Posted on 03/30/2010 7:09:19 AM PDT by Yo-Yo
South China Sea, 16N, 114E, 2018. Captain Charles (Charlie) Brown is flying Number 2 in a battle formation of four F-35Cs acting as Offensive-Counter-Air ‘sweepers’ for a flight of four Super Hornets inbound for a JSOW strike on Woody Island. A large military deployment on the Island is denying free passage throughout the South China Sea, and several new oil drilling platforms have been active around the Spratly and Paracel Islands. The United Nations is not amused by this claim of sovereignty over the region, and has resolved to remove the deployment by force.
The task has been assigned to the USN, and a Carrier Battle Group lead by CVN-76 Ronald Reagan is in the area. The plan is to cut the runway and disable the port facilities, then force a withdrawal from the Island under terms dictated by the UN/USN coalition task force.
Number 3 of the F-35C sweepers gets a contact from his APG-81 radar, and the four inbound bogeys are shown across the network. Analysis of signals from the bogeys identifies them as Russian built Su-35S, previously seen moving on Woody Island by satellite recon. All the F-35Cs arm their four AIM-120D missiles and prepare for a ‘turkey shoot’, expecting to get ‘first-look, first-shot, first kill’. ‘Ah’, thinks Charlie, ‘this will be like the AN/AAQ-37 EO DAS advertisement: ‘manoeuvrability is irrelevant …let the missiles do the turning’.
What Charlie Brown doesn’t realise is that such marketing hype was only partly right. In today’s day and age, manoeuvrability becomes irrelevant when faced with high agility, more particularly extreme agility, defined as extreme manoeuvrability + extreme controllability – a deadly combination best achieved with 3D TVC engines, widely spaced, interoperated with rapid response dynamic digital flight controls in airframes with highly relaxed static stability in the longitudinal and, in the case of the PAK-FA, directional axes.
The Flankers with their extreme agility come in range at 60 miles, and the F-35C flight sorts targets and fires a pair of AIM-120Ds at each Flanker. The seconds tick by agonisingly slowly as the missiles fly out to their targets, and each pilot watches for the tell-tale radar bloom of a kill. The AN/ASQ-239 “Barracuda” Electronic Warfare system shows considerable activity from each Flanker and then …. a single bloom indicating one Flanker has been hit.
Range is now 40 Nm and closing at 1,100 Nm/hr. The F-35C’s EO DAS detects four missile launch “flares” from each Flanker, twelve in all, and APG-81 radar detects missiles inbound. The F-35Cs each fire their two remaining AIM-120Ds and turn sixty degrees to maintain datalink command guidance of their missiles via the APG-81 AESA antenna. The cockpit MFDs show that the Flankers have broken away though 120 degrees, with the IRBIS-Es' swivelling antenna heads maintaining guidance contact. The AIM-120Ds, now chasing a retreating target, will fall short. The F-35Cs are not so lucky and they all break as the EO DAS senses the incoming R-77M missiles. Small active radiofrequency decoys and flares are ejected. One JSF is killed with an R-77ME missile with an active radar seeker, another with a tail-pipe hit from an R-77TE with an infrared seeker. Charlie’s JSF is now on full burner, heading for the deck and passing Mach 1.3 when ‘whoomp’ – the back-end explodes, and the cockpit is shrill with alarms and festooned with red displays of failure warnings. There is no response from the stick and he reaches for the ejection handle. A blast and excruciating pain as large chards of the shattered canopy knife into his upper body, then silence as the ‘chute’ opens.
Charlie has a bird’s-eye view as the Flankers tear into the Super Hornet Strikers. JSOWs are jettisoned and they hurriedly fire their AIM-120C5s – all miss. The Super Hornet’s defensive ALE-55 decoy does a good-job on the R-77MEs with active radar seekers, but not those with modern imaging-infrared seekers. Two Super Hornets are lost to these BVR missiles. The three Flankers close, and rapidly dispatch the remaining two Strikers. One is killed with a pair of infrared R-73 Archers, and the other with a burst from the GSH-301 30mm cannon.
And the final count: one Flanker killed, four F-35Cs and four Super Hornets killed for a Flanker vs USN Loss-Exchange Rate of 1:7.
Fiction or Prediction? In the rapidly evolving world of future air combat, costly combat capabilities are being countered before the aircraft become operational. Those combat aircraft built to an obsolete specification are effectively dead before they fly.
Excerpt. Read more at Air Power Australia
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Should we ever fight a serious enemy with a reasonably modern airforce and current missile defenses, we should be ready for a very unpleasant surprise.
bump
That is my chief complaint about the current military budget, as espoused by the Pentagon. The admirals and generals (politicians all) keep a straight face when they project out-year ship and aircraft numbers, as if there will never be any combat losses.
Of course they ignore that the AIM-120 missiles can be equipped with “Home on Jam” seeker heads. It gives you the choice of turning off your jammer or eating the missile. Also their mythical strike package wasn’t accompanies by an EF-18. No way a fighter is going to out jam a dedicated EW aircraft.
Definitely Satire.
Nice Sci-Fi - but very unlikely to happen.
China has nukes, they will do as they please in SOuth CHina Sea.
China has veto power in the Security COuncil
China has already been shooting at folks who nose around “their” Spratly IS. This goes back over 2 decades.
IF you live in Rio Linda, get up to speed here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spratly_Islands
and here
http://www1.american.edu/ted/ice/spratly.htm.
That is all, now back to your regularly scheduled lives.....
(Why, well the Spratleys are sought after by Hams as rare DX))
Or even training losses.
They also assume that only one out of eight AIM-120’s hit the target. The only way the Sukhois are going to get away with such a low loss rate is to pull maximum G turns and dive for the deck. Making full use of vectored thrust and God’s own G will break most radar guided missile lock. But that puts them at low altitude, low energy and in a crappy position to fire their own missiles. At the speeds of modern aircraft if you maneuver aggressively to break a missile lock, you are probably going to be out of the fight, or at best dealing with the escort and not the strike package. Unless of course the FA-18 strike package is dumb enough to just fly around in circles waiting for the Sukhois to climb back up to altitude. And if the Sukois go to full burner to catch up, they just make themselves a big honking IR target.
Of course, it's easy to imagine the worst of ours going up against the best of theirs, and we would certainly take an *ss whuppin'.
And that's just what happened on December 7, 1941.
But even in 1941, the US had some "unpleasant surprises" of our own almost ready to roll out. And perhaps the biggest "surprise" of them all, to the Axis powers, was how determined and relentless Americans can be, when sufficiently aroused.
As long as we hold fast to that, we'll be OK, imho.
If we ever lose it, then technology won't matter so much.
Thanks, great stuff!
I suspect the article is basically advertisement for why we need the F-22.
Don't know if we do or we don't -- would leave that judgment to wiser heads (no, I don't mean politicians!).
But it does seem to me that if the US has untold TRILLIONS of dollars to spend on bogus "stimulus packages," we should have some petty cash left over to explore frontiers of technology, such as the F-22.
I just wonder which of these planes will turn out to be the last manned fighter ever developed?
I am reminded of Korea and Vietnam where relatively lesser tech taught us that we can lose a lot of people and equipment, even if we are better than the enemy we are fighting.
Much of our inventory is decades old. If we again experienced predictable losses during a sustained conflict, as we have in the past, it won't take long before we get critically low, especially with our few F-22s, B-1s and B-2s.
My concern is not just overconfidence, we aren't building fighters and bombers like we used to, don't have as many companies competing for those few contracts like we used to, nor are we as self sufficient with raw materials, electronic parts, etc. as we used to be. 2012 can't come soon enough.
More wishful thinking from the Airpower Australia people. Sorry, but the Russian’s wont be building PAK-FA’s in any appreciable numbers. And you still wont be getting F-22’s.
I think this article was written by a professional concerned about what'll be in the locker if the PM and government ever send the RAAF up against the Chinese.
Which reminds me, when are we going to start bitch-slapping these Chinese claims of extraterritorial jurisdiction? They made their claims good against the RVN navy in the 70's, but that doesn't mean the South China Sea is a Chinese lake.
It isn't in the best interests of the United States for neighboring countries (the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, others) to develop the habit of kowtowing to the Han Chinese.
But we see what we're missing from our own OOB when we gave up the AIM-54 Phoenix system with the F-14. Might be nice to have longer arms than the other guy.
Not mentioned in the scenario is the probability that the Sukhoi owner would use his aircraft's ranginess to ensure that the engagement took place in our back yard not his.
The Super Hornet has a range of something like 1100 miles, about half the F-14D's, and the Sukhois' range is more like the Tom's.
Also, the MiG-25 and -31 pack the R-33/AA-9 "AWACS killer" LRAAM; presumably the Flanker series is big enough that they can also carry it. Not considered here.
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