Beyond Boyd, the Evolution of Air Combat and its Implications

Bring it On wrote a very nice post that touched upon this. A lot of us have been studying and thinking about this for a while, and I thought, rather than derailing the F-35 thread, I’d start another one to discuss.

The key here is that the goal post or requirement has shifted…New priorities have come up, newer threats and new capability can be added which legacy jets did not have. WVR combat has changed, IR Missiles are extremely lethal, all aspect, with LOAL and highly maneuverable, expect them to get only better….HMD’s have advanced and proliferated…With all this what are the odds of one platform with say a 15% performance advantage getting a significantly better kill ratio in WVR against a fighter with equally capable HMD and HOBS Heat seeker? What you will most probably get is a a 50-50 split or quite a bit of mutual kills , especially when things like DAS etc proliferate…Therefore edge has to come from other areas….Stealth, integrated avionics, supercruise , are some of those areas….The F-35 gives you the first 2, lags behind in the third area as a design compromise to meet its other obligations…NG Weapons will make Aerial combat even more lethal (Meteor, NGM, Russian Long range BVR weapons finally DEW’s) ….Whether we like it or not, we are in an era of flying integrated sensors, add stealth to boot and looking out for other fighters gets all the harder…How then do you win aerial campaigns? By conventionally fighter on fighter combat? This is a question many air forces and war planners would have to answer in the decades to come when VLO fighters have sufficiently proliferated….As far as the US is concerned we can get a bit of a peak from the ASBC , which gets only more confusing and complicated…I think Non-kinetic solutions just became as important as kinetic ones 😉

I will also add some other posts later. Looking forward to a good discussion, God willing.