the point is that intercept airliner is not the main mission of fighter aircraft, the main mission is air superiority, SEAD, CAS , penetration strike , may be anti ship…. etc that why SA and Stealth are emphasised, if you only want to intercept airliner fast, you would only need the old f-4, f-106 they are fast and cheap
But the force structure doesn’t come for cheap. Unless you have already a multi-platform airforce, what less and less country have today or will have in foreseeable future.
Some have argued that a fast trainer, supersonic, could do the job of air policing. The fact is that this is valid only while the threat is predictable. If you have, let’s say an attacking force mick-mocking an airliner to penentrate your airspace and send only a light armed trainer, it’s the same as sending nothing if we speak only in term of capacity to mitigate the effect of a surprise attack. And this is all about deterrence.
So, the debate is not only around what platform to choose but more about the financial capabilities of a given state and the missions given to its airforce.
We will probably see Airpolicing evolving toward a combinaison of unmanned supersonic drones tasked with the identification/liaison of the threat and dispersed SAM in the role of the Killer. Or, perhaps, the platforms will evolve themself in a High/Low mix of configuration for a given airframe thanks to modularity.
Anyhow, the recent polemics in Sweden, the financial burden of the Baltic policing or the increased cost of monitoring vast airspaces with the next generation of fighter might force a new trend to surface faster than anyone might have ever predicted.
Sign In
