How will harpy Get you past S-300 launchers guarded my TOrM-1?
S-300 missiles can range from 93 miles to 150 Nms depending on the variant.
At this point the heavy loaded griffin must drop its weapons load to maneuver.
Here is an important history lesson from the gulf war. This is why conventional aircraft are not in vogue.
The Package Q Airstrike was the largest air strike of the Gulf War,[4] and the largest strike of F-16s in military history. Many aircraft including the F-117 were used to attack targets in Baghdad, which was the most heavily defended area of Iraq. The same target was hit several times by F-117, and the last package consisted of 17 F-111F on the 19th day of the war.[5]
The main target of the strike was the Osirak Nuclear Reactor in Baghdad, along with many other military sites across the city. Two aircraft were shot down, with two pilots becoming POWs. The majority of the mission goals were met, with the reactor itself severely damaged and most of the secondary targets hit as well.[4]
The attack was the largest of the war and represented an attempt to strike Iraqi defenses a serious blow. The raid illustrated how a number of small incidents or stresses, none by themselves necessarily serious, could contribute to an unsatisfactory outcome,[4] which eventually convinced USAF commanders to call off further airstrikes against downtown Baghdad
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On the afternoon of 19 January, all the aircraft took off from Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. From there, they all met with tankers in Saudi Arabia, near the border of Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Link-up and refueling with the tankers ran into problems. There was bad weather along the tanker tracks, and the tankers approached the release point too early. Consequently, they throttled back to minimum speed, which in turn seriously affected the accompanying fighters. The F-16s were soon close to stalling out, and some had to light afterburners just to stay airborne; four fighters coming off the last tanker fell so far behind that their mission commander ordered them to return to base.
After the refueling, all the aircraft turned towards Baghdad, and headed out in force. They had to dodge AAA and SAMs sporadically along the trip, though as the package reached Baghdad airspace, it broke out into the open. Iraqi gunners greeted the Americans with a couple of high-altitude shots in the middle of several formations. Not surprisingly, there were difficulties in communicating among mission groups in the package; the mission commander of the flight attacking downtown Baghdad estimated that he received approximately 80 percent of the calls.
Adding to the disarray of the flak exploding below, the Iraqis threw 100-mm shells into the formations. From the moment the package approached Baghdad’s air defenses, the Weasels engaged enemy SAM sites. However, there was a problem with the Weasels allocated to the mission; either because of fuel, timing, or the decision of the package commander, not all made it to Baghdad; moreover, some Weasels did not fire all their HARMs, which suggests that they had to leave because of fuel problems.
Approaching their targets, the “downtown” aircraft (flying F-16s with newer model engines) passed F-16s on the way to, rolling in on, and leaving targets all in a hostile environment. On their way to downtown, the F-4 “Wild Weasels” left, being low on fuel. This left the F-16s and F-15Cs alone against the air defenses. As Maj. John Nichols rolled in to strike his target, the Iraqi Air Force Headquarters, he heard the Weasels call that they were leaving. Unfortunately, cloud cover obscured the target; Nichols rolled off to turn to an alternate target, an oil refinery which was under attack by a portion of his formation.
Up to this point, the Iraqis had fired most of their SAMs ballistically. Within a short time of the Weasel call that they were leaving, SAMs directly engaged Nichols’ flight. Many SAMs were now guided and most of his flight had to take evasive action, which included “last-ditch maneuvers” such as jettisoning fuel tanks and bombs. Approximately half of the flight struck the oil refinery; others were en route to alternate targets when SAMs engaged and forced them to jettison ordnance.[3]
SAMs hit one F-16 just as the last bombs were striking the oil refinery. As the flight egressed Baghdad, evading SAMs, another missile impacted near another F-16. Both aircraft were lost, but their pilots survived the war as POWs. One of the two lost aircraft managed to fly for 150 miles on the return route after taking a SA-3 missile just south of Baghdad, before the engine quit.[3] In all, the participants in the wild ride over the capital counted twenty SAMs in the air; one pilot dodged no fewer than six. Many of the F-16 aircraft sustained major or minor damage, but stayed airworthy.
These are the reasons for the commonality of airframe across nato. here we learned.
1. having dissimilar aircraft performing various mission brings another level of difficultly to a war plan.
2. Planes that hang heavy things from there wings and lack internal bays not only suffer from more than the initial weight and performance penalty.
An adversary only has to make the aircraft evasive maneuver to totally defeat the mission. when your getting shot at your going to dump fuel and weapons.
3. 5th generation airframes keep most of there flight envelope in stealth mode
4. Its better to be Not see and not tracked rather than waste gas turning all day.
Thank the gods that the LM rep´s are way above this (low) level of understanding because if the best that the chaps that suport Dave acquisition could came up is “Q Package”, the entire JSF program would have been terminated a decade ago!
Q Package was a badly planed and coordinated mission. Its entirely stupid to go after a bloody gigantic fixed target in the downtown enemy capital with MK82 dumb bombs, thats what Q Package tried to do. Q Package repeated the errors that the US Navy had done over Lebanon a decade before.
Interestingly enough the example that you use to suport your point of view (“You need to fly over the thing and put a bomb through it”) is the exact one (a big static target in a highly defended area) that today is considered a classic case for “CASOMING”.
The RAF learned that at its own expenses, their answer was not “we must get an all Stealth FJ TAC fleet”, it was (roughly counting) nine hundred Storm Shadows who have been doing an admirable job since they were acquired.
Bloody well, it would have been droping a dozen LFK Taurus five hundred km´s away from Bagdad.
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