Posted on 07/29/2015 6:26:33 AM PDT by Sir Napsalot
The controversy surrounding the F-35 is fundamentally an extension of the debate over what a future fighter should be. Recently the aircraft made news when it was officially announced that the airframe couldn’t dogfight worth a damn. The standard riposte is that dogfighting as a form of aerial combat, stopped being relevant a long time ago.
Perhaps the best advocate for dogfighting-is-dead point of view isn’t a paper for the F-35 but a paper which argues that air combat is fundamentally changing. Perhaps the F-35 is not the best tool for coming era, but neither is the super-dogfighter many in the public seem to crave. In a PDF article titled Trends in Air-to-air Combat, John Stillion of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments argues that the era of pointing the airframe at moving point in space is over. It never really existed. Even during the age of gun kills, most victories arose from a dominant situational awareness and the ability to initiate the fight and disengage at will.
(snip)
This means intangible information assets have become as important as battleships and aircraft carriers in December, 1941. A Chinese “Pearl Harbor” strike against US satellites and information systems could be conducted without killing a single American. But would the public react the same way? Would an administration similar to the current regard that as casus belli? Or will it ignore it like the OPM hack and just move on?
..... 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
The tactical geniuses said that about the F-4C during Vietnam when they took the guns off and replaced them with missiles. We were getting our asses shot off until the guns went back on. Mano a Mano is still viable as is the CLOSE support of ground troopers.
Revive the A-10 Warthog, with updates and line improvements. Virtually a flying tank, its practical application in close ground support is unrivaled by anything we have now. Able to take tremendous damage and still cripple home, it can deliver a bomb load with low-level pinpoint accuracy, and with the cannon mounted in its airframe, it can blow heavy armor apart. It can fly in and out of the most rudimentary of airfields, and do so with reliability and with enough redundancies built into its systems to assure the pilot will return to fly another day.
And give it to the Marines. Use it to substitute for gunship heliocopters for Army Airborne, and make sure the Israelis also have a supply of them.
The enemy then shall not only fear us, they will tremble at the approach of these compact dreadnaughts.
Wow, that article is packed.
I will have to read that again, thanks for posting.
The A-10 is an amazing aircraft. No wonder DOD politician wanna be’s want to kill it.
Yes give it to the Marines.
If air-to-air combat is no longer relevant, why do we need an Air Force with all its beaurucratic tail and headquarters? Air-to-air stemmed from the need to protect manned bombers from other fighters. No with all the so called smart munitions, unmanned aircraft (which could be bombers), long range missiles, etc, why do we need an Air Force? Let it revert back to the Army, and in some cases to the Navy. DOD would save a whole hell of a lot of taxpayer money. I know that never crosses the mind of many in the Pentagon. It is too entrenched in old beauracracies and keeping traditions over saving money. The age old slogan continues...if you don’t spend it you lose it.
Don’t forget the BC comment section. It is just as good as the article from the host.
Excellent and thought-provoking article. Nicely ties recent cyberattacks (probably Chinese) to the F-35 and Situational Awareness. I hadn’t connected those two seemingly-independent things before. Considering the HUGE numbers of Chinese engineers graduating and their excellent math and science skills, our superiority is going to be seriously endangered in the coming years and decades. When you factor in our lack of political will and recent propensity to surrender before the first shot is fired, we are in big trouble.
The whole article is about the nimbleness of our military and intelligence planners’ minds, with the normal politics aside.
Using the F-35 airframe as starting point of some obsolete thinking (both sides have good merits), and how much the American public is to be shielded from knowledge.
The whole picture is not good.
But of course, we don’t hear from ‘our side’, and I doubt ChiComm (and others) will advertise how successful our cyber warfare for them.
Wow, this is how USA entered Vietnam. Therein we were taking large losses from Migs and we got smart again. Back to stupid.
I think a lot of people are missing the point of the article. It’s not about dogfighting. It’s not even about air superiority. It’s about cyber warfare and how a war can be lost without anyone dying in combat. It’s an new era of technological struggle and no one really understands what that means. The plane is a small part of the issue.
To succeed, cyber warfare has to degrade and defeat the enemy. You can do a lot of nefarious things with the personal info of tens of millions of people, but that alone won’t defeat a country.
Our enemies can degrade or destroy our critical infrastructure (power, gas, sewage, water, transportation, financial service) which could be a mortal blow if big enough.
Or they could disrupt all military communications leaving all ships, planes, and troops cut off and completely isolated. Those $300 million F35s would instantly be pretty useless.
The latter path might be the best. The recent OMB attacks could be dry runs to test our resolve as the author points out.
I disagree that it’s not about the planes. It’s about ALL of our defense systems as well.
Yes. That's what I'm getting at. It's not about "missiles vs guns" on fighters -- the topic is very much broader than that.
“why do we need an Air Force with all its beaurucratic tail and headquarters? “
It’s the golf courses.
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