Posted on 07/23/2017 10:23:14 AM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
Every Monday there is a new Russian Wunderwaffen. One week it's a ship. One week it's a tank. One week it's an airplane-doesn't matter. Every week the Ruskies are just about to go on-line with something that will put the West to rest.
Then on Tuesday or Wednesday we get another story about the Russians having to steal fuel from their aircraft carrier to put in the tugboats that are needed to push the carrier around or their new radar array that can't identify Eurasia.
They sure do "dream up" some nifty make believe stuff though.
From 1950-1954 the NORKs and ChiComs found out that bullets were a lot cheaper than people.
It's a good thing that TPTB are doing everything humanly possible to keep deliverable nukes out of the hands of the Norks who might be willing to take a 2% chance.
And it's double plus good that TPTB are doing everything they can to keep nukes out of the hands of the mullets in Iran who want to end the world as an article of faith!
Methinks it won’t be too long before Europe finds that muslims are cheaper than bullets.
And if they sell the technology to the Chinese, who have just as much money as us, and a bigger manufacturing base?
Cross that bridge when we get there. For now and the foreseeable future, China must have trade with us or their economy would implode so a full-on conflict with them is not in the interest of either. China also has NO real logistical ability to project force outside of their immediate region.
China is a potential and likely threat. Russia is pretty much washed up - an economy completely dependent on energy for income.
The 4th generation Russian aircraft are beautiful and impress at air shows, but they likely lose to our current aircraft and most certainly lose to our 5th generation. I don’t think they would even have a 10-1 ratio and that means 6 F-35’s and they have no more Su-35’s even counting those ready for export.
It will certainly change, but at this moment in history, our military is without equal. As others have pointed out - it is our national will that I question.
Using the reliability of the AK-47 as a benchmark for modern combat aircraft is an exercise in futility. Imagine if you had one decent belt-fed machine-gun at Gettysburg. Would it matter which side had the more reliable musket? Technology eventually drives tactics - not the other way around. This is true no matter how much resistance the old guys put up.
On today’s battlefield or airspace - technology wins. If they can’t see ours, but we can see and track theirs they will lose. Period. Dogfights are as antiquated as advancing in a line with muskets across open terrain. We went into WWII with a Navy totally committed to the battleship. We came out completely committed to aircraft carriers and submarines. The tactics were set, but technology changed everything. Today the aircraft with the best computers, radar, and missiles wins and few very planes would ever get close enough to ours to “switch to guns.”
The evolution of warfare never stops. As robotics and AI become more common the wealthiest nations will become even more powerful. That is my best guess.
* Wayne Handley in the 90's with his highly modified Stephen's Arko and his "Agrobatic Routine"? It would make you sick to your stomach watching what he did.
* Or Sean Tucker with his latest mount with the eliptical / Shark wingtips as he hangs off the prop?
* Or any current generation R/C acro aircraft, ICE or electric behaving more like a helicopter than a fixed wing?
What the Ruskies are doing is cool, but with enough thrust ( vectored ) to cover your butt when your are at the edge of the envelope when normally, you did run out of thrust, you can do anything, and they have.
Will it beat our Gen 5? Heck If I know. However think of this... If this thing has the typical Ruskie robust landing gear and rough field air intakes, why not mount a center pod with A-10 type weaponry and you have a later day A-10 with that maneuverability. It could use more of a high bypass type engines, but that can't be done, lets face it. If it did and they went the A-10 / Su-25 route, I'd be worried, that would be one kick-ass support bird....
Interesting posting. I enjoyed the read!
“...Who wins a air battle between 25 F-35s with 4 missiles each or an opponent who has 500 aircraft that can outrun the F-35s but only have machine guns with 1000 rounds each?...”
Wrong comparison. But it illustrates a mindset Americans cannot shake free of, one that went out circa 1800: the militia mindset. The conceit that sufficient masses of citizens, armed with flintlocks and bursting with republican virtue (the small-r sort) but otherwise untrained and unorganized, can best any invader. A holdover from victory in AWI, and the no-clear-win rematch that was the War of 1812. Most of it was dumb luck, with a dash of strategic imagination.
When I wrote that quality beats quantity, I was not writing about one-one-one with same-type armaments.
F-35s (and a number of aircraft of slightly earlier generation) will eradicate any opposing fighter force because they will (if developed correctly) be equipped with capabilities no earlier combat aircraft possess. Doesn’t matter how many, how fast they can fly, nor the size of their ammunition load. It will be over before they are even aware the F-35s have arrived.
It’s the wrong comparison for other reasons: no fighter enters air combat one-on-one without ground control (though no fighter pilot can admit it); hasn’t been the case since before 1940. No matter how speedy, no matter how maneuverable, no matter how many guns it lifts of any caliber, a single fighter is helpless.
Who wins any air-to-air encounter? Whoever gets the drop on the other guy. Another truth fighter pilots are loathe to admit. Only about three percent of the average engagement is the visual-contact, hard-turning portion. It make no sense to design a fighter to exploit that segment, if it has no capability to fight during the other 97 percent (though you can watch the execrable Pierre Sprey claim the opposite, a couple times a week on American Heroes Channel and Smithsonian Channel. He also takes credit for designing the F-16, which he didn’t. Not really a standout in terms of the fighter mafia and their propensity to tell fibs).
If NATO had gone into battle with neutron warheads, it would not have mattered how many Red Army soldiers were swarming across the Oder-Neisse Line with their Kalashnikovs (decent ones cost more than $50.00, by the way).
In similar vein, no militia armed with flintlocks - nor Garands, nor even M14s - is going to meet with much success if ICBMs rain down on their heads.
That’s the edge quality enjoys, over quantity.
It is my opinion from my experience in the Navy that the next major war will be conducted with low tech sensors. The Mark 1 Mod 0 eyeball will rule. Along with other passive sensors like passive sonar and IR. Why? The old saying you radiate you die is still true. For example as soon as an AWACS starts transmitting 10 AARM come homing in on it....
“...If everything went according to the Germans’ plan, their telephones worked far better than US phones....the German phones were far superior. ... But ... of little use when the phones didn’t work. The US phones worked well enough in real-world battlefield conditions. The German phones were overengineered, ... Good design is about making compromises on a continuum of choices. ...” [null and void, post 16]
Hand’t heard about German field telephones before, but the inclination of Third-Reich development folks to over-engineer stuff is legendary among systems engineering types, weapon designers, and technically oriented historians.
Maximizing individual performance of one weapon in isolation was a very German tendency. Doing so without reference to who’s going to use it, or how, against whom, or where, doesn’t necessarily meet with success. It was more of a Third Reich organizational quirk.
But it misreads what actually happened in the Second World War: The Germans did not lose because they overengineered weapons while the Allies refused to. They lost (at least to the Western Allies) in part because the Allies devised integrated logistics systems to supply the best stuff they could produce, to the right places at the right times, in overwhelming quantity. And the logisticians worked hand in glove with the tacticians (overseen by the senior strategy types) to help the combat troops get the most out of what could be supplied. No one carried on in isolation.
The field-telephone arrangements are a great example: looped wire-stringing and simplified repair are in some measure tactical adaptations, to deploy a more resilient network than would be otherwise possible - even if the Americans had enjoyed engineering superiority in that case.
Superior organization for supply, repair, and the flexbility to adapt when the unforeseen happened (as often happens in action) greatly magnified Allied (especially American) capabilities to keep in the fight, and to return battle-damaged items to the fight with a minimum of down time.
“...The Germans did not lose because they overengineered weapons while the Allies refused to. ...”
Lest the forum find fault with this approach, let me emphasize that overwhelming logistic superiority, brilliant intel exploitation, organizational adapatation, and industrial prowess would have meant nothing, had not Allied soldiers gone toe-to-toe with the Germans: when all else was said and done, real determination and grit - fighting spirit - were still indispensable (so wrote the late Stephen Ambrose, in the preface to one of his works on the deeds of American troops in the Second World War).
“...The Mark 1 Mod 0 eyeball will rule. ...”
This has not been the case since before the Battle of Jutland in May 1916: by then, the range, power, and accuracy potential of the weaponry had outstripped the ability of ships’ crews to see targets and direct gunfire onto them - and exceeded the ability of commanders to perceive the total battlefield or devise & command maneuvers against the enemy forces.
Every advance since then has come in the area of sensors, and communications.
Whatever the US Navy will or won’t do in the next conflict, I do not believe they will give up on any of the modern sensor systems. I spent almost 29 years wearing a USAF uniform, but I stand second to none in my admiration for the courage of sailors, and the imagination and tenacity of their officers. Working with them in a Joint billet was a surprise and a delight: from junior rating all the way to four-star admiral.
The M4 Sherman versus Panzer VI (Tiger) example is of less importance than Americans believe. Though encounters with Tigers were very hard on individual Sherman crews, there were never enough Tigers to lend the Germans a decisive advantage. And though Tigers were difficult to beat in a standup fight, once knocked out there was little chance of recovery and repair (mechanically, they were breakdown-prone as well).
In contrast, the Sherman was reliable, easy to operate, easily repaired by crews in the field. Many analysts and some veterans (some from the Red Army itself) rate the Sherman as equal to or better than the vaunted T34.
Every technological innovation in weaponry has been opposed: too costly, too fragile, will never work. Goes back a long ways, well before radar, well before aircraft: back to the days of smoothbore muskets and probably farther than that.
Sometimes the objections are valid: every device conveys advantages and introduces drawbacks of its own. But many more innovations than not ultimately prove workable: belligerents decide to adapt as needed, and bear the expense, bullying or coaxing their military forces to find ways to succeed. Thus the character of armed conflict is transformed, within limits that are only partially mapped out, imperfectly defined by broad truisms and basic principles.
As far as air-air and air ground warfare is concerned I am sure it is the same.
“You’ve never been in the military? Turning on radar is like asking to be sunk. Radiate and die is how we used to say it...”
Spent 29 years in USAF uniform, as aircrew and in various technical support staff billets. Radar was a central concern. I devoted 13 years to various aspects of operational testing, of anti-air systems and defensive countermeasures. Worked closely, with all US service branches and several allied armed forces teams. A never-ending problem. The neat, clean, speedy, sweeping, techno-whiz-bang, politically painless solutions Americans believe in, and yearn for, rarely happen.
What central_va writes about is a serious limitation of surface warships. They cannot hide nor run away quick enough. The same limits do not apply to aircraft.
There are very large aspects to the problem that haven’t been broached here, yet. Radar is just a single facet.
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