I haven’t been following the fiasco that closely, but Richard Fernandez has some thoughts:
The reality of modern day information combat is that China can win a war without killing a single person or disrupting a single reality TV show. What if America could lose World War 3 and not even know it, especially if it relies on its politicians to tell it an attack has occurred.
Sadly true.
What if America could lose World War 3 and not even know it, especially if it relies on its politicians to tell it an attack has occurred.
Obama wouldn’t know until he read it in the newspaper like the rest of us.
Well I have slightly different concepts for how such a system would work. I think it is too early to say this is the end of dogfighting. This has been claimed several times, including in the 1970s, and it didn’t happen.
Most conflicts since have been asymmetrical conflicts, which were not between major powers, where the USA always had a superior numerical advantage in aircraft. So it hardly surprising that the kill ratios are like that and I think these conclusions are premature.
If dogfighting did not matter then the optimum design would be something like the 1960-1970s interceptors. Think a large dual seater aircraft with a weapons operator, a large radar, and the ability to carry a lot of BVR missiles. Something like the Mig-31 or the F-14.
The emphasis would also switch from turning to higher speed aircraft. So you could see a comeback of Mach 3 interceptors.
However the F-35 is nothing like that.
As for UAVs I am not convinced. They are fine for reconnaissance. However remote human control can only take you so far. You have latency issues, lack of situational awareness, and the comms might be jammed. The last problem is probably the most insurmountable. Ask any FPS player what he thinks about playing on an intercontinental server with 100ms latency. Satellite comms are even worse. The only way to solve the latency problem is to give AI control to UAVs. At least for piloting and automatic obstacle avoidance/countermeasures activation. I still think its a really bad idea to give AI the trigger control. Of course if you do that and have such a system on an UAV you also risk that it can be subverted somehow and that someone can hack into your UAVs and turn them against you.
I do agree with you about the reported demise of dogfighting, but I disagree with the notion that an optimum design would look like a 60s/70s interceptor or that the F-35 would be poor at the interceptor role. The problem with Interceptors was RoE prevented BVR. A pilot had to verify the bogie as an enemy acting hostile before attacking BVR. One of the major cost increases to the F-35 is building into it advanced optics (similar to what was worked for the F-14 to fire the Phoenix missile) to identify beyond human visual range.
To me, the optimum design for intercepting is a UAV. Because it doesn’t have human limitations for visual range. Rather you can put a big lens on it to see far into the horizon. And they can be made into missile trucks that have the advantage of loitering on station rather than having to rush to the intercept location. But a UAV for dogfighting I think is questionable, and jamming is an issue. But then again, we have missiles that can home in on emitting jammers. The AI need only be as complex as to fire such a missile in the general direction of the perceived jam, then wait it out. If the jam is erroneous, the missile won’t track anything. If it is an emitting enemy, the missile will do the rest of the work.
You forgot AWACS, one of the reasons pilots are more willing to release a live missile on a target BVR.
And, again, I have to point out that the United States has traditionally relied more on designs which have emphasized strength & power over maneuverability. The P-40 (an unappreciated craft) could and did beat the Zero, even though the latter was the most dangerous dogfighter for the first half of WW2. Ditto for the Lightning and the Wildcat.
A parallel situation existed in England. The Brits said the Thunderbolt could not survive in German air space as it couldn’t dogfight worth a darn, and don’t even think of comparing a Jug to a Spitfire….
Just don’t tell Robert S. Johnson.
Same thing with jets. For my entire life I’ve been hearing how maneuverable MiGs are; nasty little knife-fighters. Yet the record consistently shows that -with proper training- MiGs can be defeated by less maneuverable designs. I cite the F-4 Phantom II as evidence. 🙂
So, yes, maneuverability is desirable, but I’ll prefer properly trained pilots myself.
Regarding US airplane design. Yeah. Quite often an US airplane was designed around the basis of a big high performance engine. Even today you see this happen. The Japanese did not have that luxury so they made the Zero by basically making the airframe really light on a comparatively subpar engine.
The Axis had a lot of issues with engine design. They did ok with the DB601. But Japan and Italy only got to license produce this engine much later by the time the war was basically lost.
The Germans focused on liquid-cooled engines. They had a lot of trouble scaling them up in size to make bombers and the DB605 was basically a disaster. The Japanese had some rehashed pre-war radial designs. The Italians basically licensed production.
The USA had the Wasp and Cyclone radial engines with superchargers. The radials were basically everywhere from the Corsair, to the B-17, even on M4 Sherman tanks. Somehow the designs were a lot easier to scale up.
The British had the Meteor engine so they were in a similar situation.
As for the talk about maneuverable MiGs. That probably comes from MiG-21s in Vietnam. The MiG-15 used on Korea was not that maneuverable. In fact the MiG-21 was designed to be maneuverable after veteran WW2 Soviet pilot experience fighting the F-86 Sabre with MiG-15s in Korea. They found the F-86 Sabre to have better visibility and maneuverability. So the MiG-21 was designed with than in mind. It was kind of similar to the F-16 design process in a way. They also found back then that the Sidewinder missile was a lot better than the missiles they had. They reverse engineered it into the AA-2 and eventually designed the AA-11 Archer. Which takes us back full circle as it lead to the West basically scrambling to support something similar e.g. AIM-9X, IRIS-T.
The MiG-25 and MiG-31 were not maneuverable either.
I think the biggest weakness of the P-40 was an inadequate supercharger/turbocharger, giving the Zero sanctuary above a certain altitude. A similar situation of a heavier aircraft in relation to the available engine thrust and wing area for the Sabre ceded the “high ground” to the MiG.
The big weakness of the Zero along with the MiG (15 — did the 17 have this problem?) was aeroelastic flutter. Pilots were trained that they could disengage from the Zero by diving. The stouter, heavier P-40 didn’t have this problem.
John Tolland recounted Claire Chennault developing tactics for the P-40 fighting the Zero, but Tolland perhaps lacked the technical background to properly explain what was taking place. After a public television showing of the John Wayne “Flying Tigers” movie, American Volunteer Group veteran and squadron leader David Hill was interviewed to speak about what was (not much) and was not realistic (just about everything) about the movie, especially with John Wayne’s character patterned after David Hill.
Hill emphasized that by a dive to evade a Zero, he meant “straight down.” The P-40 was tough enough to do this whereas the Zero, not so much.
He also mentioned something that must have been taught by Chennault but not understood by historian Tolland. He explained that when he would attack a bomber, he would dive down, roll inverted, and then zoom climb up on the plane he was attacking. The tail gunner could not depress his gun to shoot back. Hill explained that was why everything in the gun camera footage looked upside down. The way I understood it, he was “strafing” the belly of the bomber, inverted, and from underneath.
This explains a whole lot of things, including Peter Townsend (no, not the rock star, the war hero who was not permitted to mary the Queen’s sister) who got himself shot down by the tailgunner of the German bomber of which he decimated the crew, of the ball turret to defend American bombers from blind-spot attack, and the German Schrage Musik night-fighter upward-slanting cannon.
Anyway, the P-40 could dive (straight down) as a “get out of (Japanese POW internment) card” when pursued by a Zero. The knock on the F-35 is that it lacks such a get-out-jail-free card against potential adversary aircraft.
This thing about turning as a measure of combat prowess reminds me of a History Channel show about the aerial combat which merited Leo K Thorsness the Medal of Honor, occuring a short time before he was shot down by a SAM on another mission and spent the rest of the war as a POW.
The circumstances were that the Skyraiders were providing close air support for an attempted recovery of downed Air Force pilots when the North Vietnamese MiGs showed up, I believe, shooting down two of the Skyraiders and turning the situation into a “Charlie Foxtrot” for the rescue forces. Thorness and his backseater show up in an F-105 Wild Weasel, and the two men merited the Medal of Honor for driving off a flight of MiGs in a “wheel” tactical formation with their one Thunderchief, low on fuel, with them returning to base on “fumes.”
The History Channel animations and terse narrations were interspersed with a now aged Thorsness, looking back with self-deprecatory amusement about his past heroism, recounting on how he radioed the remaining Skyraider pilot on how to save himself. Just as the MiG could out turn the Thunderchief, with Thorsness’ attack runs using the low-level speed of the F-105 designed for low-level nuclear attack to conduct “strafing” passes on the MiGs, the Skyraider, he knew, could out turn the MiG.
“So I looked down, and I could see this little guy (the Skyraider and its pilot) turning these small circles down below.”
I assume you are talking about IRST. But even IRST has limited use if the RoE require you to visually confirm a target’s markings or whatever.
The main advantage of IRST is that it is a passive sensor which you can use to get a firing solution. In combination with an agile short range missile like the AIM-9X and a helmet you can dispense a lot of the cases where you would need to use a cannon or turn the plane to hit a target.
EOTS is combination IRST and FLIR. FLIR is used quite often to target ground objects beyond visual range.
I suspect that the durability of a particular cyber attack is very low, so having a pretty high tolerance to provocation is probably a good strategy. With a set of weapons that you’re only likely to be able to use once, you want to make sure that the other guy doesn’t get off the mat when you finally hit him back. With that in mind, I kinda think that our reluctance to respond to something like OPM may have some method to the madness.
So, what you are telling us that there is a certain “Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes” aspect to the passivity to OPM? That this is like the scene of the British elite troops in “A Bridge Too Far” with their stuffy officer scolding them “Wait for the commaahhhnd! Wait for the commaahhhnd!” to hold fire until the Panzer unit gets closer, even though guys are taking bullet wounds?
That when China crosses a certain threshold, we will “let them have it?” And that current leadership has the ice-cold-blood discipline to tell our cybertroops “Wait for the commaahhnd!” as well as the resolve to give the “commaahhnd” when our adversary is most vulnerable?
I am not dismissing what you are saying, I would like to believe it, but could you elaborate?
Disclaimer: all of this is highly speculative.
First, we know that once a zero-day is used, a fix for it will emerge with in a small (but non-zero!) number of days. So any attack is likely to be a one-shot. If you have an infinite supply of one-shot attacks, that doesn’t really matter. But if you’ve only got, say, 30 that work at any one time, then spending 15 of them to prove a point might not be a great idea.
Second, let’s group cyber attacks into 3 rough categories:
1) Annoyances/embarrassments/security breaches.
2) Standalone attacks designed to cripple an enemy state.
3) Attacks coordinated with the kind of military action that goes boom.
How you husband your Big Bag o’ Exploits is going to depend a lot on how worried you are about each of those things. If you think a state actor is likely to just harass you with a lot of #1’s and you’re worried about what happens in a #3, you’re likely to be extremely patient. On the other hand, if you think that the #1’s are just leading up to a #2 (insert scatology here), you’d probably want to do tit-for-tat deterrence.
Or, in ABTF terms, it depends on whether you’re Anthony Hopkins being machine-gunned in an attic or Sean Connery hiding in a basement.
Final point: there are situations where the people who know what they’re doing will recommend passivity. All such recommendations will be approved in the Obama administration, unlike those where the people who know what they’re doing recommend doing something that will cause the pacifist wing of the Democratic Party to wring its moist, tiny, little hands.