ELPThis is a funny photo everytime I see it. They are display model weapon shapes like the plastic food in a Japanese restaurant. The walk around on real weapons is to give a quick once over of the weapon ( the munitions people on real weapons hook it up and know how ) and to press some body weight into it to make sure the thing is mounted on there. They do this fairly quick. I don’t know what this guy is doing unless it is a staged photo to make it look functional or just a bad time to snap the photo. Or the guy doesn’t have a crew chief to pull the flag for him. Or just feels like pulling it himself which I guess is OK. 😉
ELPYup, keep pushing the sore loser whining.
Maybe Rafale and Typhoon will have some real certified A2G weapons on the jets in time for the next deal. Although I wouldn’t hold my breath. Slow. Slow. Slow.
ELPThe Genie should be mentioned as the most amazing piece of junk of the time. Read one account from a Voodo pilot doing a twin firing of inert warhead Genies. First one went OK. Second one didn’t light and became a bomb. Not too good. Not too suprising as a lot of complex missile tech of the day while sound in theory, wasn’t very reliable.
ELPBoth the EF2000 community and the Rafale community are having a competition to see which can take longer to field a figther, with a complete suite of weapons ( not demo inert shapes flying on the jet ). Massive foot dragging.
Part of this competion will rest on A2G values of which there is still a long list of weapons to become certified with real weapons drops of live weps.
Go to one of the EF2000 sites and you get to see a press info on a race with a sports car:rolleyes: , scheduled droping of inert LGBs, and not much else.
Rafale isn’t doing much better.
F-15E has a full menu of A2G weapons, The customer can fly along in the jet with these weapons and drop them. Fly the super amazing F-15E combat crew simulator and see video and first hand results of real weapons drops.
Typhoon not showing up for this latest show was not a good move.
Rafale and Typhoon have no one to blame but themselves if they lose this deal. I would have thought they would have learned something from the Korea deal and have real A2G weapons certs complete and ready to go.
This deal is really annoying. Someone in both camps needs to kick some ass and develop a sense of urgency. I can’t see how running this process so damn slow “saves money”.
ELPOriginally posted by Phil Foster
…..new dual LGB/GPS versions (a sort of JDAM but cheaper) ALARM anti radiation missiles, CRV7 unguided rockets have also been mooted but I can’t confirm it and a plethora of free fall dumb bombs delivered ….]
A JDAM kit is about $18,000.
A Paveway II kit 5 years ago ( LGB only ) was about $19,000.
Haven’t seen anything that states that an Enhanced Paveway or Paveway IV is cheaper than a JDAM.
The sole reason for the UK going with Paveway IV was that JDAM ( which was considered ) would only fit Mk 80 series family of dumb iron which the UK doesn’t use.
Some? All? Paveway IV kits will be built? assembled? forget which, in the UK.
ELPFB-22 is a great idea but as mentioned already, there are over a dozen existing legacy and new programs already going and just not enough budget money to go around. These could be partially “paid for” in the long…long term by retiring F-15E units. It would still need a lot of extra funding from congress.
I would be for USAF having less total JSF airframes to help “pay for it”.
Trying to make the FB-22 fit in the plan could be good in the long run. In order to do it you would have to reorganize all the “shooter” airframes. Not too bad as we can do more with less airframes anyway. Have a lot less of everything. Example:
All F-16s go to the Guard,
Retire all F-15s
Have:
F22, 3 Wings
FB22 ( take over F-15E job ) 3 Wings
4 JSF wings
2 Jump JSF Wings
2 A-10 Wings and / or “blended wing” Active/Reserve/Guard
Less B-1s but all upgraded to “Block F” and able to carry SDB, etc 2 Wings
2 B-52 Wings
1 B-2 Wing
Bring in X-45 UCAV for 2 Wings.
Sounds drastic accelerating retirement of the lower hour F-15Es but the support and infastructure to run just one of those F-15E wings is plowed back into the above FB-22 program.
Makes for a nice parlor game anyway.
We’ll see.
ELPJust imagine how an EF would crush an SH.
ELPBiffbutkus was an ex B-52H ECM maintainer. Very sharp on a lot of basic avionics tech and part of the old crew here. Had the ability to explain a lot of avionics tech and post some stuff that made good sense.
Haven’t seen him lately but he was maintaining airline flight sims like the Bombardier CRJ series jets for a company in Cincinatti.
ELPArthur can sing the Russian National Anthem or the Polish one with equal zeal… depending on what is required for the situation. 😀
ELPI guess it wasn’t one of their better airframes or they didn’t have time to bury it in the sand. 😮 Or they didn’t get the memo to bury it.
ELPNo. I think it does a pretty good job and is pretty good tech. The people that are managing it and running it are fools.
ELPDud? Heck no. It shoots down lots of stuff very well. Just not always what you need shot down…..:rolleyes:
ELPToo funny Steve. OK I’ll bite. I don’t have my FMS Money Laundering Guide in front of me so I will have to ad lib. Almost got teary eyed reading that article. 😮
Those conclusions are indeed fantastic, with a little bit of stress on the root word. 😉 .
It isn’t so much we need Israel’s business on buys when you figure out how some of those deals are done with 2 or 3 different colors of U.S. money ( some of that being bounce back FMS aid money ) ( example GD now Lockheed ) who needs to make a profit when you have extra funding ( padding ) from other U.S. government contracts to make up the difference? All you are trying to do as Boeing and LM is raise stockholder value and keep a steady flow of government money coming in. Usually you would use the Polish F-16 deal as a common playbook on how this game works ( clever tricks like 0 interest loans with the first payment not done for years, and massive “offsets” into the local country paid for by you guessed it. the U.S. taxpayer and little or no visable profit margin from the company), but Israel has other special rules. You have so much shared tech going back and forth between the U.S. and Israel it is amazing. We use a U.S. comany like Boeing or LM to form partnerships with Israeli industry so projects like Popeye ( Havenap ) can be attached to a B-52 (that was one of the early ones) then things like TILIADS spoofing defensive drone dropped off things like F-18s came along, Hunter UAV for the U.S. Army etc. These are just a few of the products out there. These kind of deals are really fun because the U.S. taxpayer shells out R&D funds to a U.S. company so it can in turn partner up with a foreign country so over time it builds up companies that sell products to other countries as an off shoot of that… pretty amusing. Then that foreign company ends up competing against a U.S. one for deals or worse yet leaks the technology out to places like China ( Patriot being a great example ). The U.S. taxpayer is so generous.
The most accurate statement in that article was
The relationship between the United States and Israel is so complicated that it is impossible to resolve the aid issue in a single article.
Now where do I start with the following? 😀
The American aid to Israel does not cost the American taxpayer a single cent. Israel’s decisions to purchase the Hawkeye or the F-16 were worth large sums of money. Today, we call it “sophisticated marketing”. These are only two small examples from a myriad purchasing agreements that create thousands of jobs in the US.
The “marketing” sure the hell is “sophisticated”. So much so that GAO or anyone else can’t follow it. Yes jobs are created by the deal. But at what cost? Should we not let the federal government prop up other corporations like they do LM and Boeing and N.G. ? Lets just prop up every single industry we have in the states then no one will do anything except listen to the large sucking sound of tax dollars burn up at even a higher rate than they are now.
Yeah those deals are in fact “worth large sums of money”. Large amounts of money goes to for example LM from FMS sales fund sites, both from separate contracts from the government and bounce back from FMA funds. Go to school and learn accounting… be the best you can be… so you can write up sweet FMS deals that are so clever they even look legit. Pretty amazing. Certainly has that writer fooled.
I Like the “FMF Waived” metric in this chart. ( green chart half way down page )
http://www.sunship.com/mideast/info/military.html
Well now we need some parity don’t we? Better start writing up FMS deals so Egypt can get rid of those nasty “old” upgraded Block 40 jets and certainly get rid of the older ones before that. Also get rid of those crummy LANTIRNS they have. Get them Block 60 jets, AMRAAM, SNIPER – XR, JDAM for sure. Harpoon, SLAM-ER. ( we already bought them a nice F-16 mini-PDM facility.) Etc etc etc. I don’t mind, I’m the U.S. taxpayer. I am confident the military industrial complex will make a profit free and clear and it won’t cost anything. :rolleyes:
The last one is really funny.
Does the improved range of the F-16I provide a response to the simple fact that the immediate, strategic threat to the State of Israel, is just over the superfluous counter-terrorism barrier?
IDF has enough strike power and huge force mulipliers like tankers, JDAM, Popeye, SPICE etc….
BTW. Wonder what I would find if I was able to make a paper trail between the IR digital target recognition head hardware/software tech that is on…
*the latest USN only JDAM strap on order,
*SLAM-ER
*JASSM
*JSOW-C
*French AASM
*Israeli SPICE.
The point being is it would be interesting to see where the original funding for that tech came from. Most likely the U.S. taxpayer – DARPA all weather PGM initiative from the mid 90’s.
Here is a fun trip down memory lane…
-Retired Israeli General Investigated for Embezzling $10 Million in U.S. Aid Funds-
Read the whole article…
ELPYeah Arthur, Saw that article already and found it wanting on some matters. There are alot of things happening now.
All of the following things meet at one point and cause turmoil:
-High ops tempo and reorg of AF wings in the early 90’s. And ops tempo has been going on for some time.
-911 air defense, OEF, OIF.
-PGMs are making aircraft more efficient killers. You don’t need as many airframes anymore.
-E8 JSTARS as a blended wing ( half guard / half active ) is working pretty well. We will see more of this.
O.T. you have the Reserve Associate wings. BTW the article at the top applies more to Guard than it does Reserves.
Air Guard units change over jets a lot over the years. Today’s F-16 unit could be tomorrows tanker or C-130 unit. ( or Todays E-8 unit was yesterdays B-1 unit which not long before that was an F-15 unit. ) You’ll take it and like it.
While for Guard units you have duties that are specifically that of the host state, the federal taskings determine what airframe you get.
Changes have to be made. You can’t let things go on and on as they are now where you have Guard personal deployed for long periods of time. The force structure has to be dramatically reorganized. That means more real world taskings should be active duty personnel. Guard people can’t, on one hand complain that they are being over tasked, which they are ( and it has been a serious problem for years ) then complain when the force structure is being reorganized to help fix this.
ELPOriginally posted by Mark2
wrt the ordnance possibly used….even a 2000lb weapon makes just a very small depression in DIRT (max of a foot or two) much less when used on concrete (as in this example)
The calling card of the 2000lb JDAM is usually a large crater. Unless, for example, a clever B-1 offensive systems operator decides to airburst it ( if he has enough 3D GPS info ) ( like laying a few down a trench line ( used in OEF ).
The BLU109 body the “pointy tip” 2000lb JDAM leaves very large craters. In cement like above it would go down about 6 feet before going off. A preferred weapon these days to disable runways. ( Example OEF )
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