Well you have no idea whether Spectra could jam the lock that the F35 is evading. Different means for the same result. Those AESA jammers must have some utility don’t you think?

Nic

The Rafale pilot had better hope his system works. At least the F-35 has passive means of survivability along with active ones.

F35 isn’t going to be good to go in 10 years either…;) :p
Mildly facticious comments aside, i’ll bet that in 10 years, F35 operational or not, the air defence systems are ahead of the non electronic stealth the F35 brings to the table.

In 10yrs, not only will the F-35 be operational, but so will the NGJ(which F-35s are wired for). The smaller engagement footprints they have to worry about, against fire control radars, combined with electronic attack, and multiband jamming, will give them much greater flexibility.

That’s why stealthy UAV/UCAVs are developped and start to see widespread use. If you you need a SAM magnet to localise enemy air defense, you may want to send unmanned assets, because your 5th gen fighters are going to be detected anyway, and even if SAMs can’t target them, they are going to be attacked by other means (fighters with IRST coming to mind, or maybe future generation of SAMs).

In 20 years, a fleet of Neuron/Rafale seems to be as it will be just as efficient as a fleet of JSF/X47, don’t you think?

Nic

What if you have to go to war in 10yrs though? The plan is to use the UCAVs along with F-35s in the future, but they’re not ready yet.

the fact still remains:

if you need a certain power to detect a contact at a given range, splitting beams will reduce that range

But with a greatly reduced RCS, and LPI sensor, you can afford to be closer. In a nutshell, if anything’s emitting within a few hundred nautical miles of the Raptor/F-35, they’re going to be able to geolocate the source, and use their radars at over 100nm to gain additional situational awareness. They can then periodcially update using even more discreet beams(so they’re not only operating in LPI mode, but they’re only broadcasting for very brief periods contributing to lower probability of detection).

900NM+ with 2 1000lbs JDAMS and 2 AMRAAMs?

Nic

I posted this link earlier in this thread, but here it is again. Check out page 13.
http://www.nps.edu/Academics/Institu…%20fighter.pdf

927nm mission radius with 2 2000lb JDAMS, 2 AIM-120s, and 2 EFTs.

Why would you want your pilots in that sort of airspace??
Why would your pilots want to be in that sort of airspace??
Why not fly your (considerably cheaper, considerably more expandable, considerably more stealthy and considerably more surviveable) UCAV strike aircraft into that airspace instead?
Or indeed why not your stealthy cruise missile?

To champion the F35 as the platfrom for that sort of op with stealthy cruise missiles available now or stealthy UCAV for strike just around the corner sounds like a collossal waste of funds to me.
Not to mention quite likely in a few short years a little bit of a suicide mission for the pilot…

Because there are still tactical targets that need to be dealt with in a timely manner too, as well as strategic ones. A stealthy cruise missile fired closer to its target, has a greater chance of surprise(and gives the defender less reaction time). In short, it gives you greater flexibility, if air space isn’t non-permissive. In the future, F-35s will operate along with UCAVs, providing a man in the loop(seeing as how there’s likely to be a high degree of EW, and potential for delay time in the C2 of these UCAVs, due to the bandwidth requirements).

er, yeah, except that the power output will be extremely low, so, unless you’re trying to see a target a couple of hundred feet ahead of you, a single module won’t do much.

Every time you reduce the number of modules wroking together, you reduce the radar power in the same proportion (and thus, range, etc…)

But AESA radars are considerably more sensitive than other arrays, and thus more efficient. They don’t require as powerful signal for a given range.