LMFS: the thing is, anti-stealth radar tends to be L-band or lower; the E-2D is an UHF-band system. Fighter radars and missiles tend to be in the X-band and up, where stealth coatings and shapings are highly effective.

This is why I’m suggesting that in a stealth-vs-stealth engagement, what’s going to happen is that AEW&C / ground counter-stealth is going to pick up the stealth fighter, then allied fighters will track the stealth fighter on IRST / EODAS and either data-link a radar-guided missile in, or fire IR missiles WVR. But the radar-guided missiles can’t track on their own vs stealth fighters except at extremely close ranges.

moon_light, is it impossible? If we assume the J-20 is capable of Mach 3 speeds or even prefers high Mach 2 speeds, we should also assume that it prefers a higher altitude than contemporary fighters. One big lacunae in estimations are projections is the J-20’s climb speed. If it has an excellent climb speed, it’s probable that the J-20 wants 70-80k ft combat for the kinematic advantage.

Also, I think latenlazy mistakenly translated a pilot report about the J-20. Supposedly, it’s capable of reaching the speed of sound on supercruise (i.e, mach 1.4 supercruise due to the drag drop after the sound barrier is breached), has supersonic maneuverability beyond anything in the Chinese arsenal, presumably including the Su-35S, and the sustained turn rate matches the F-16. This goes back to what I’m saying.

Put this another way; the Chinese have bad engines, and are relatively behind on the stealth game. If they produce the J-20 as simply a knock-off, they end up with a craft that is uniformly inferior to American fighters, including the F-35. On the other hand, if they choose a different paradigm (high altitude high speed) and sacrifice some stealth for that, they have a potential advantage over the F-22 and F-35, less so in the former case, and one that they can attempt to exploit.

It also ties into why the J-20 has such shoddy IR stealth. You can assume the Chinese don’t know what they’re doing, or are severely handicapped by their bad engines, or you can assume that the Chinese are planning to fly Mach 2 or higher at high altitudes, meaning that they’re not going to achieve IR stealth anyways due to higher contrast (hot object against the cold sky), so why botheR?

This seems to accord with my expectations: the J-20 is capable of operating in stealth listening mode (i.e, radars off, EODAS cued by AEW&C drones), but its preferred combat environment is in a high-speed swoop and turn. The probable employment is going to be with J-20s in the front, flying silent, and J-20s in the back at high altitude, preparing to supercruise for swooping strikes.

@LMFS: DIRCCM. Or multi-seeker type tracking. At the shortest ranges, radar is just as good as IR.

The other issue with seeker radar is that some of them are X-band, like fighter radars, but others are Ku-band and higher. Against stealth shaping, radars get worse the higher band you go up, so while a F-22 might be -40 dBsm to X-band, it could easily hit -70 dBsm to Ka band.

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I am also aware of the problem with the dash target; MICA, for instance, is a medium-ranged air-to-air missile with EO seeker, up to about 100 km. On approach at high Mach, you’re going to be detected at very long ranges, and you can be targeted beforehand even if the missile can’t acquire a lock and needs data-linking.

Radar stealth does two things, first, it screws with missiles, preventing them from having a self-guided lock, and second, it screws with aircraft radar, stopping them from detecting non-emitting fighters at distance. But radar stealth doesn’t mean much when it comes to IR. True, the F-22 and F-35 have effective IR coatings, but their effectiveness, as show in pictures, is not comparable to radar stealth. So you’re still hittable by IR missiles, unless the laser dazzler scheduled for the F-35 does its work.

As to the F-15 limit at Mach 2.5, note that the manual for the F-15C states that the aircraft is operationally limited to Mach 2.5. The implied maximum aerodynamic speed is Mach 2.6. And it’s with the older PW F100-220 engines. The latest 229s have about a 22% thrust increase, suggesting a 10% further increase in speed, so you can hit Mach 2.75.

Agility matters a lot less when everyone has HOBS. The PL-10 purportedly can hit 180 degrees off bore-sight; i.e, if you’re on a Flanker’s six, they’ll just lob PL-10 and you’re done. Likewise, as I’ve explained to FBW, you only need enough LO to stop the enemy from hitting you with AIM-120s at range. And once again, Boeing claims that the F-15 can hit 3000 km/h.

https://www.boeing.com/defense/f-15-eagle/

Well the J-16 isn’t the best Flanker. It’s better than the Su-35S by virtue of its AESA, but the Su-35S is better by virtue of its better maneuverability, range, engines, and fuel capacity. Like I keep on saying, the Chinese go in one direction, the Russians in another; the Russians love WVR, the Chinese seem to love BVR.

First, a small correction. The J-20 does not have a one-piece canopy, the prototypes featured such a canopy, but the production version has a two-piece canopy.

Second, I think we have a huge misunderstanding here. Your point is that stealth coatings can’t survive past Mach 2. I absolutely agree on that.

But my point is that I think the Chinese or Russians DON’T CARE if their stealth coatings survive. The J-20 and Su-57 aren’t pure stealth aircraft; you’ve seen all the videos of people complaining about poor edge alignment on the Su-57, or the canards on the J-20. They’re all stealth-compromised.

What I’m suggesting is that while US stealth fighters may be operationally limited to 2.05 Mach or 2.1 Mach, Chinese and Russian stealth fighters will not have the same operational limits because stealth is less important to them. At the discretion of the wing commander, they will employ tactics that will burn off the stealth coating on their aircraft and ruin their stealth properties. If the aircraft gets back home to base in repairable status, it will need a substantial rehaul to reapply the stealth coating. But the Chinese and Russians don’t care.

Let me put up an analogous example.

The Dutch and Chinese pirates under Koxinga were fighting over Taiwan. Koxinga managed to capture a Dutch man-o-war, a ship superior to any Chinese ship under his command. The Dutch vessels in the area made an attempt to recapture it, only to discover that Koxinga had repurposed it as a fire ship, and used it to destroy the other major Dutch warship in the area, leaving Koxinga with naval superiority.

The Dutch were utterly flabbergasted at Koxinga’s decision. The man-o-war was expensive, powerful, and thus valuable. Koxinga sacrificing it was unthinkable. But think about it from Koxinga’s point of view. He just captured a ship that was light-years ahead of his military capabilities. He didn’t have the trained technicians needed to run the ship, or to maintain the cannons, and so on. In his hands, it was less valuable than it was in Dutch hands, and using it as a fire ship was the best move.

The Dutch really did not expect Koxinga to wreck his man-o-war like that, and that was the only way the fire ship managed to destroy its target. The Dutch expected Koxinga to think the same way they did, to employ the same operational doctrines they did, and so they did not expect the fire ship tactic and lost their Taiwan fleet.

So that’s what I mean by Mach 2.8 J-20s and Su-57s. The Chinese and Russians don’t emphasize stealth as greatly as the United States and its allies do. For them, if the stealth is enough to ruin an AIM-120 lock at range, it’s good enough for them. If it allows them to get the aircraft back to base in one piece, or to launch a hit-and-run attack on slower F-35s with kinematically-advantaged WVR missiles, it’s good enough for them. Remember, the Russians traditionally viewed their airpower as a neutralizing factor to disrupt enemy air superiority; they’re not a great air power. The Chinese tend to fight wars of deterrence or wars of attrition, and having their force come back in one piece is less important than achieving the desired political or strategic effects.