MixelplicThe Laser is dead because it’s best use is in killing airframes and satellites.
Lasers and the USAF are thus at cross purposes and until broken apart under separate program control the former will do anything they can to monkey up the works on the latter. Just like they did with Nautilus/MTHEL. Just like they did J-UCAS.
‘Cheap F-35s’ (115 million each, 370 billion over all) will then be set against DF-21 or later threats off a Formosa Strait environment and we will see whose vision of national defense is most capable.
An SM-3 equipped shooter off the coast of Israel is for Israel, not Europe. The cross track intercept variables on even a 4.5kms Shahab V are just ridiculous for assuming there will be anything like a rise intercept.
The Laser is quite capable of attacking falling RV, you just need to induce turbulence as shock perturbation of the hypersonic flow that alters the half angle shape high enough to get the weapon to tumble in exo transition and it will blow itself apart under building dynamic load. Whether you want to wait that long is of course another matter.
Coatings and other crap is also ridiculous and will or would be proven so if they ever get their full power kill capabilities demo.
Remember, before they hushed it all up, AvLeak was ‘casually mentioning’ that targets /behind/ the fast rise plume had to be clean-sky checked. That’s not a 250km weapon, that’s not a 400km weapon. That’s a 1,000km weapon and more. The ABL is a monster and with diode pumping and the proper (Cobra/AOA) optics package would become even more so, well able to act as a four engine, million pound, air dominance fighter against any threat that could possibly rise up to high-fast on our stealth forces.
Of course, ten years later, other nations would follow but that’s a pretty much a fixed timescale certainty now anyway as we are being out-graduated as much as anything and everyone knows that effective DEWS technology is the event horizon point beyond projective wars become endurant ones.
The entire ‘architecture semantics’ rigamarole sounds like another exercise in hollow system design for it’s own sake. Theater Wide/Upper Tier/NCW, all the same paper chase.
It’s also ridiculous to look at the defensive game and not contemplate the offensive one which in this case means aeroballistic cruise and other fast response optioned smack down of the TELs where they live. Again, the ‘failure to mention this’ amounts to Airpower Uber Alles and a head-vacant idea that smart weapons mean much if you cannot sustain presence overhead long enough, deep enough, to kill the launcher when the launcher itself is hostaging your basing mode, land or sea.
In this, the real cost of evading high capability defensive answers to ballistics threats is one of escalation anyway. Most of these fools are using technology baselines that go back to Thor if not the V-2 but you start showing them 800nm in 10 minutes in a package the size of a Tomahawk and suddenly I guarantee you that we WILL be thinking about the freighter with covered crate deck cargo off our shores.
It will also put paid to any kind of conventional mechanical (and particularly airborne) CMD intercept defense as saturation will rule the day and threats will come too fast to be taken out VSHORADS or THAAD type weapons.
MPlic.
MixelplicHere are some cool pictures of the latest JASDF F-15`s weapons to face the regional threats
Is it still enough?
Not by half a pole.
Rocket propulsion in a 400lb class weapon is as dated as it is in a 250 class weapon which is why the French are doing all they can to buy into Meteor rather than simply stick their MICA GCS atop a streamlined S530D chassis.
The APG-63V(1) is another sign of how far behind the times the JASDF are, given it is nothing more than a DMS solution to keeping a planar array competitive in a world of fast AESA. It isn’t an AWG either (roughly half the ERPs) in terms of peak TWT loads so that you cannot truly take advantage of longrange STT terminal options with a silent midcourse weapon.
Most importantly, the signature of the F-15 doesn’t support the kinds of silent shooter : standoff illuminator options that a similar capability with even (say) F-14 and F-5E would. If you’re out there, they will see you, even against the clutter, with simple upgrades like the Scipio or El-2030 series as bought or stolen.
The unfortunate part is that the F-15 is no F-4. It doesn’t have the internal gas to get by with a single centerline and the CFTs turn it into whale on roller blades. Which effectively means the need for gas and that fixed conical camber wing deny you the option of wing pylons by virtue of a very aggressive aero-acoustics environment.
Hence the aircraft cannot gracefully be reroled into A2G like the F-4EJs were.
If the JASDF want to go somewhere, they need to design a missileer platform with a sub-1m crosssection able to carry a minimum 4-6, 600lb class, Ram-AAM weapons* with a functional (secure, discrete) datalink.
They then need to back this cheap and simple, _endurant_, spear carrier with a high rez AESA capability (Wedgetail as much as 767 AWACS) to scan wide volumes and provide weapons grade tracking for home defense. If they want to take that out into the maritime power projection role to support their F-2s they need to put that radar (and 4 X400lb AAM or 2+2 400/600lb AAM) into a jet like the Shin Shin.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g94C5CNIPOQ
So that what the U.S. plays at with MFFC and useless platforms like the F/A-18E/F and F-15/16C in rigged Alaskan exercises designed to make the F-22 look good can be realistically achieved at minimal exposure to a realistic (small) strike force using much more advantageously positioned support enablers.
The key is to understand that length may mean more than weight and a bombbay like the YF-23 may be more useful to the Japanese overall security mission against North Korea and China both.
Either way, it’s better to send the bullet before the pilot and the F-15 which has the ability to loft 2,500lbs of AIM-7 based hardware, no problem, now carries 1,600lbs for no other reason than that GD in the early 80s demanded that our followon MRM be compatible with the F-16 outboard and tiprails so that they could make an even bigger profit.
The result is an NEZ on the order of 8-10nm for AIM-120C and 6-10nm for the AIM-120B and an outer pole in the 15-17nm category which means if the weapon misses, you have one more chance before you eat the merge.
Of course, looked at from this standpoint of wanting to kill threats in the 40-60nm range category (without SSC), the utility of the 7-10nm SRM becomes even more questionable. The shear duration of nose-on foolish closure commitment as you descend not-gracefully from a 4 100km to 2 40km to 2 20km weapons envelope as gaps of mistaken commitment renders the aircraft -useless- as much as dangerous with offboard datalink to hand the missiles outside of a sideband tether.
Now consider what happens is if a threat refuses to commit but simply chucks LACMs or aeroballistics, making at an arrow-not-archer redoubled threat at over 60 or even 100nm standoffs and suddenly the MRM/SRM pairing is just ridiculous. It -pays- the enemy to invest in force multiplier cruise weapons because not only do they conserve their own platforms but they force the shot trade to happen between AAM/CM at an exchange value of 25-50 million yen per shot vs. roughly 10.2 million CMY per cruise.
IMO, DPRK and ROC are stalking horses designed to bleed U.S. money into an imperial/colonial support system that gives away technology and does little else. When China inevitably asserts herself (via currency value normalization) as the U.S. gets weaker and weaker becoming a socialist welfare state, Japan will be the only free nation left facing what amounts to an Asian Monroe Doctrine. We will slink backwards across the pacific. China will develop retargetable ballistic technologies and ROTHR like systems to keep the USN and her Carriers well away and the only way to win will be cheaply with maximum standoff and prepositional uncertainty to keep the enemy on their toes. That doesn’t happen with AAM-3/4/5 which are little more than a 2000s reenvisionment of the same solutions looking for an answer that was 1976 AIMVAL.
MPlic
*As the potential booster baseline for a followon Raptor-Talon = HARM/ASAS cheap and dirty MRBM killer.
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