whack and arguably impossible. Still, the ability to dogfight is really low on the list of modern combat aircraft assets.




Fretmute wrote:
LawBeefaroni wrote:The visibility thing though, when are F35s supposed to get into CQ dogfights? They're radar evading stealth fighters. If they're in a close quarter dissimilar air combat situation, something's fubar.
Especially when the latest AMRAAMs have a range of over 180 km.
Just start building missile platforms then. Why even bother to worry about maneuverability at all?

So far the "we don't need to be able to dogfight" argument has been shown to be incorrect multiple times over decades. Get back to me after there has been multiple full engagements with air forces of similar numbers, technology and will (desire to win). Blowing up a few stray planes that enter a no fly zone isn't exactly a battle for air superiority.

It's not that I don't value long range lethality. It's that I don't want to have an entire air force that is so reliant on it that having it fail means losing the battle for the skies with no fall back technology. What is all that stealth technology for anyway, if not avoiding getting killed from long range? Is there some tenet that prevents other nations from developing their own? Perhaps based on captured drone tech?

If there's one thing you can count on in combat, is that things will go fubar.
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

Post by Fretmute »

GreenGoo wrote:Just start building missile platforms then. Why even bother to worry about maneuverability at all?.
Given that I work for a company that designs missiles, I am on board with this. ;)
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

Post by raydude »

GreenGoo wrote:
LawBeefaroni wrote:
GreenGoo wrote:We've been over this. Modern planes don't need to dogfight until they do.
Modern planes don't need to launch missiles from the runway until they do. In Iron Eagle and Independence Day. :lol:

I agree that the F35's all-purpose promise was way out of whack and arguably impossible. Still, the ability to dogfight is really low on the list of modern combat aircraft assets.




Fretmute wrote:
LawBeefaroni wrote:The visibility thing though, when are F35s supposed to get into CQ dogfights? They're radar evading stealth fighters. If they're in a close quarter dissimilar air combat situation, something's fubar.
Especially when the latest AMRAAMs have a range of over 180 km.
Just start building missile platforms then. Why even bother to worry about maneuverability at all?

So far the "we don't need to be able to dogfight" argument has been shown to be incorrect multiple times over decades. Get back to me after there has been multiple full engagements with air forces of similar numbers, technology and will (desire to win). Blowing up a few stray planes that enter a no fly zone isn't exactly a battle for air superiority.

It's not that I don't value long range lethality. It's that I don't want to have an entire air force that is so reliant on it that having it fail means losing the battle for the skies with no fall back technology. What is all that stealth technology for anyway, if not avoiding getting killed from long range? Is there some tenet that prevents other nations from developing their own? Perhaps based on captured drone tech?

If there's one thing you can count on in combat, is that things will go fubar.
Back in the 90's there was a turn-based strategy game about modern air combat called Flight Commander 2. I remember one scenario which pitched a few F22s against a lot of older generation Migs (I think the enemy was China but I can't be sure). I believe the F22s were outnumbered 3 to 1. The engagement started at long range and I slowed the F22s down and launched all their long range missiles at the Chinese. A lot hit, a few missed, but as we closed to dogfight range the F22s were still outnumbered 1.5 to 1. I sucked at that game so all my F22s died.

But that game does illustrate that a major weakness of having a few elite fighters: swarm tactics. This would only be exacerbated if the swarm manages to close to dogfight range. Yes, good planning and intelligence will probably give this scenario a low probability of happening, but the swarm team only needs to win once.
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

Post by GreenGoo »

Another tactic used by faster but less manoeuvrable planes was to fly through enemy formations at high speed, making strafing runs essentially against slower but higher turn radius enemy planes. I vaguely recall reading that this was part of the "missiles will win it for us" korean war. I could be wrong. Details are sketchy in my memory.

So not only do dogfighters have to be able to survive long range engagement, they also need to be able to catch their targets, which isn't always possible.

I in no way am suggesting that dogfighting is the most important ability of a modern fighter, but I am concerned that they will become sitting ducks if their offensive and defensive abilities fail for whatever reason, including running out of ordinance. Like I said, enforcing a no fly zone is one thing. Engaging another major air force over a protracted conflict is another.

I would be less concerned if the entire point of the F-35 wasn't to replace every other plane in every single military combat role. It just makes sense from a military proficiency standpoint to have planes designed for and excelling at specific roles. The idea that one plane can do everything is great on paper and for the cheque book, but as we're seeing, paper isn't reality and those savings aren't being realized either. the F-35 is pure boondoggle so far.
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

Post by abr »

Plus keep in mind that the rules of engagement may call for visual identification. Those AMRAAMs better come with some pretty impressive binoculars. ;)
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

Post by LawBeefaroni »

GreenGoo wrote:
Just start building missile platforms then. Why even bother to worry about maneuverability at all?

So far the "we don't need to be able to dogfight" argument has been shown to be incorrect multiple times over decades. Get back to me after there has been multiple full engagements with air forces of similar numbers, technology and will (desire to win). Blowing up a few stray planes that enter a no fly zone isn't exactly a battle for air superiority.

It's not that I don't value long range lethality. It's that I don't want to have an entire air force that is so reliant on it that having it fail means losing the battle for the skies with no fall back technology. What is all that stealth technology for anyway, if not avoiding getting killed from long range? Is there some tenet that prevents other nations from developing their own? Perhaps based on captured drone tech?

If there's one thing you can count on in combat, is that things will go fubar.
While the F-22 and F-35 represent a lot of spending, the entire Air Force isn't, and doesn't plan to be, reliant only on long range engagements. See below.

raydude wrote: Back in the 90's there was a turn-based strategy game about modern air combat called Flight Commander 2. I remember one scenario which pitched a few F22s against a lot of older generation Migs (I think the enemy was China but I can't be sure). I believe the F22s were outnumbered 3 to 1. The engagement started at long range and I slowed the F22s down and launched all their long range missiles at the Chinese. A lot hit, a few missed, but as we closed to dogfight range the F22s were still outnumbered 1.5 to 1. I sucked at that game so all my F22s died.

But that game does illustrate that a major weakness of having a few elite fighters: swarm tactics. This would only be exacerbated if the swarm manages to close to dogfight range. Yes, good planning and intelligence will probably give this scenario a low probability of happening, but the swarm team only needs to win once.
That's what drones are for. Any large scale engagement, especially against a foe like China, will include a lot of new technology. There's always the risk that un-battle-tested tech won't work right, but it's not like we are just saying, "AMRAAMs or nothing!" Drones will soon be able to out-dogfight any human-piloted aircraft. A swarm of MiGs will be met with a swarm of 5 times as many drones for a lesser or equal cost. Small virtually unhittable drones will serve to mark targets or just seek and destroy.

Our air superiority, human piloted fighter planes will essentially be quarterbacks on the battlefield while drones do all the heavy banging. Sentries and Hawkeyes and whatever else will be the coaches and coordinators, directing the battle with precision from afar.

A recent article covering some of this stuff:
The next generation of remotely piloted aircraft could swarm enemy defenses, serve as wingmen for pilots, attack targets with lasers, or work as mobile weather radar.

Aerospace experts say that the technology is becoming advanced enough that drones can now take on a host of missions far beyond their normal reconnaissance and ground-strike roles.

“We’re just at the very early stages of what robotics and autonomous systems might do,” said Paul Scharre, a retired Army Ranger who helped craft some of the Pentagon’s drone policies while at the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

During discussions on the future of drones at the Sept. 14-16 Air Force Association national convention, Scharre compared the state of RPAs with aircraft after World War I: Everyone knew they were changing warfare, but no one was certain how to use them or what the extent of their capabilities would be.

“We’ve used these systems but in fairly limited ways; the technology’s still somewhat constrained; what they do is sometimes not clear yet,” said Scharre, now a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C., think tank the Center for a New American Security. “I would argue down the road they could have some pretty significant changes in terms of how militaries fight.”
I mean drone wingmen? Hadn't even occurred to me. But it makes perfect sense. And I'm not talking about at the bar.
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

Post by Rip »

Drone require communication. They work great against an enemy without a strong support structure. But against an enemy with effective EW the issue becomes less simplistic.
Chinese military writings have discussed using electronic means to disrupt drone surveillance.

A February 2013 technical article in the journal Aerospace Electronic Warfare revealed in detail how China’s military planned to detect and to counter Global Hawk surveillance flights, as well as RQ-170 drone operations. Both are radar-evading stealth surveillance drones.

“The American military has an advanced theater control network but it also has its vulnerabilities,” the article states.

“We can use network warfare to attack and even control America’s network,” the report says. “UAVs and ground stations are normally quite far apart and usually have to depend upon satellite communications. As long as we can disrupt its satellite communications, drones will be unable to carry out missions and will have to return its base.”

The report said Global Hawk drones have seven vulnerabilities, including being open to electronic interference. Jamming “will greatly reduce the effectiveness of Global Hawk,” the article states.

Rick Fisher, a China military affairs analyst, said China could increase pressure on the United States to halt surveillance flights in Asia by first attacking one of the unmanned aircraft flights.

“Though UAVs like the Global Hawk are rather expensive, they are also regarded as more expendable because they are unmanned,” said Fisher, a senior fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center.

“But failing to defend these UAVs runs the risk of China viewing them as ‘fair game’ to shoot down whenever they please.”

Beijing also might attempt to capture a Global Hawk by causing one to crash in shallow water, or by attempting to snatch one in flight using a manned aircraft.

The United States should balance its unmanned high-altitude surveillance systems with high-altitude piloted aircraft that are better able to conduct evasive maneuvers and use defensive systems, Fisher said.
http://freebeacon.com/national-security ... -s-drones/
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

Post by El Guapo »

Rip wrote: “UAVs and ground stations are normally quite far apart and usually have to depend upon satellite communications.
Couldn't this part be fixed? This certainly isn't my area of expertise, but in the long run couldn't you have the UAVs communicating with airborne (maybe seaborne, though I don't know if that would help) craft? Either by communicating with the manned aircraft or perhaps as other UAVs that are there to act as communication relays? Or at some point the UAVs could be more autonomous (though I'm sure that has risks too).

Anyway, I wonder whether this stuff is a permanent flaw or whether it's just going to be part of the cycle of measures and counter-measures.
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

Post by Isgrimnur »

E-3 Sentry (AWACS)
The AWACS Bistatic UAV Adjunct is a proposed $850M+ acquisition program with prototype in FY08 and completed in 2015. High Altitude Endurance (HAE) Dark Star/Global Hawk UAVs with bistatic receivers for the AWACS radar will expand area coverage of a single E-3 orbit and with the inherent significant signal to interference ratio enhancement provide increased coverage of low RCS targets while operating inside and outside an air defense threat environment. The inclusion of the Bistatic UAV adjunct to the E-3 would allow reduced E-3 operational tempo in some theaters and the ability to cover two major regional conflicts with fewer E-3s. By only carrying the receiver, IFF interrogator and a JTIDS/JCTN transmitter package, the UAV weight limitations can be met (combat ID systems might also be included if weight and size allows). The bistatic UAV would also be able to serve as an adjunct to the E-2, TPS-75 and other air/ground radars. Most important, the Bistatic UAV is a key part of the USAF transition from the E-3 to UAVs and Space for the AWACS mission, with the mission crew on the ground. The Bistatic UAV will be able to serve as the receiver using a satellite as the radar transmitter instead of the E-3. The bistatic UAV is a common link to a reduced E-3 fleet and use of Space for surveillance of large to LO/VLO air vehicles (missiles and aircraft) in the battlespace.
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

Post by El Guapo »

Anyway, no one should be worried about the Chinese air force because these new prototype drones should take care of everything:

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Re: No more F-22s for you!

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Rip wrote:Drone require communication. They work great against an enemy without a strong support structure. But against an enemy with effective EW the issue becomes less simplistic.
I think drones are fantastic, but as Rip points out, you need to be able to communicate with them. If you think cellphone reception can be spotty, imagine trying to coordinate a hundred plus drones (lotsa signals) in mountainous terrain (intermittent disruption) at long range (response time) and that's before enemy counter measures are taken into account. Hell, you need to worry about enemy taking control of them and encryption doesn't even guarantee security, but it does add extra response time.

I didn't follow up on the story but:
wiki wrote:On 4 December 2011, an American Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) was captured by Iranian forces near the city of Kashmar in northeastern Iran. The Iranian government announced that the UAV was brought down by its cyberwarfare unit which commandeered the aircraft and safely landed it, after initial reports from Western news sources inaccurately claimed that it had been "shot down".[1] The United States government initially denied the claims but later President Obama acknowledged that the downed aircraft was a US drone and requested that Iran return it.[2][3]
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

Post by GreenGoo »

El Guapo wrote:Anyway, no one should be worried about the Chinese air force because these new prototype drones should take care of everything:

Image
There are a number of designs being considered

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Re: No more F-22s for you!

Post by LawBeefaroni »

GreenGoo wrote:
Rip wrote:Drone require communication. They work great against an enemy without a strong support structure. But against an enemy with effective EW the issue becomes less simplistic.
I think drones are fantastic, but as Rip points out, you need to be able to communicate with them. If you think cellphone reception can be spotty, imagine trying to coordinate a hundred plus drones (lotsa signals) in mountainous terrain (intermittent disruption) at long range (response time) and that's before enemy counter measures are taken into account. Hell, you need to worry about enemy taking control of them and encryption doesn't even guarantee security, but it does add extra response time.
Autonomous drone swarms are in the pipeline. They receive orders and then go do their job. If they lose communication with command they are still able to perform. The only have to communicate with each other.

We're a lot closer to this stuff than people think, if we aren't there already.
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

Post by LawBeefaroni »

Rip wrote:Drone require communication. They work great against an enemy without a strong support structure. But against an enemy with effective EW the issue becomes less simplistic.
Considering that the complaint was about F-22s fighting 60's era MiGs, I don't think that's an issue.

In a full scale conflict against a foe like China, all bets are off. I said it earlier in this thread or the other one, against China it will go non-conventional pretty quick. And I don't mean non-conventional as in nuclear, I mean skunkworks, black project type stuff. Full scale EW that we barely know about right now.

But like I said, there are several EW counter measures already being deployed and developed. Autonomous drones are one of them.
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

Post by GreenGoo »

LawBeefaroni wrote: Autonomous drone swarms are in the pipeline. They receive orders and then go do their job. If they lose communication with command they are still able to perform. The only have to communicate with each other.

We're a lot closer to this stuff than people think, if we aren't there already.
And as El Guapo pointed out, autonomous killing machines. What could go wrong?
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

Post by Rip »

LawBeefaroni wrote:
GreenGoo wrote:
Rip wrote:Drone require communication. They work great against an enemy without a strong support structure. But against an enemy with effective EW the issue becomes less simplistic.
I think drones are fantastic, but as Rip points out, you need to be able to communicate with them. If you think cellphone reception can be spotty, imagine trying to coordinate a hundred plus drones (lotsa signals) in mountainous terrain (intermittent disruption) at long range (response time) and that's before enemy counter measures are taken into account. Hell, you need to worry about enemy taking control of them and encryption doesn't even guarantee security, but it does add extra response time.
Autonomous drone swarms are in the pipeline. They receive orders and then go do their job. If they lose communication with command they are still able to perform. The only have to communicate with each other.

We're a lot closer to this stuff than people think, if we aren't there already.
That should be awesome when they are hacked, told to attack us, and then placed in autonomous mode.

When maintaining control of your weapons is uncertain you must consider what if they are used against you.
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

Post by LawBeefaroni »

Rip wrote: That should be awesome when they are hacked, told to attack us, and then placed in autonomous mode.

When maintaining control of your weapons is uncertain you must consider what if they are used against you.
You seriously don't think that's a consideration when designing such drones? Yes, it's a potential liability but it's not like no one has considered it.
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

Post by Rip »

LawBeefaroni wrote:
Rip wrote:Drone require communication. They work great against an enemy without a strong support structure. But against an enemy with effective EW the issue becomes less simplistic.
Considering that the complaint was about F-22s fighting 60's era MiGs, I don't think that's an issue.

In a full scale conflict against a foe like China, all bets are off. I said it earlier in this thread or the other one, against China it will go non-conventional pretty quick. And I don't mean non-conventional as in nuclear, I mean skunkworks, black project type stuff. Full scale EW that we barely know about right now.

But like I said, there are several EW counter measures already being deployed and developed. Autonomous drones are one of them.
As if there aren't also EW counter counter-measures being developed just as quickly.
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

Post by Rip »

LawBeefaroni wrote:
Rip wrote: That should be awesome when they are hacked, told to attack us, and then placed in autonomous mode.

When maintaining control of your weapons is uncertain you must consider what if they are used against you.
You seriously don't think that's a consideration when designing such drones? Yes, it's a potential liability but it's not like no one has considered it.
They consider a lot of things. Are we next to discuss all the things considered while designing the F-35 that they still failed brilliantly at?
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

Post by LawBeefaroni »

GreenGoo wrote:
LawBeefaroni wrote: Autonomous drone swarms are in the pipeline. They receive orders and then go do their job. If they lose communication with command they are still able to perform. The only have to communicate with each other.

We're a lot closer to this stuff than people think, if we aren't there already.
And as El Guapo pointed out, autonomous killing machines. What could go wrong?
Yes, this has been considered. And it's scary. But their battlefield capability is just too enticing to ignore. So we will have them. Pray for good programmers.

We are aware of the potential danger. A selection:
33. As with any technology that revolutionizes the use of lethal force, little may be known about the potential risks of the technology before it is developed, which makes formulating an appropriate response difficult; but afterwards the availability of its systems and the power of vested interests may preclude efforts at appropriate control.9 This is further complicated by the arms race that could ensue when only certain actors have weapons technology. The current moment may be the best we will have to address these concerns. In contrast to other revolutions in military affairs, where serious reflection mostly began after the emergence of new methods of warfare, there is now an opportunity collectively to pause, and to engage with the risks posed by LARs in a proactive way. This report is a call for pause, to allow serious and meaningful international engagement with this issue.

34. One of the reasons for the urgency of this examination is that current assessments of the future role of LARs will affect the level of investment of financial, human and other resources in the development of this technology over the next several years. Current assessments – or the lack thereof – thus risk to some extent becoming self-fulfilling prophesies.
OTOH, it's not like our manned drones aren't vaporizing civilians either.


How the Taranis is envisioned:
According to an infographic from BAE, the Taranis can also target threats and is able to fire on that target on its own after a remote pilot gives the go-ahead.

To do this, the Taranis would reach a preselected area using a programmed flight path. It would automatically identify and target the threat within that search area. It sends this data back to its home base, where the information is verified by the human operator, and the target is OK'd for attack.

The remote pilot would then essentially pull the trigger, and the Taranis would fire before flying back to the base on its own.
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

Post by LawBeefaroni »

Rip wrote:
LawBeefaroni wrote:
Rip wrote: That should be awesome when they are hacked, told to attack us, and then placed in autonomous mode.

When maintaining control of your weapons is uncertain you must consider what if they are used against you.
You seriously don't think that's a consideration when designing such drones? Yes, it's a potential liability but it's not like no one has considered it.
They consider a lot of things. Are we next to discuss all the things considered while designing the F-35 that they still failed brilliantly at?
That's a political discussion. I think the F-35 thread is good for that. The F-35 project could have taken several different forms but was ultimately guided by politics.

Autonomous drones are an inevitability.
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

Post by GreenGoo »

LawBeefaroni wrote:
GreenGoo wrote:
And as El Guapo pointed out, autonomous killing machines. What could go wrong?
Yes, this has been considered. And it's scary. But their battlefield capability is just too enticing to ignore. So we will have them. Pray for good programmers.
Great, now we've got to be nice to Fret or he'll bomb our homes.

But really, all I'm saying is that it's one way ahead, and almost certainly a great way ahead against less technologically advanced nations (But they were never a problem to begin with), but there are significant hurdles including physics hurdles, that keep it from being super awesome.

On the plus side, they are a helluva lot cheaper than a fully trained pilot flying a modern fighter.
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

Post by em2nought »

LawBeefaroni wrote:I mean drone wingmen? Hadn't even occurred to me. But it makes perfect sense. And I'm not talking about at the bar.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozzOA33xNls :mrgreen:
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

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10 GOTO Danger Zone.
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

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The volleyball scene will be played in DOA Xtreme 5 on the PS6.
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

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Mothballs
The U.S. Marine Corps has received the first two old F/A-18 Hornet fighters that Boeing is pulling out the U.S. military’s retired-warplane storage facility in Arizona and refurbishing for continued service.

Under a contract the U.S. Navy signed with Boeing in 2014, the Chicago plane-maker is “reconstituting” 30 first-generation F/A-18s that have been sitting for years in open desert storage at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base near Tucson.

This is not the first time the military has brought back decommissioned aircraft from Davis-Monthan. Perhaps most famously, during the height of the war in Iraq, the Marine Corps pulled several retired CH-53E heavylift helicopters from the desert and restored them to help alleviate shortfalls in the CH-53E fleet resulting from crashes and heavy use in the Middle East.

But the reconstitution of old Hornets reflects an arguably more serious crisis for Marine aviation. In the late 1990s, the Marines chose not to adopt the second-generation F/A-18E/F Super Hornet that the Navy was developing as a bridge from older planes to the stealthy F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which at the time was scheduled to begin entering front-line service as early as 2006.

Reasoning that they couldn’t afford the Super Hornet and the JSF, the Marines decided to operate their existing F/A-18s, AV-8B Harriers and EA-6B Prowlers without replacement until the F-35 was ready. In short, the Marines bet their whole tactical aviation future on the JSF.
...
The combination of longer service lives and less maintenance resulted in a perfect storm for the Marines’ tactical air fleet. In April 2016, Lt. Gen. Jon Davis — the Marines’ deputy commandant for aviation — told the U.S. Senate that just 87 of the Corps’ 276 Hornets were flightworthy — a mere 32 percent.

The Marines say they need 58 percent of the F/A-18s to be ready for flight in order to have enough planes for combat operations, basic flight instruction and day-to-day training at the squadron level. After assigning 40 Hornets to combat deployments and 30 of the twin-engine, twin-tail fighters to the dedicated training squadron, the Corps discovered it had just 17 F/A-18s available for squadron-level training at eight units.
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

Post by Isgrimnur »

Jalopnik
But unlike the tweet in which he yelled at his Amazon Alexa to “Cancel order!” on the next Air Force One, Trump isn’t exactly proscribing anything here. He’s not saying the F-35 program, with Lockheed Martin as the general contractor, will be canceled, just that the United States will save “billions of dollars.” Don’t worry about the specifics.
...
If we cancel it now, it’ll take at least a decade and hundreds of billions of dollars more to develop a whole new set of fighter jets from scratch, judging by the last 50 years of aircraft development. Which would have been fine 20 years ago, as I said, but the U.S. Air Force’s F-16s and A-10s, the U.S. Navy’s F/A-18s, and the U.S. Marine Corps’ F/A-18s and AV-8Bs are too old and too tired to last at least another decade, if not more.

And that’s a problem, if your long-term goal is to start a dumb war with China.
...
Lockheed Martin stock is down four percent as of this writing.
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

Post by Holman »

Wait for it... We're getting Su-35's!
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

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Holman wrote:Wait for it... We're getting Su-35's!
That's well within the believability range for Trump, unfortunately.
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

Post by em2nought »

El Guapo wrote:
Holman wrote:Wait for it... We're getting Su-35's!
That's well within the believability range for Trump, unfortunately.
...and PSLs for our snipers. Sounds good to me
Image

...as long as those Ruskies buy crap Chevys in equal doses.
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Re: No more F-22s for you!

Post by Grifman »

Actually, if Trump did cancel the F-35 it might be the best thing he could do as President. From everything I've read, it's a terrible idea in a terrible plane. We really need to start over.
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