Posted on 07/11/2009 4:46:00 AM PDT by myknowledge
America’s global primacy in the air power is currently teetering on a knife-edge. Soon, the US Senate will vote on whether to continue funding future production of the F-22A Raptor. If the Senate endorses the continuation of F-22 production, as sought by the full House of Representatives, the House Armed Services Committee, the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the Senate Appropriations Committee, the United States Air Force has some prospect of maintaining its strategic position in the longer term. If the Senate votes against the F-22, the United States Air Force will enter a terminal death spiral from which it has few prospects of recovery.
Air Power Australia has been studying the problems the US Air Force faces very carefully, as these problems are mostly common to all Western air forces, differences being primarily in matters of scale. Recently, Dr Carlo Kopp and Peter Goon produced a series of detailed briefings, which encapsulate the core issues and the genuine problems the Americans must confront.
The first challenge the Americans must overcome is the rapid evolution of Russian and Chinese Surface to Air Missile and radar technology, which has made such weapons far more lethal than the weapons of the Cold War era. Widely exported, these digital systems are extremely difficult to jam, very difficult to kill due to high mobility and defensive aids, and more than often actively defended by guns and short range missiles designed to kill US smart munitions in flight. The notion of the US carving corridors through hostile SAM belts is now a historical idea, as future combat aircraft will have to penetrate such defences and survive. Only the F-22 is built to do this, and 187 F-22s is simply not enough to do the job. This is discussed in detail in “High Technology Air Defence Weapons vs Planned US Force Structure”.
This problem is compounded the complete dependency of all US air, land and sea capabilities upon the possession of air superiority. Since the 1940s the US has been able to dominate air space above US forces in combat and their basing, as a result of which “If the US cannot win and maintain air superiority, its whole military machine collapses like a house of cards”. Despite this deep dependency and strategic vulnerability, air superiority is not considered important in most current US strategic thinking, as it is more than often simply assumed to be the state of the world. This is discussed in detail in “Why 187 F-22s are Not Sufficient”.
The 1990s plan to recapitalise the US fighter fleet has failed. Rapidly evolving fighter technology and surface based air defences have rendered existing legacy fighter designs ineffective, and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter was simply not defined to fight and survive in this kind of threat environment. Even were the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter capable of surviving in combat, its program schedule is so far behind target and its unit costs so high that it is no longer a viable proposition. The only option left to the US is to build many more F-22s and do so as soon as possible. This is discussed in detail in “The Failed Fighter Recapitalisation Plan”.
The global situation will not improve any time soon, as advancing Counter-Stealth technologies erode the US technological advantage. Russian and Chinese radar, passive sensor and sensor fusion technology has advanced enormously over the last decade, especially due to the infusion of Western digital processing technologies. Aircraft with top end stealth capabilities like the F-22 and B-2 can continue to operate in this environment, but second tier low performance stealth designs like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter cannot. The only techno-strategic choice the US has to deal with proliferating Counter-Stealth technologies is to build more F-22s. This is discussed in detail in “The Proliferation of Counter Stealth Systems”.
People often think of advanced weapons as being used mostly by the nations that build them, but this is no longer true, if it ever was. The reality of today and the future is that nations with money to spend and an agenda can purchase any high technology weapon they desire and can afford from Russian manufacturers, and more recently, Chinese manufacturers. Anti-access weapons built to deny US forces from operating in a theatre are proliferating globally, and problem states are the biggest buyers. Good examples are Iran and Venezuela, energy rich and buying very lethal anti-access weapons. The problems of a globalised anti-access weapon market are discussed in “The Global Impact of Anti-Access Weapons”.
The five APA briefings provide a critical and incisive look into these challenges and underscore the precarious situation the United States, and its many dependent allies, face over the coming two decades.
Have a read, and if you want to evaluate air power strategy, download the PDF files.
Building high tech military equipment and all the jobs and new technology that go with it is bad...
Pouring the “savings” from all those endeavors and then a whole lot more into social services is good...
Who cares if we are all dirt poor in the end, it only matters that everyone is equal - equally poor. It is "social justice"...
Thanks for this indo...excellent read on a very important part of US Military Defense.
It is very true that the Russian SAM threat is far more serious than during years of old. However, there are still a few factors that stack up against the SAM. Principle among these is their silver bullet nature. An SA-20 type missile is very expensive and therefore in finite supply, especially for a country such as Iran. I think we could take advantage of this by fielding a modern TALD (Tactical Air-launched Decoy) or even a modified tactical Tomahawk to sump their SAMS.
I’d wish it were good.
Commonly, military expansionism was the best way out of an economic recession. The practice enriched the nations.
IIRC, during the 1982 Lebanon War, the Israelis used the IAI Harpy, a UAV and was used to expose Syrian SAM site radars by getting them to switch on. Then a Wild Weasel F-4E Kurnass popped from behind and took out the radar set with an AGM-45 Shrike (predecessor of the AGM-88 HARM currently in use).
Remember the Wild Weasel UAV trap?
The silver bullet strategy is still effective, to a limited extent.
Once factor inhibiting the effectiveness of the silver bullet strategy is the mobility and concealibility of these new Russian-designed SAM systems (and their Chinese-made clones).
Seems like we need at least 300 or 400, to keep per-ubit production costs low!
If you ever want air superiority in at least two, let alone three theaters of war, in addition to basing in the CONUS, 500+ would be the best quantity, and the price unit will be an eight figure sum, not a nine.
About a measly fraction of the annual U.S. defense budget won’t do any harm to maintain air superiority with this wonderful Gen 5 stealth fighter.
Who cares if we are all dirt poor in the end,
who cares if we are all dirt poor unprotected and vulnerable in the end
Done.
You've missed my point. I'm talking about simply forcing them to fire on the decoys. When the SAMS cost far more than the decoys, they can be saturated. There is no reason to HARM the radar when they don't have any missiles left.
The problem with using UAVs or the old TALDs for this, is that they do not properly match a strike aircraft flight profile or signature and sophisticated systems will ignore them. However, making small turbine powered decoys (like the SLAM-ER) with the proper radar reflectors would force them to fire. Without a warhead, such decoys would have enormous range and could fly multiple profiles.
Additionally, the decoys could go from being very stealth to having a large RCS instantly. This could make them survivable, thus increasing the sump effect even more.
Meanwhile it seems the other side of the issue, deployment, which involves lots of refueling is also at a standstill, or at best serious delay.
Why not make it 700 or 800 then, just to be on the safe side? It is still a LOT cheaper than LOSING a war!
The practice enriched the nations.
In more ways than one.
A very good point. The effectiveness of advanced SAMS are negated if the crews operating them are inexperienced and/or incompetent. That is a lot more likely to happen in places like Iran and Venezuela. Of course, its very dangerous to make such assumptions; the sites could be manned by foreign advisors or technicians. The key thing is to compress the engagement so that the SAM crew does not have time to react properly. Stealth will definitely help here.
And, yes, it is madness to only buy 187 F-22s after ~25 years of development. The more you buy, the less the unit price.
That's an over the top exaggeration and any Raptor strike will be accompanied by SEAD platforms just as F-117 and B-2 strikes have been.
Incorrect. If they're emitting; regardless if they are armed or not, then they need to be taken out and a SEAD platform ingressing to the target has no idea whether a SAM site has already blown it's entire load. Even if a SAM site no longer has any missiles on the rails their return can be datalinked to other sites downstream. Using your logic a strike package shouldn't take out assets on the ground that are unarmed and unfueled.
You and I have both done strike planning (if memory serves concerning your posts), and you know that HARMing a SAM or EW radar provides no assurance either. It may simply turn off when the HARM approaches, engage the HARM, or deploy multiple emitters or suffer temporary damage which will be fixed in the near future at an unknown time. In any event, the SAM remains a threat.
However, once out of ammunition a weapon is useless. And once highly depleted of ammunition a weapon becomes far less useful. The SAM operators must decide whether to shoot their few remaining missiles on what might be a decoy or save their ammo and suck up a strike.
In any event, I'm not suggesting that HARM not be used. I'm pointing out a far more effective strategy of forcing emission and depletion.
I accept the fact that we will never know when they are completely depleted (although we should have a good idea), but that is no worse than the current IAD HARM suppression, where the status of a system is never really known.
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