Now that the F-22 has done it, I’m waiting breath for the Rafale and Typhoon to do a supercobra. 😀

I think it is 4 a peice for the F-35 internally as of now !!

I wasn’t aware of this capability.. is this confirmed?

I’m not really big on putting more A2A internals on JSF. JSF on the offense will fight with a large advantage in that you have to find the thing with legacy systems and keep it from doing a Rodney King style beatdown of your airfields and AD assets. That includes the AESA on it doing any number of dirty deeds on the ingress.
In a by-directional conflict where it is set up for air defense, and doesn’t initiate the first punch, there is opportunity for a second set ….small number of JSF setup for A2G, on alert and immediately sent out on a counter air strike against the opposing legacy tech airfield(s) AD of the aggressor. Here the legacy aggressor has to strike during the day in good visability. Otherwise they are going to get overwhelmed with a lack of situational awarness and even then a good day might not help a legacy aggressor. The JSF force will most likely be controlling the tempo of the air war early on and sustaining it. If the passive JSF defender isn’t wiped out on the first day by some adverse pearl harbor scenario, then the following night will be it’s to own and deal out a severe beating. The legacys that survive the initial encounter with JSF will be demoralized and know that their chance of making it through a second mission if they even get off the ground, will be slim. While there may be losses, most likely the percentage of Buick-of-Stealths lost will be far less than the legacy agressor. Given that both sides SAM belts are at least equal, the legacy team will suffer a lot more.

The scenario would be different in the case of a smaller airforce (ie. not USAF) w/c will only have a limited number of F-35s doing double-duty. I wouldn’t feel too comfortable being a F-35 pilot on BARCAP facing a squadron of approaching bandits with only a handful of AMRAAMs between me and my wingman. I’d waste no time calling for help but will my buddies arrive in time? maybe, maybe not.. sure would be nice to have more AMRAAMS in that situation.

That seems to cheap compared to the 258 million per plane that waas being touted around. But honestly I doubt it would be as low as 120 million.

Flyaway costs were being quoted at around $130 million recently so maybe they achieved some cost reductions in the manufacturing process as they learn tobuild smarter.. definitely doesn’t include R&D and cost of setting up the production line.. I’m sure the USAF accountants would know where these wound up.

We may yet see an AMRAAM with TVC and with the fins removed…simplify cramming more of them into the F-35
…………………………………………………
Amraam C7, D Delayed 15 Months
Aviation Week & Space Technology
09/25/2006, page 49

Amy Butler
Eglin AFB, Fla.

Fielding of the AIM-120 C7 and D slips, but developers expect increased performance

Printed headline: New Amraams

Officials claim that the new AIM-120 variants, once fielded, will provide significant improvement over current versions. But development of the Pentagon’s new advanced air-to-air missile has slipped 15 months.

Raytheon’s Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile (Amraam)–the AIM-120–has been the preeminent missile in its class and a cash cow for the company, with sales to at least 32 countries. It was introduced into the field more than a decade ago. Amraam is a beyond-visual-range weapon. Initial and mid-course guidance is provided by the launch aircraft, while Amraam’s radar provides target acquisition and terminal guidance. Because airborne threats–aircraft and cruise missiles–continue to become more sophisticated and employ increasingly complicated countermeasures, the U.S. and its allies find themselves playing catch-up in a technological game of cat and mouse. Airborne targets also continue to have smaller radar cross sections.

Using round electronics cards, engineers opened up space on the Amraam C7 missile. That hole will be filled with a GPS/IMU unit in the D version, currently being developed.

In the meantime, China is developing the PL-12 active medium-range air-to-air missile. And Russia is working on technology for its R-77 (AA-12 Adder).

The Pentagon is continuing early production of the AIM-120C7 after some recent snags in operational testing. Forging ahead, the Air Force has already started to fund its follow-up, the AIM-120D. Officials here were limited in what they were willing to discuss about Amraam’s ongoing development efforts.

The AIM-120C7 is estimated to cost about $700,000 per missile. It will use modern electronics on round–not longitudinal–cards in a hockey puck configuration, opening up space on the missile for upgrades to be added to the D-variant. The C7 also has a new, more robust and maintainable radar seeker, according to Lt. Col. Michael Schmidt, Amraam program manager here.

Schmidt says the Air Force “underestimated” the amount of time needed by Raytheon to build the first C7s. Operational testing was to be complete by March 2006, but additional time was needed to test software fixes for the missile. “We’ve encountered some things we didn’t expect in operational testing, and we had to reshoot the missile,” Schmidt says.

Baseline operational testing continues in parallel, but a fielding decision is not expected until the C7’s Software Upgrade Program is fully tested.

Operational testing should wrap up next spring, with a fielding decision likely in June 2007. Already, more than 250 of the weapons have been produced and are in storage. The Air Force and Navy C7 buy was to be 900, but that number is going up–including 70 additional C7s this year–to compensate for the delay in the D’s availability. None of the required fixes for the C7 have prompted officials to rescope work for the D variant.

Compared to the more substantial changes in the AIM-120D, the C7 is an incremental improvement. The 15-month delay in the C7 has spilled into the D developmental timeline. This summer, the Air Force added $25 million to Raytheon’s AIM-120D contract to extend development to June 2008, while officials continue operational testing of some technical fixes to the C7.

The space opened up on the C7 by installing round electronic cards enables developers to install a GPS receiver on the D missile. By using GPS, the missile is directed more accurately toward its target from the moment its motor ignites. The constantly moving target–an aircraft or cruise missile–forces the missile to receive continual course corrections from the launch aircraft, or to self correct, and the GPS guidance unit allows more efficient use of the missile’s propulsion.

“Because of the additional computing power and the GPS, we are better at putting the missile on the correct track from the beginning, which saves a lot of energy–it is efficiency,” Schmidt says. “The increased battery life allows us to use the guidance section longer and take advantage of the missile’s energy longer.”

The D will be the first Amraam to have a conformal, one-way antenna on the missile’s nose as well as an enhanced, two-way datalink at the back end. The improved communications capability, dubbed the “Enhanced Datalink,” is designed to increase the probability of a kill, especially against advanced targets, by extending communications between the missile and launch aircraft longer than possible as compared to earlier models.

The array is wrapped around the missile, giving it a wider field of view to receive targeting updates from more angles in flight. It also eliminates the need for a launch aircraft to have a direct line of sight to the back end of the missile.

“You are kind of guessing what the missile is doing in the current environment,” says Schmidt.

In other words, pilots are left to guess when they can break communications with a missile and possibly retreat to a safer position during an engagement.

“Depending on what the aircraft is doing and what the missile is doing, you get a lot better opportunity to stay in communication with the missile,” Schmidt explains. Ball Aerospace is developing the conformal array.

Initial operational capability for the D is slated for the fall of 2009, and the F/A-18C/D will follow about six months later. The Air Force expects to declare operational capability for the D on the F-22 in 2013.

Meanwhile, officials at the Air Force Research Laboratory are also looking ahead to other Amraam improvements that may be ready in the near future, possibly as soon as the next decade. Among them are reaction jets, which could be used to direct the missile at extreme angles during flight, similar to thrust vectoring in a jet. Small exhaust nozzles ring the back of the missile around the main exhaust, and depending on the vector needed, these nozzles could take over, directing the missile with the heat-plume thrust. The typical Amraam fins would also be removed. Reaction jets would be useful in high-off-boresight engagements.

In other avenues, officials at Air Combat Command are now examining the potential utility of a Joint Dual Role Air Dominance Missile (JDRADM), which would be useful against short- to medium-range aerial targets as well as small ground targets. The missile, if developed, could be optimized to suppress enemy air defenses, or it could be used to work against cruise missiles. It is possible that JDRADM could assume some of the roles of the High-Speed Anti-Radiation Missile.

Eglin is finalizing negotiations for study work with three contractors, and a downselect is expected in about one year.

This may help provide some perspective…

Surviving a Revolution in Military Affairs

By Max Boot
Special to washingtonpost.com’s Think Tank Town
Thursday, October 19, 2006; 12:00 AM

The conventional assumption is that the future of American power lies in our economic strength. There is a great deal of truth in this, but it is not the whole truth. If you look at the history of the past 500 years, a prime determinant of which nations rise and fall has been their success in taking advantage of revolutions in military affairs. There have been four such major shifts in military tactics and technology since 1500: the Gunpowder Revolution (1500-1700), the First Industrial Revolution (1850-1914), the Second Industrial Revolution (1917-1945) and the ongoing Information Revolution (1970 to the present).

Of course a country’s success, or lack thereof, in harnessing change cannot be divorced from such underlying factors as its economic health, scientific sophistication, educational system, political stability, and so forth. But even big and wealthy countries often lose wars and head into longterm decline through a lack of military skill. There are many examples of the poorer side emerging victorious — Britain beat the Spanish Armada (1588), Prussia beat the Habsburg Empire at Königgrätz (1866), Japan beat the Russian Empire (1904-1905). More recent instances might be cited, such as North Vietnam’s defeat of the United States or the Afghans’ defeat of the Soviet Union.

About Think Tank Town
Washingtonpost.com edits and publishes columns submitted by 10 prominent think tanks on a rotating basis every other weekday. Each think tank is free to choose its authors and the topics it believes are most important and timely. Here are the participating organizations:

American Enterprise Institute
Brookings Institution
Cato Institute
Center for American Progress
Center for Strategic and International Studies
Council on Foreign Relations
Heritage Foundation
New America Foundation
RAND Corporation
Manhattan Institute
Hudson Institute

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The ongoing proliferation of destructive technology means that the link between economic and military power is more tenuous than ever. Al Qaeda, whose entire budget wouldn’t buy a single F-22, can inflict devastating damage on the world’s richest country. Advances in biological and cyberwar promise to put even more destructive potential into the hands of ever smaller groups — as does the continued proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Dreamers can convince themselves that military power no longer matters, that economic interdependence has consigned war to the dustbin of history, and that a country need only wield “soft power,” but history is likely to deliver a stark rebuke to such wishful thinking. As a matter of fact, it already has. The attacks of September 11, 2001 put an end to a decade of talk about the “end of history.” It reminded us that war still matters, albeit a different form of war from what we had gotten used to.

In assessing the future conduct of conflict, most analysts tend to fall into one of two camps. One group stresses the dangers of terrorists and guerrillas who use cheap, simple weapons like AK-47s, machetes, or explosives. Another group stresses the danger of high-tech weapons such as cruise missiles and killer satellites proliferating around the world and into the hands of states such as China and North Korea. The former school (associated with ground-combat arms) stresses the need for better warriors; the latter school (associated with air and naval forces), the need for better machines. The reality is that both high-intensity and low-intensity threats are real and that both superlative people and first-rate equipment are needed to counter them.

Today, the U.S. is much further along in figuring out how to deal with conventional threats, and it needs to place more emphasis on making up for its deficiencies in irregular warfare. While the Information Revolution has decreased the number of soldiers needed to defeat a conventional adversary, occupation duty and nation-building — the prerequisites for turning a battlefield triumph into a long-term political victory–continue to demand lots of old-fashioned infantry. Therefore, the U.S. and its allies would be making a mistake if they were to stint on force size in order to procure more high-tech systems.

But that doesn’t mean that the U.S. can simply ignore the dangers of major war fighting or the dictates of technological change. That was the mistake Britain made before 1914 and again before 1939. The British had the world’s best “small war” force — an army well-trained and equipped for fighting bandits and guerrillas — but it was ludicrously insufficient to deter German aggression or to defeat Germany once a world war broke out. That mistake, symbolized by deficiencies in tanks and aircraft carriers, hastened the end of the Pax Britannica.

The possibility of conventional inter-state war is now lower than at any time in 500 years, but it has not disappeared altogether. Because Americans and other citizens of Western democracies no longer seem willing to suffer the same level of casualties experienced by their ancestors, their armed forces must be able to defeat adversaries at scant cost in lives. That argues for keeping the qualitative edge that the U.S. gained in the Information Age — an edge that cannot be preserved by standing still.

Innovation must be organizational as much as technological, and it needs to focus on potential threats across the entire spectrum, from low-intensity guerrilla wars to high-intensity conventional conflicts. To fight and win the wars of the future — wars that may more closely resemble a series of hit-and-run raids than traditional force-on-force armored, aerial, or naval engagements — we need to cut away bureaucratic fat to turn bloated Industrial Age hierarchies into lean Information Age networks.

Whether the U.S. is ready for such challenges will determine whether it can keep its position as the lone superpower or whether the world will see another power shift of the kind that accompanied the Gunpowder Revolution, the First Industrial Revolution, the Second Industrial Revolution, and the early stages of the Information Revolution.

I spoke to a friend of mine last night who lives over that way and says he saw the incident take place!
Apparently it may have flown into a flock of geese, and then came over and flew two tight circuits at about 300ft near his house making a lot of noise before flying out to the bay where the crew ejected.
The crew were then airlifted to hospital, current status unknown.

Plazz

Were they radar-guided geese or heat-seeking? Seems mother nature won this round. Glad no one was hurt.