Posted on 09/29/2008 5:27:55 AM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
War game argues that USAF fleet could be outmatched by Chinese
By Stephen Trimble
Rand's 90-slide briefing presented in August argues that the US Air Force's fifth-generation fighter fleet could be outmatched by hordes of lesser-skilled Chinese Sukhoi Su-27 pilots in a 2020 battle over the Taiwan Straits. In the Rand war game, China launches an air attack on skies above Taiwan. Using advantages of proximity and sheer numbers, the assault force consists of 72 Su-27 Flankers, 24 in each of three regiments. Operating from Andersen AFB, Guam, the USAF can muster only six Lockheed F-22s in the Taiwan Straits at any time.
As the engagement starts, Chinese Flankers outnumber F-22s by 72 to six. The F-22s are also heavily outgunned in the battle. Three Su-27 regiments carry a total of 912 air-to-air missiles, compared with 48 by six F-22s.
In the end, the simulation optimistically assumes no F-22s are shot down in dogfights, but enough Su-27s break through to wipe out the USAF's tankers. Since the F-22s lack the range to return to a friendly base, they are lost anyway.
“1. Ten guys with clubs will win out over one man with nine bullets.”
Even odds, shoot nine then pick up a club...
“I don’t enought to know just how good the F-22 is, but I do know that just being technically superior is not enough, if you are on the short end of long odds for a long time. The Germans produced some very fine weapons in WWII. The Panzer VI (Tiger) totally outclassed the Sherman, and routiunely knocked them out at a 5 or 6 to 1 ratio. But the Sherman had been specifically designed to be easy to mass produce, and the US Army could afford to trade 6 Shermans for a Tiger, and replace their losses faster than the German Army.”
Another factor was that we would recover our vehicles if they broke down or got knocked out.
The Germans on the otherhand didn’t do that.
btt
“Or better yet, put the F-16XL into production.”
The best bet would be the Agile Falcon, it had a 25% larger wing than the “C” model as well as uprated engines.
The Bismark was hit by a torpedo launched by a Swordfish torpedo plane. It didn't do much damage -- but it did jam the rudder, leaving the ship sailing around in a circle.
The Germans had very modern, sophisticated anti-aircraft guns on the Bismark, designed to mechanically assist the gunners as they tracked enemy planes. Unfortunately for the sailors on the Bismark, the system was so modern that there not a speed setting, for the target's speed, that matched the Swordfish, because, being a canvas covered bi-plane, it flew more slowly than the slowest setting on the AA guns.
But that just goes to prove my point. The Brits got in one lucky hit, and were lucky again that the rudder was turned -- it it had not been they could have maneuvered the ship with the screws.
We need enough planes that we can lose a few to dumb luck, and still get the job done.
Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to be the first to advocate bringing an old standby back to restore the balance of power in the skies.
Short Range: AIM-2 Genie
The other solution would be to mount a W54 warhead into a modified AMRAAM. 50 pound nuclear warhead with a 1 kilton yield ... bye bye clustered fighters.
Actually, I think just the opposite is true. So long as they had fuel, and the ability to move without being attacked by air, the Germans were the champions of battlefield recovery.
Germany didn't have the industrial base we did, and they made do, and scrounged all kinds of things. Most of the tanks Rommel used in France were Chech. And many of the Panzer Regiments that went into Russia in 1941 were equipped with French tanks. In North Africa, the Africa Korps not only recovered their tanks, but captured and used British tanks, trucks and cars.
IN Normandy, we faced French tanks, British mines, and Russian artillery pieces, all converted to German use.
The exercise assumed that F-22 with AMRAAMs had a 100% kill ratio and the Chinese had a zero percent kill ratio.
The Chinese win because our nearest base was so far away from the Straights that they needed to hit tankers, and enough Chinese aircraft get through to take out our tankers and AWACS aircraft.
However, the purpose of the exercise was not to show how weak the US is, it was to show the need for more basing closer to Taiwan, to replace Clark AFB that we lost in 1991.
While this whole scenario is inaccurate in most respects, your brother is off the mark on some comments- the
Chinese don’t need tankers if they are deploying SU-27s. They barely need to cross the Taiwan straits to unload their missiles and the SU-27 is a long range machine. The F-22 (if it were deploying from Guam) is at an obvious disadvantage on that front.If this whole thing were to happen in 2020-the PRC would have plenty of tankers and AWACS to play around with. They are already buying from the Russians or developing indigenous programmes. And their training while still inferior has improved considerably. They’ve learnt the lessons of Iraq and Yugoslavia better than most folks.
There was one that was being developed for Israel that with the use of water injection, it could top Mach 3 at high altitude.....IIRC it was called the F-4X. The State Department nixed it, and later the Air Force pulled funding because it would interfere with the F-15 project.
Then there is the F-4 2000 “Super Phantom”/Kurnas 2000, or the Turkish version of the Kurnas known as the F-4E 2020 Terminator.
“Short Range: AIM-2 Genie”
Only if we get to bring back the F-106 at the same time ;)
“for cost and a few updates in avionics, it wouldn’t be a bad fighter in today’s world.”
That’s why Turkey went the route they did with their F-4E’s, and have effectivly extended their useful service life to at least 2020.
“Even the F-15 could deal with anything out there now and the foreseeable future.”
The F-15 needs some structural reinforcement, and a more stringent inspection routine to prevent the recent string of losses to the fleet.
I agree with you on the F-35. They want too many capabilities incorporated into the design and as a result it isn’t going to do anything as good as a purpose designed aircraft could. With exception of stealth, it barely has the performance of the F-16 it’s supposed to replace.
The F-22 is a cool aircraft. The one thing I could never understand about the Air Force is their need for everything to be multi-mission. So instead of using the F-22 the way it’s supposed to be used, some pencil pushing weenie decided that the Air Force needed to hang bombs on the F-22 to make it more a more “glamorous” multi-mission aircraft. So now what’s the point of going through with the F-35A when the F-22 has already been given mud moving capability? I say either strip the mud moving from the F-22 and use it as it was designed, or cancel the F-35 outright.
In 1998 dollars, the F-15C had a fly away price of $29.9 million per airframe, so even if the cost has doubled, we can still probably buy at least 3 for the price of one F-22.
The F-106 is by far my favorite aircraft.
NASA retired the “Six” back in 1998, and that’s also the same year that the last QF-106 was blown up.
There’s a small handful that “survived” though.
Their argument boils down to "The Chinese could put enough planes in the air to overwhelm the USAF." But there's a lot more to real-world fighting than a simple numbers game.
They mostly gloss over the huge disparity in pilot skill, pre-conflict intelligence (our side being ready for what they'll throw at us), early-conflict counter-measures (hard to take off from bombed-out runways, or find the enemy with no operational radar...) and the massive logistical processes needed to put and keep a large number of aircraft in the air. (We can refuel our birds in the air and keep them there, while the Chinese would have to land a lot. etc.)
The devil is always in the details, and the USAF has all the details on its side.
Six USAF F-22A Raptors should be joined by eight F-15C Eagles and sixteen ROCAF F-16A Block 20 / F-16C Block 52+ Fighting Falcons along with an AWACS and an ABL 747, both of them kept away at a safe distance of 200 kilometers.
How’s that for technology against 72 PLAAF Su-27SK, J-11B and Su-30MKK Flanker fighters flying in three separate 24 ship formations?
PLAAF Flankers make kung fu rags for ROCAF F-16s. Nationalist Chinese pilots are flying kung fu warriors.
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