F/A-22 Ups and Downs; the Tacair Debate; [Brian's Military Ping List]

"By your definition the SR-71 and Mig-25 were the best fighter aircraft ever built. I think you need to rethink what criteria are important to fighter aircraft."

No, look at what I said. I said that the F-22 is the very best military fighter today.

What you are complaining about is that I simply pointed out that current civilian aircraft can fly faster and higher than the F-22. You are embarassed by those facts, as well you should be.

But just because you are embarassed doesn't mean that I ever claimed that the SR-71 was the best fighter.

"My arguments supported such cost-effective aircraft."

My point is that during their development, to the critics those aircraft didn't appear to be all that "cost_effective". Lest you forget, Carter cancelled the B-1B. Reagan revived the program and built 100. Gawd, to hear you talk about the F-22 while praising the B-2. I bet you raised a major stink about its cost per aircraft!

And how about the F-16 and F-18? The F/A-18 began life as the YF-17. The loser in the lightweight fighter competition. It was too good to cancel, so we built both. How about that? Two aircraft doing the same job??? How cost effective is that?

Again, we forget the development costs now that we rely upon them for our defense. We will feel exactly the same way about the F-22. And...we should have built Northrop's YF-23, just as we did build Northrop's YF-17.

When that inevitable day comes when the F-22 proves its worth in battle, people like you will be praising the F-22 while bitching about how much the next gen aircraft is costing us to develop. Just like y'all bitched about the costs of the F-14, the F-15, the F-16 and F-18, etc then and the F-22 now.

"What you are complaining about is that I simply pointed out that current civilian aircraft can fly faster and higher than the F-22. You are embarassed by those facts, as well you should be."

Well, now you are just getting irritating. For some reason, you think an aircraft that flies high and fast is the ultimate military platform. You have an incredibly weak grasp of what constitutes an airborne weapons system. Civilian aircraft have flown higher and faster than most of our fighters for decades. Ever hear of the Concorde? Hell, the Learjet could outperform most of our fighters when it came onto the market. If high altitude and speed were important we would have squadrons of SR-71 type aircraft lining our ramps. But we don't. Not because we didn't have geniouses like you and Dick Rutan to enlighten the world to the fact that such aircraft are possible, but because since the early 1950's we've been exploring aircraft with exactly those capabilities, and found them wanting in useful military application. But don't let that slow you down. As long as you're demanding our military take a several decades step backward in military technology, let me introduce you to another currently untapped civilian discovery....the bow and arrow.

I just took a look at Scaled Composites website. Here's how they describe SpaceShipOne.

"Our plan involves flight in a 3-place spaceship, initially attached to a turbojet launch aircraft while climbing for an hour to 50,000 feet, above 85% of the atmosphere. The spaceship then drops into gliding flight and fires its rocket motor while climbing steeply for more than a minute, reaching a speed of 2,500 mph. The ship coasts up to 100 km (62 miles) altitude, then falls back into the atmosphere. The coast and fall are under weightless conditions for more than three minutes. During weightless flight, the spaceship converts to a high-drag configuration to allow a safe, stable atmospheric entry. After the entry deceleration which takes more than a minute, the ship converts back to a conventional glider, allowing a leisurely 17 minute glide from 80,000 feet altitude down to a runway where a landing is made at lightplane speeds."

This somehow presents some new lethal military application?

"When that inevitable day comes when the F-22 proves its worth in battle, people like you will be praising the F-22 while bitching about how much the next gen aircraft is costing us to develop. Just like y'all bitched about the costs of the F-14, the F-15, the F-16 and F-18, etc then and the F-22 now."

No, no, and no. You aren't reading what I wrote, you are just guessing.

I've already praised the F-22. It's the world's best fighter, bar none. So lets stop pretending that I will only praise it in the future.

I've also been an enormous supporter of building the F-16 (among others) back in the day. The F-14, F-15, F-16, and F-18 didn't have cost overruns that ate up 6.5% of an entire year's defense budget for a mere 23 aircraft, however.

It's those *MASSIVE* cost overruns that are the F-22's problem...the plane costs so much now that it is eating up our budget for our other fighters and ground attack aircraft...and costing so much that no reasonable person would ever think that it will really be used for close-in ground support of our troops. It's too valuable to protect our grunts on the ground, lest it get hit by lucky groundfire...bringing down a Billion+ Dollar machine.

As for "next generation" aircraft, I'm a big supporter of our new UCAV. There's a bomber that can be sent into the heart of the beast itself without risking a single pilot.

"But don't let that slow you down. As long as you're demanding our military take a several decades step backward in military technology..."

You haven't understood what I've said.

Going sub-orbital is not a step backwards in technology for fighter aircraft. Going Mach 6 is not a step backwards in technology for fighters, either. Being unmanned is also not a technical step backwards for fighters or bombers.

Countries in darkest continental Asia and Africa can manage to man planes, after all...but fielding unmanned fighters and bombers is another thing altogether. Going sub-orbital in said fighters and bombers an even higher hurdle for them.

Ditto for going Mach 6 (faster than many munitions).

This is not to say that the F-22 is inferior as a fighter. It's not.

What it does say is that there is technology out there that is superior to the F-22 in various areas (e.g. unmanned, flying Mach 6, going into Space). Obviously, that sort of civilian technology is going to be incorporated into military aircraft eventually.

And that won't be a step backwards, as you mistakenly rave above.

"Going sub-orbital is not a step backwards in technology for fighter aircraft. Going Mach 6 is not a step backwards in technology for fighters, either."

SpaceShipOne is hoped to eventually fly 100km high. It will eventually reach a speed of about mach 3 (not even close to mach 6). 41 years ago, the X-15 flew to altitude of 108km high and achieved a top speed of mach 6. That was 41 years ago. Tell me again why you think anything SpaceShipOne is doing is a technological leap forward?
We've already got several hundred sub-orbital, mach 6 capable, unmanned aircraft. They're called ballistic missiles. Again, SpaceShipOne adds nothing to that capability.
If you're arguing that we will eventually have unmanned, hypersonic, sub-orbital (and orbital) combat aircraft I couldn't agree more. But since you are arguing that SpaceShipOne is the first step toward acheiving that type of aircraft, I'd say you missed the "revolution" by about 4 decades. SpaceShipOne can't even accomplish what NASA and the USAF achieved 40 years ago. It represents Rutan's ability to almost duplicate a long since retired NASA program. Nothing more.

The PRC is working hard...and has been for years...to prepare to confornt us...and they have been doing it economically, politically, and militarily.

They have ingeniously/insidiously found a way to dump the old failed Maoist economic practices and adopt a form of fascist/market driven economics against us that in essence uses our own wealth to drive what they are doing.

All warfare is deception - Sun Tzu

When they finally do decide to confront us, unless we take measures to prevent it (economically, politically and militarily, the most important of which IMHO is economic...treating them as Reagan did the Societs and bankrupting them in the pocess) we will probably see all of the following:

Moving on us only after we are engaged already in multiple theaters (ie. Mid East and Korea first).
Use a variety of their own conventional high tech against us. (ie. their own Aegis, Supercavitating Weapons (which despite what you may believe Southack, are very relevent and dangerous wepons to our CBGs), SU-30's, Sovremmeny DDG's, anti-sat, etc.)
Use significant and potentially devastating asymetrical warfare (ie. sleeper/terror cells in the CONUS aimed at population and infrastructure, shut down Panama canal, digitl warfare, economic warfare, etc.)
Alliances/UNderstandings/Agreement/Intimidation of potential allies to deny the US of their help/assistance/resource.

Now, I believe in any case that the US would come of victorious even in a worst case scenario...but only at horrific cost. If we ct now, particularly economically, although it would be difficult and create hardship...it will be nothing compared to if we wait for the PRC to act on their own timetable.

This is the principle reason I have written the Dragon's Fury Series of Novels, to serve as a warning of what could happen.

We're back at that point again, with Rutan's SpaceShipOne going higher, faster, at Mach 6 into Space where modern fighters can't play.

And from a practical standpoint, how is this worth anything? A modern fighter flying at sub-orbital altitudes going Mach 6+ is nothing but a manned ICBM. Why does it need the man?

I see no practical military application for a manned ICBM. Especially since you would be allowing so much weight to be dedicated to the man and his support systems. This weight will have to be taken from payload, fuel or both.

Nope, the concept has no practical applications in the real world. To a lesser degree, this was the Mig-25 Foxbat's problem. It was built has a high flying, super-fast interceptor. It sacrificed range and payload to achieve, for the time, very remarkable records. In a real conflict, it would offer little if any threat to opposing air or ground forces. It was purpose designed for one thing, to intercept and shoot down long range bombers (i.e B-52's on a nuclear strike mission.)

Your Rudan toy is this same bad principle on steroids.

"And from a practical standpoint, how is this worth anything? A flying machine flying over dreadnaughts is nothing but a manned kite."

...said the Battleship expert to the Wright Brothers when the U.S. first turned down the opportunity (moments later siezed upon by the French military) to purchase the first heavier-than-air plane.

History is repleat with the failures of those who don't understand that they are repeating the mistakes of others.

23 - "Will we shortly get to the point where we only have a handful of planes in the Air Force due to the high unit cost, they'll be GREAT planes, but if only a few of them get taken out we're toast??"

Exactly - like Germany during WWII - they made far and away the best tanks - the Panzers. And we beat them with the far inferior Sherman tanks. The thing is, they built 5,000 Panzers and we built 55,000 Shermans.

They also built the fastest fighter planes, the first jets and the first rocket fighter planes, both far faster than our prop planes, but we beat them with props, by far superior numbers of planes.

how to post a picture:

Go to the picture, and right click on it, then select properties. Then, copy the "address", and put it into memory

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Have a good week end.

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