I believe it was 2005 air force almanac (could be something else but i am confident it was USAF publication) where it was stated that out of 183 raptors, some 122 would be available for action on a regular basis. In addition to testing and training, there’s also maintenance.

That is not to say that more, perhaps mention 160 figure, can’t be achieved with planning the attack and logistics situation. While it may not mean all the raptors available asap, more than 122 would probably be available at some later date from the moment that need for intervention breaks out. If you assume not all of maybe just half would be sent to a theatre of war, that may or may not be overwhelming number.

And that seems to be the point of US strategy. To always, at any cost, they have overwhelming force. In technological terms but also in quantity. Just look at overwhelming numbers in both iraqi wars, serbia, etc. It doesn’t matter that russians or chinese don’t have a 5th gen plane flying. If lets say they did have 100 of those each, then USAF wouldn’t call for 380 raptors but would demand like 1000. Just to be on the safe side and keep the edge. Other countries would certainly like to be in the position us is today, but right now they’re not. And us certainly will try to do all it can to maintain its position of sole superpower, in military terms as well. It is not about military. Militarily, today they may not need any raptors. Its about politics and not letting anyone mess with the balance of power for any forseeable future.

So do we know some figures on production rates of jsf? I’ve seen varios articles, some even coming from good sources, but no one really can agree on max production. Lowest figure ive seen is 108 a year, which seems too little, highest i’ve read is 198, which seems ok… I’ve also seen 122 a year for just the f-35A version, which also seems doable. No i dont have links other than google, thats how i found those figures. So they plan to produce some 400 odd planes before finally ramping up to full production, around 204-2015 or so, was it? So by some 2025 all of currently needed JSFs for US could be delivered. Not a moment too soon, as average life of today’s f16 in usaf is nearing 20 years. So last airframes might be pushing 40 by the time they’re retired.

Is there any fighter radar which does not operate in X-band?

Not to my knowledge. Longer wavelength bands also require larger radars. Sort of hard to pull off on a small aircraft.

While technically possible to place array bits all over the aircraft, that would just add problems for the uav constructors. It’d take significantly more space and weight per T/R module than if all the modules were bunched up close where they could share the supporting hardware. Cost, too, would be astronomical, and much bigger than simply designing the uavs to hold some shorter range missiles themselves. Power consumption issue still not addressed.

When i mentioned possibly compromised datalinks i was refering to the control role of the proposed uavs. You’ve said they would not have any crew but would send the radar data to some other station where it’d be interpreted properly and commands would be issued based on it. But i guess we can assume that AI tech is gonna be good enough to have unmanned awacs planes, since we’re assuming so much anyway.

As for evading missiles, that’s not gonna be so simple either. Older sidewinders didn’t do 50 Gs yet they performed well against 7-9 G manouvering fighters, with biggest cause of misses through the decades being guidance, not flight performance. Today’s defenses against manouvering missiles (also unmanned, capable of violent and quick manouvers) are – missiles. ESSM, RAM, pac-3, etc. In the end, a smaller missile will ALWAYS have the flight perfomance edge over a larger aircraft, given the same tech.

Just because some of today’s missiles can do 40 G it doesnt mean they need to sustain that much to catch a 10 G manouvering plane. It’s merely a further edge over the target, something that’s achievable with today’s tech so why not use it?

Not to mention that in order to maximize its chances of manouvering its way out of incoming aam, the uav must know its position and move in according directions. Which also puts it in danger if more aams are coming after it at the same time, from different directions. There is no such thing as an universal manouver to escape from all at the same time.

To achieve just some of mentioned goals, one needs tech that is not yet available. When it gets available, air war doctrine may already be different. Ratio of new uavs/ucavs versus ‘old manned planes’ will already be much different.

I do believe uavs will be used in awacs roles too, when the time comes, but not in the manner you sugguested here. I believe it will be much simpler and less costly to use them in a way that they’re used now – Keep them relatively safe, in the background, while having fighter cover in front of them. That fighter cover too may be unmanned, depending on the progress of AI.

Even IF the uavs you speak of could be manoverable/agile enough to give a really hard time to fired AAMs – which in itself is something that seems out of reach of today’s tech for any air force; Even if you have enough money to build and operate such swarm of high tech, superpriced (they’d have to expensive, cutting edge always is) uavs; Even if you pull off all that (and thus sort of stomp the older fighters concept into the ground since you’ve already so advanced that you can afford to use uavs in such autonomous missions) there’s still the matter of radar. AESA, in itself, is no magic bullet against radar stealth. Far from it. While it is said that it does have greater resolution/tracking range than regular radar arrays of same power, that range improvement is far from enough to be useful against raptors and such. You’d still be in amraam’s NZE before you can detect them. To have a real change against stealthy planes, those uavs would have to sport much larger, much more powerful radars, operating in various wavelengths. When you have a hercules sized uav, i’d guess the maneouvrability would suffer…

Higher number doesn’t mean its better of course but if you were referring to my choice of apg81 (i mistyped apg80 before) as standard, i did that because i thought thats the apex of aesa tech right now. Sure, its less powerful than apg77 but all the future US AESAs will be based on apg81 tech, until next generation arrives. No?

So strike eagles will get easa? that makes sense… but then, in some ten years time, there might be quite a capability gap between first tier air superiority fighter – the f22 and second tier f15c. Unless they will regularly use strike eagles for that too. Unless procurement numbers of raptors increase significantly, usaf said that it plans to keep a few hundred f15c models. I would imagine those too would get aesa by that timeframe. I guess price of modernization would be main concern…

Anyway, i don’t believe raptors will indeed stop at 183, with all the administration changes by 2012, with dropping production costs and accentuation of the china threat, i would imagine hundred more might be built. Though the 381 figure usaf keeps repeating as minimal number they wish is…well, still just wishful thinking.

So does that mean that those AESA Eagles have some half baked radar? What’s the point in putting state of the art bits if some parts of the system, like the computer computing and interpreting data won’t be up to the task of fully using what the new array offers? Developing software and making that array is most expensive bit of the whole deal anyway, pure cpu power should be peanuts compared to that. I’m just guessing here but i would assume all those AESA radars are not much behind raptors’, if at all. Given the same size and output power, of course. Smaller, weaker AESAs will always be somewhat inferior.

On a side note, what’s with all the LPI being revolutionary talk? LPI is just a term signifying modes of operation for a radar that were, at a certain periof in time, harder to detect. I’ve seen the term LPI used with radars decades old. They were LPI then, they’re not LPI anymore. Just like today’s raptor’s radars won’t have the same LPI in 10 years time as they do today. Tech always advances.