MATRA Corail chaff flare dispensers can be mounted in fairings that looked like stub pylons, between the inboard wing pylon and the fuselage root of the Mirage F-1. A further Alkan Lacroix flare ejector could be inserted in place of the dragchute cover and the ventral fins (on the SAAF models) were thickened with their own ejectors.

http://i18.servimg.com/u/f18/09/01/13/73/489_gu10.jpg

https://www.flightglobal.com/FlightPDFArchive/1989/1989%20-%203244.PDF

All told, you might have maybe 120 expendables. The Israeli standard is around 400, minimum.

The problem with all EXCM options are three fold:

1. With the exception of toweds, they are a reactive measure which means you are already past the suppression or delay of acquisition/tracking phase. You can still defeat the missile but the measure is so transient that if you are in a SARH vs. IRH fight, you can end up Emperor’s New Clothes conditioned, really fast. A-10s with 16 buckets worth of RR-180 series chaff (theoretically 288 cartridges) were SCREAMING for SEAD packages the few times they got sent north to hunt SCUDs in unreduced air defense missile trap arenas. The Hawg community was furious because the worthless F-16s were dropping Mk.84s on ‘area targets’ just across the FSCL in Kuwait.

2. Pilots don’t like to fly straight and level when being shot at. Which means that the expendable burst has to be correctly patterned from buckets at the middle and end of the jet, doubling the use rate, even with very rapid-blooming/kinematic lightoff to provide proper obscuration of the target signature (why modern flares are so ‘smokey’ is to block as much as dazzle staring arrays from seeing the airframe silhouette image). Rotate the velocity vector to escape the tracking cell in this brief breaklock window period and you knock 100-150 knots off the jet in honoring the threat. While burner use to honk the nose back around to return the favor makes you a VERY bright target for a threat which is doing shoot-shoot-look combinations with R-24R/T or quad launcher R-60.

3. Where you are at very low level, the threat can kill you with very cheap, shoulder fire, weapons from atop every termite mound in saturation mode. Threat reaction window is measured in hundredths of a second and without an effective MAWS, you can be dead before you are aware of the shot.

Given the era and other collaborations, I’m assuming Armscor or Atlas simply went to the CIA for surplus ALQ-101V(10) or Elta and picked up a few EL-8202 pods, they would not have had access to the Thomson Barem or Electronica/Selennia (ALQ-234) alternatives due to the arms embargo.

The problem here is that of coverage. SPJs, even when celled up, have very little ability to act in a suppression (SOJAM) mode (not enough ERPs wattage) and if you are on the deck to avoid EWR cue, the horizons are very short and your look up angles against threat DCA, almost non existent. Essentially, the threat SHORADS sees you and lights off, well within burn-thru range and the interceptors just ramp down ontop of you. A Mirage F-1 is not going to outrun a MiG-23 with 10,000ft of burner acceleration.

And of course, the trashfire doesn’t care.

This is why the USAF never bought into the European lawnmower approach to penetration. We had lost too many 105s, screaming down the karst of Thud Ridge, to be suckered into avoiding the radar threats by tackling the 100X greater density of AAA. And we never faced MANPADS over RP5/6 (did over the HCMT and were thrown off it).

Short of Real Money for a complete SEAD systems aggregate, the only way to kill a threat IADS is to either sabotage it with commando raiders taking out key radars and hunting down TELARs so that you can hit the sites blind. Or to use indirect ALCM/GLCM and simply force the threat to shoot at a lot smaller targets.

‘Somewhere’ in Langley or Wright Pat I’m sure there is still a photo taken from a BQM-34 flying so low that the cameras tripped when the drone flew under a telephone line, just south of Hanoi. That drone flew something like 200 missions in a bait and geolocate mode with another drone flying about 5-10km to the side of it’s ground track, watching the North Vietnamese get their mad on as radars coming up and AAA bursts were all ELINT’d and Photographed.

People actually cried when that Lightning Bug was finally lost: ‘somewhere, up there’. But they also knew that it was about 190 missions more than a manned recce asset would have gotten away with.

Where they failed to make the connection was in seeing how very easy it is make a GLCM out of exactly this kind of system with the option (including RAM and contrail suppression tanks) of high or low penetration /instead of/ sending manned packages.

Considering that primitive versions of TERCOM and DSMAC had been around since the Navajo, that was a real shame.

We lost 320 out of 833 F-105s at roughly 2.2 million apiece in 1970. At 530% inflation, that’s roughly 4 billion dollars in hardware at 2017 prices.

With 40-60 million dollar force structure leverage on the JAS-39 and very long replacement production lag, even now that ZA is ‘readmitted’ to the world community; you simply cannot afford that kind of writeoff risk to a todesfarht by penetrating tacair. A couple bad sorties and you not only collapse your combined DCA/OCA/INT sortie generation for the next day’s home defense, but you leave people badly exposed on the pointy end. See: Argentine Mirage III pulled out of the Falklands to defend Buenos Aires against the ‘Vulcan Menace’ Thatcher threatened when they had all but destroyed the SHAR CAP the previous day with long range Super 530 shots.

See the sudden shortfall in counterair missions over Stanley when a couple of SHAR got shot up by the Skyguard 35mm system and the GR.3s not yet ready, leaving the RN with a set of hard choices between defending the Falklands Sound anchorage and TF Corporate itself with less than a squadron of ready aircraft generated, each day as CANA/FAA were seemingly supplying ‘a ship kill per foray’.

Fighters have the energy to maneuver for position, either in getting squint angle for LOROP/SAR or in Poling up missiles against counter strikes by equivalent threats. But without stealth and standoff munitions, they should never be used as a penetrating asset in an A2AD environment. Even with dedicted DEAD equipment and training, it’s just not worth the cost in sorties.

PLA,

>>
1. Has to be single engined as part of a wider military-industrial plan.
>>

Don’t get hit. The A-1 operated in a pre Man Portables era and so could lose an engine ‘one cylinder at a time’ with the R3360. This is NOT the case for a jet or turboprop where you have a much hotter core and a set of spinning blades which is essentially an annular blast warhead, waiting to happen.

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2. Rugged, STOL platform
>>

STOL is vastly overrated for a couple of reasons: First, you are never any further from the enemy than they are from your airbase. Camp Bastion cost the USMC 12 irreplaceable Harrier IIs.

Second, a bird overhead is worth twenty at the FOL, 50nm back, because that airframe can see the threats coming and give a headsup which is the difference between being able to sleep on a LRRP and fighting dead tired in disadvantaged terrain because the threat walked up on your without a Hellfire to the forehead of the guy with a satphone to discourage the others. On this fact alone you are talking about UAS uber alles because a Predator has as long as a 42hr sortie length at about 1,000 dollars an hour.

Number of airframes in the ATO goes way, way, down at that point.

Also good for route recce on supply runs and meet and greet patrols where the ambush awaits your convenience.

The key thing being that CAS is as much sensor dependent as it is munitions based which means an artillery mission or SSM is not only costly but for all intents and purposes, a fast ambulance to a situation already gone sideways.

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3. Low cost, cheap, easy to mass produce.
>>

Stay _far_ away from jets then as these are still the number one single driver on airframe cost.

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4. Has to run either on diesel or gasoline
>>

AvKer _is_ diesel, for all intents and purposes, albeit high quality. Turbines will generally run on just about anything but lamp oil and if you want to get SPCA and Green Peace on your behind, go kill a whale and we’ll work the math for the combustor temps.

Keep in mind that the Rotax 912/914 series works with 1,000lbs of ‘heavy fuel’ (diesel with boron additives) and gets something on the order of 3,500nm at 100 knots out of 1,000lbs of fuel. Nothing that a manned _or_ turbine platform could offer is going to match that because the amount of thermal energy it takes to keep the spools spinning at X-rpm sufficient to keep the engine working is vastly more flight idle power setting than you need to keep the prop turning to support ‘hovering’ flight at 60 knots. The best example of this is the old time Dirigibles with their Continental engines where you can literally _Hear The Lag_ as the cylinders fire and watch the prop blades turn like a house fan turning on.

This is a major problem for all aircraft and one which I believe will only be solved for mixed performance profile 350-450 knot penetration cruise from the theater periphery, 150-250 knot slow-low flight in the mission area) when someone wakes up to the power of electric motors and sized thrust from multistage (ADVENT) turbines.

Basically, the difference between a turbine and gearing system on a turboprop and the equivalent, variable brush stator on an electric motor is zero for size/volume considerations UNTIL you start adding multiple drives on a common shaft and/or capacitor banks for redundancy to combat damage and/or mixed cruise. Even then, it’s easy to assign the system value to avionics support or a possible laser.

It also has a lot of merit for ESTOL if you’re serious about that because the best way to get the behavior is to put thrust lines forward in a blended LERX plenum with a pair of fans on each side of the cockpit. Now you can use full power on your turbine to feed your lift fans while keeping the back end (necessary for AAR clearance) at min RPM, irrespective of gearing.

IMO, as we continue to look at ‘excuse wars’ (Syria is about threatening Crimea and the Caspian Basin as an Inchon and Petrogas choke) where we fight micro threats from the edges of a theater base-in which doesn’t really want us there, we will have to move to these kinds of systems for the simple reason that oil is going to continue to get more and more expensive as SDR authorizes other currencies to be used as petroleum exchange mediums.

Something which China is certain to demand soon, even if the Euro completely tanks if/when Le Pen gets elected and we see a Fraxit.

The problem with this ‘500-800nm from the edge, 3hrs overhead, RTB’ is that you really need a minimum speed close to that of a jet to move the pilot/WSO team (another necessity for effective CAS, IMO) fast enough down range to not exceed their 8-10hr mandated mission lengths while sustaining sortie rates. 3+3+3 with an AAR coming and going achieves this while the electric drives give you the option of rolling back your fuel load as the motors needed to turn a high energy propfan can have scaled contacts or multiple stages, based on need (and only cost a fraction of the weight of a turbine for the L+LC layout in particular).

Minimum 320 knots @ 25K, behind a tanker, is also a driver on safe, effective, (max fuel transfer) refueling. Which is to say: scaled airframe volume. The A-10 carries 12,000lbs of fuel and still sucks as a theater deployment aircraft because that big, fat, straight, high cambered, wing is running right up against VNE while the TF34s are suffering major altitude losses as the gerbil core driving the massive fan is simply able to generate the thrust needed. The result is a lot of cussing by KC-xxx drivers as they have to get down in the weather band to drag Hogs to theater.

Something which will never again be deemed acceptable solely for a good turn rate at low level.

As far as contested CAS, this is basically OBAS or BAI in that you don’t have a dog in the fight, driving the mandate for air overhead with threat tanks driving up the laces of your boot infantry.

In this, we have learned a lot from the actions in Khafji, where the Russians use small Kampfgruppe type units to raid and decoy in Ukrainians into massive RT/RRT traps (Ukrainian infantry basically can no longer hold ground without being spotted by quadricopter MAVs and Tu-349 Reis recce drones, which always brings the rain) as well as from Khafji where the Iraqis were successful BECAUSE they split up into small units and made 1-2-3 uncoordinated runs on the town. So that we couldn’t get air to make the contact, obliterate one group, find the next and rinse repeat on a limited sortie allocation basis.

I believe that these conditions will continue to drive the nature of future combat, as the SFW and Hellfire/Brimstone have rendered large scale maneuver largely ineffective at the regiment and above levels formerly favored by Russian maneuver doctrine.

Which in turn brings us back to finding threats in micro staging areas and then tracking them over extended periods while shooters with high count/low weight ATGW position to ruin their day.

No-LO Props _can_ do this, at low level, provided their standoff munitions are in the LAM/LOCAAS/SPEAR-3/MASSM category with 30-100km standoff instead of 12-15 as with Brimstone and JAGM. Which means your ISR platform is what needs to be small, very low observable and fast enough to make intercept over threat airspace ‘complicated’. No Darkstars need apply but something like a Japanese TACOM might be just the ticket.

Again, this has echoes with history in that, contrary to popular myth, the Voodoo, RF-4C and Vig were never all that important to daily recce, electronic and IMINT, but rather it was the AQM-34 and particularly the later Buffalo Hunter which did about 70% of the Vietnam targeting with options for both 50K run ins with RAM and contrail suppressant and <50ft, literally passing under powerlines.

Either way, with the Russian emphasis on sophisticated battlefield SAMs, you are going to lose a helluva lot of ISR on Day-1, a fact which will get worse as SSL and Hunting Weapons come online. But again, if you are just a truck with the backseater running apertures from much lower signature, high speed, offboard sources; you have the ability to trade downrange munition kinematics as standoff for threat exposure, particularly to GBAD.

‘No More Najafs’ (30+ AH-64s shredded in a single afternoon over a MOUT conditioned ‘flickering lights’, high collaterals, ambush) should be a given. But there should not necessarily be an abandonment of the A-10 ‘intruder’ profile by which so many deep CAS (the Depots, SCUD Alley/Lane and the IRGC) were royally ripped by aircraft which could hang and assess compared to the F-16s which would have had to tank over enemy airspace just to get deep into Western Iraq.

The key is getting away from the GAU-8 mindset and looking at what other successful intruders have done to assure their survivability in the theater. B-57B/G and OV-10A/D/NOS come to mind here. Keeping in mind that we can carry six Brimstones for the drag/weight penalty of a single, loaded, LAU-88 worth of AGM-65H Mavericks and the 70mm APKW has a 1m CEP from 5km compared to the 20m ellipse described by a 2 second GAU burst throwing DU splinters and ricochets another half mile down range.

We can _do_ COIN CAS with what we have, just on a minor ordnance/DIRCM upgrade to account for VSHORADS ‘if and when’. The higher end stuff, particularly with a possible maritime emphasis in Iran, Taiwan and possibly Korea, is what requires the rethink.

CONCLUSION:
Designing for CAS after the threat is in-contact is stupid. It takes too long to coordinate within the JAAT system of suppression and combined arms firing pulse separations. It puts the engaged force at terrible risk of overrun and it draws the threat air response like flies to a corpse.

But if you want to go deep and/or catch multiple runners as they try to Red Rover Come Over into your own rear areas, you need to think networks to split out the value by exposure risk vs. carry weight on what is basically a smart pylon bombtruck Killer mission enabled by a TTNT capable datalink from forward Hunters.

i.e. The exact opposite of the F-35 with it’s wasted sensorization and minimal weapons load as pilot endurance factors.

Air vehicle design is a part of this. But only insofar as you rewrite the doctrinal play book which all of your threats have read. We don’t want to get Patton’d in the next war.

Consider what happens if the Iranian Revolution occurred two years earlier and the Shah’s Save of the F-14 program fails to emerge. Congress cancels the dubious VG ‘missileer’ fighter program (the Israelis routinely beat the F-14 with unmodified A-4 Ahits in sales trials, so did F-4S with better DECM and VTAS) and puts their foot down over “NO! We told you to select ONE fighter from LWF/ACF, not BOTH!”…

Having no other Sparrow shooter option, the USN will absolutely refuse to take the F-16 because even if it could carry the GWH, they had had enough of narrow track, short wheel base types with the F-8 and A-7 thank you very much. And of course, for SARH, ERPs are everything and they simply cannot afford to face off with a clone of the AWG-10 as the Sapfir with a 24″ radar pedestal and a less than 2KW of output power when tackling the new MiG-23/25. Not to mention the 4G assymetric maneuver limit which later beset the F-16ADF with just two AIM-7s, firing LSL sequentially.

Comparatively, the USAF has already bought into the A-7D as a stopgap on the A-X ‘because we don’t do enough CAS’ (read: everyone knew the A-10 was worthless) which promptly added another 500 A-7E to their program of merit as common avionics/engines and so would have had to look at ‘who had the bigger inventory payoff’ in terms of an all-18 shared inventory, 20 years earlier than originally planned, on Navy decks.

The F-15 is safe as a symbolic ‘best of class’ buy and being a twin doesn’t suffer as much from short-buy on the Pratt engine which is incredibly badly engineered anyway (.7 BPr = instant duct stall from throttle slams and burner hardlight inherent to a 1:1 machine, only the fact that it was ‘one of two’ and fed by a variable ramp intake system kept Rodan from having _exactly_ the same engine loss rates as the Viper. Albeit with still a horrific Hangar Queen reputation in the F-15A with it’s ‘squared and balanced’ weak-wings).

Yet if the Blue Suiters go with even just MacDac 800 F-18 vs. the 1,200 F-16s (and 300 NATO) that they promised GD; they get to add-on another 600-800 squidian F-18s, depending on whether the USN sticks with the A-7E as light-attack or activates the A-18 clause of the R&D as separate-variant contract.

Point Blank: The USAF gets more bang-from-buck cost relief from a joint USN program than they do from the F-16 (initial sales) alone. Just like they did with the F-4C/D and then E/G work which was ONLY possible because of the backing B/N/J. Having a higher end LWF does somewhat ruin your FMS opportunities but then again, that’s what the F-20 was for…

Why is this important? Well, the Hornet can carry two AIM-7F/M on the outboard LAU-115 without much assymetrics trouble, in addition to the shoulder stations which have to compete with the targeting pods only in offensive strike warfare. Which is to say a minimum 3-5 days after warstart as constant DCA ops over a crumbling HAWK belt and multiple OMG breakouts.

This radar missile option gives it F-15 equivalent BVR capability in an operational environment which is socked in from about November through March in Central Germany and not really that much better, even in ol’ Blighty across the Channel.

The Russians love snow. They don’t feel cold like we do and were becoming increasingly adept at night operations with image intensification replacing active lamp IR, throughout the 1970s. Do you REALLY WANT to play sidewinder games with a 15-20,000ft hard base and running scud in the 3-8,000 range beneath that _at 0D30_?

There is a reason why Ramstein’s gate sign had three conditions: ‘Snow, Sleet, Rain…’ you know.

The APG-65, while by no means as powerful as the APG-63 (and later further degraded by espionage) was a full rather than elliptical 27″ array and like all Navy jets, had genuine vs. HPRF emulant CW. Since you now have a sideband illuminator, as soon as you go to strapdown in the AIM-7MH, you can have a smart-datalink ability to trajectory tailor shots with lofting. This is _a good thing_, at a time when the APG-63/AIM-7F was basically a ‘mind the step’ (big notch) system which a simple break-back maneuver would spoil the tracking of because the Conscan was cyclic dependent on Hz rates in the interleave rather than monopulse capable of single-look tracking within the pulse train.

Now look at the wings and the retained LEX slot. Having a straight wing is stupid in any jet which wants to cruise fast in the clutter but a thin section wing (indicated by the 7,780lb instead of 10,000lb internal fuel load, nominally suicidally low as a fraction on a twin engine aircraft) with spoilers and suction relief through the large boundary slots can use structural mode control similar to the B-1B to control ride and particularly porpoising/lunging by means of low lift coefficient wing area further spoiled by lift dumping so that whenever the LEX start to rise or fall through the microbursts, they control their own lift gradient losses by _reversing flow_ through the slots as a kind of ejector and then the wing spoilers simply have to equalize the bent-through-middle torsional effect of the wing punching through the same burble. If you go to a flaperon (ala F-16) instead of a simple slotted mechanism as on the Naval Hornet, you can likely deflect the entire wing camber into low-ride mode.

Add to this the payload factors: as those are NOT 330 gallon but _600 gallon_ tanks and you are carrying the equivalent of an A-6 in MER’d ordnance and external fuel which means you have an exceptionally high wingloading accompanied by the active dampening on a very torsionally stiff wing to control ride function with. Obviously, a lot will depend on rapidly transitioning from the dual electromechanical/CAS system to a full up FBW but since this happened, eventually, anyway, there is no real problem here either.

I would also add that the F-16 really never was suited to all weather strike in the Euro threat environment either, the combination of terrain masking flight in a region saturated with high tension power lines, no imbedded TFR (as the APQ-126 gave the A-7D/E) and a nominally ENORMOUS radar surface and air threat environment all point towards single pilottage tactical flight without even a COMED or hold-bias assisted autopilot as being exceedingly stupid. BAM, the Hornet’s real leverage: it’s marvelous out of the box weapons system and cockpit interface gives you everything an F-111D /wishes/ they had, including the option to look up, shoot up, with near range equivalence as well as firing big-missile SEAD weapons which it would take the F-16CJ 15 more years to really do.

About the only thing you are missing here is the original PWIV as Planar Winged Weapon and LOCPOD/LAD systems to provide at least a minimum of standoff rather than relying on highly draggy and threat exposed overflight/laydown.

As much as the Viper /eventually/ became something to be proud of (on the verge of obsolescence in the face of the Eurocanards) the MSIP program failed utterly to bring in the kinds of network comms (SINCGARS, JTIDS), internal jammer (ASPJ), ARH-BVR (AMRAAM, 12 years late) for the wingtips and of course LANTIRN and AGM-65D in time to be useful in a NATO operational environment.

We would have been _vastly_ better off, in terms of everything from single vs. twin loss statistics (90% of all Viper losses to date have been pilot related do to lack of GCAS in a high energy flight environment especially. But of the rest, more than 33% are single-engine related) to a more realistic tactical perspective on what 1980s combat required in an ‘under the GBAD radar’ ‘through Wx’ and ‘pop the enemy OCA from below’ LDSD environment relative to what the technological SOA could actually achieve.

Without MMIC/VHSIC/VLSI, as Pave Pillar, the rabbit-swallows-lion trick of the Blk.40 and later F-16 avionics systems was never going to be able to support a tactical, single pilot warfighter, particularly as an adjunct to the limited Bitburg/CNA F-15 force in securing DCA freedom of operations over /our/ lines. Never mind Poland.

Thus the Window Of Vulnerability had to be slammed shut on the WARPACs fingers with the fireball politics of Gryphon and PII which is a helluva way to call someone’s already extant SS-20/21 bluff with a deepstrike nuke capability of your ‘Cry Havoc!’ own.

Report all you like.

We are committing a crime against humanity by aiding the Israelis in meeting the UN codified definition of genocide. That’s a fact as any geographic distribution study of the contraction, fragmentation and decimation of the Palestinian population from 1948->present will show.

http://georgiapoliticalreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/israel-map.jpg

https://geographicalimaginations.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/vp-alhaq-gazavillages1.jpg

If I am anti-Semitic and Palestinians are a Semitic people, what does that make my nation’s government who are supplying first world weapons systems to a 2nd world economy for the purposes of further disenfranchising the legitimate population of Palestine of their economic centers and eventually pushing them out of Israel itself? What Shin Bet does to the Palestinians is Gestapo like and there are people reporting on this FROM WITHIN ISRAEL, such as Miko Peled.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etXAm-OylQQ

With this in mind, we should look to our own reputation and specifically study when the violence REALLY began for us, after sitting inside Saudi Arabia, on Arab holy ground, for over a decade, minding Iraq’s business when no other Arab state wanted to and taking a kick back on over-production by other OPEC states making a killing in compensation for Iraq’s exile from the oil export business. By our hand and at a time when Clinton and Company were selling off our industry as fast as they could such that we had no business getting $1.05 gasoline in an otherwise faltering economy.

All at the same time Israel was prosecuting an intifada war against a civilian population by stealth and police-state night raids to terrorize the Palestinians into submission until the dozers could get round to them.

What the Israelis are doing, in destabilizing the Middle East into warring tribal barrios, is setting up the world for global terrorism at the same time a nuclearized Iran becomes seen as a suitcase-WMD source for escalating that terrorism through intermediaries. Helping to turn Turkey into an Islamist-nationalist isolated state, firmly in the Russian camp and threatening a fundamentalist Islamic power bloc across the entire northern arc of the PG and Med will not help either.

IDFAF F-35s will not be enough to prosecute an active Iranian nuclear program then, so the Israelis will likely pull an Allen Dulles (BOP) trick of starting a fight that their forces cannot get out of on their own. And then _demanding_ that we save their skins for them. As we did, with mercenary pilots and TAC transferred fighters/EW/munitions, back in 1973.

And that will make us eternal enemies throughout the MENA.

If the Israelis were serious about gaining survivable, longrange, regional strike, they would use the vastly cheaper missile-in-a-box option off a Q-ship styled freighter rescued from one of the Indian chop yards (and sunk immediately after use), along with their own Type 209 subs with the 650mm torpedo tubes for modified, long-range, Popeyes. More DMPIs, more initial surprise, less need to DEAD the threat to penetrate to target.

They are not going this way. Which means we are being suckered yet again, just like we were in 1990 and then 2001.

And the proof is that the F-35 cannot make the radius on it’s own, cannot drag a tanker survivably through hostile Arab airspace over dozens of raids and will not itself be stealthy or able to carry large, heavyweight, munitions on a wing already overloaded with EFT and CFT that bloat the LO signature values.

Which is a perfectly legitimate argument against Eagle’s perspective that the F-35 is all that and the chips. Because the Israelis wouldn’t waste the cash compromising the Adirs stealth if they didn’t have a plan for it that required REAL legs, it cannot achieve on 19,000lbs of internal fuel. Indicating that the massive F135 engine is a TSFC JP guzzler, just like I said.

If KPF cannot handle that truth, then I need them less than they need your approval. My bias is known because I stated it. Yours is one of covert misdirection hiding behind paladinism because the Palestinians are Semitic too and the things which the Israelis do to them are cruelties which WE WILL CATCH THE HATE FOR with all the unwarranted Islamic immigration being planned for us, here, with Hillary Clinton’s promises of open-door immigration akin to Europe.

Because of all this and given the certainty of technology base risk to a 1.35 trillion dollar stealth fighter, for every loss in an insane Iranian de-nuclearization campaign, we need to seriously consider whether we need to be Israel’s FMS freebie arms dealer anymore.

No one, not NATO, not England, not Oz, not Japan, gets anything near 3 billion a year from us. The Israelis don’t do anything to deserve that kind of largesse. It is not in our interests to be charitable for it’s own sake when it buys us trouble with the oil states at a time when our petrodollar’s status as a GRC is under extreme threat.

Just as we need to remember what it was to be the world’s Nazi Killers so that when we look in the mirror and know that whole planet hates our guts for doing exactly the same adventurist stuff, we won’t be surprised because someone said it was ‘Anti Semitic’ not to help Israel fight their own wars.

Israeli Crypto Fascism is what is driving ‘anti semitism’ today. Not the U.S.. And not me.

[QUOTE=Jessmo23;2229921]Ok sir, I can’t help but to think your disdain for Lockheed has clouded your judgment.
I will attempt to help you see the light:

1. The main fan face was exposed when a radar blocker wasn’t covering it. Which is a killer for VLO

You don’t ever want to get so close to a threat, while flying on a wing which honestly has the same supercruise at 40-50K capability as the F-22 that someone -can- look right down your inlet. You turn obliquely and then drop a GBU-53 at 40nm or a SPEAR-3 derivative thereof at 100nm.

This is fairly simple logic in comparison with blowing right through a 7-11 overlap at danger-close standoffs, opening a ‘can you see me now?’ bombbay whose configuration prevents supersonic releases RIGHT OVER the terminal defenses and then continuing on through overflight because any angular change actually increases your RCS compared to an in-and-out straight ground track at that point.

2. The blocker hurt supersonic performance. So you had to choose to either have the blocker on for vlo or, off for mach.

The Super Hornet has blockers. The SHornet’s blockers don’t hurt supersonic performance (as inlet ram recovery), having a straight winged tank of an airframe with bloated LEX and horrible aspect ratios does.

3. Direct lift has always ran the risk of hot gas ingestion. The X-32 was no exception, even have a incident happen on the 1st VL.

Bloody Marvelous. We agree that STOVL is a worthless metric by which to judge the capabilities of ANY fighter. Because, if a 600nm radius platform cannot secure it’s basing mode against a 1,200nm DF-21D or a 1,500nm DF-26, the one generating one sortie per day, the other generating fresh shots every 10-15 minutes, how can a 460nm (neh 250nm) STOVL fighter do better? You literally have to steam inside the threat WEZ for MORE THAN TWENTY FOUR HOURS just to reach Doolittle range. And I mean _very little_.

Add to this the fact that STOVL is worthless at force-filling USN airwings because it’s gear cannot handle being run over a strung pendant, it cannot recover vertically, over the side (deck parks, LSO platform) and it hasn’t got enough running room ahead of the JBD to run work off any conventional carrier (or a helo carrier with active RWA deckspots as 2nd wavers get ready to go ashore) and the STOVL fighter is just a hideous waste of money and time because any (SPOD Capture) operational tasking which requires a high end VLO jet to be survivable is a theater threat which needs a 40-60 jet airwing off a real big deck carrier, not an 8 aircraft detachment on a gator freighter or even a 20 jet CVE wannabe.

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4. Form usually follows function. I truly believe that if a plane looks good it will fly good. Generals are human after all, and when they name your plane Monica Lewinsky it cant be good.
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The YF-22 looked like a beached whale. The Navy changed the specs in the middle of the JSF competition. Lockheed ‘lost’ 60 million in accounting errors and should have been disqualified then. The Rhino (no, not that one, the FIRST AND ONLY /Rhino/) is a kluge of McDonnell Great Book Of Aerodynamic Solutions. The Turkey, is inferior to the F-4S with VTAS in a straight up EM dogfight and the Israelis laughed so hard they fell over straight into McDonnell’s Eagle Nest, proving exactly that. The F-35 looks like a duffle bag with an orchestral harp shoved inside it.

The PWSC F-32 might or might not have been a looker, certaintly having an engine in the middle of the jet, solely because of STOVL CG metrics, didn’t help. But it would have been a production optimized design based on a jet which already outflew the F-35 in the X-jet stages where time has shown that the Lightning was never fit to be judged because all the factors which chubbed it up were left off. DO NOT THINK that that wasn’t deliberate. Anymore than covering up 4,000lbs of bloat, right through PDR, wasn’t deliberate.

No weapons bay, no wingroot gear, no proper location of engine auxiliaries, no gun, no radar, no FLIR, no wingroot structures shared STOVL plumbing. This by itself proves that you are dead wrong in your external aesthetics judgment because it was the GUTS OF THE AIRFRAME which, within a largely similar moldline between X-35/F-35, changed everything, turning this jet from a turkey to a turd.

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5. If I can recall the bomb bay was an odd design.
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You could put an AGM-154 into the lateral bays of the X-32, even the F-35A/C bay is too short. You also cannot launch a supersonic anything from an F-35 because the inwards toe-in prevents the opening of the doors above 1.2 and 1.2 is the absolutely _minimum_ threshold for transonic clearance as about 30% of the airframe is still sheathed in mixed flow. A GBU-32 off an F-22 at Mach 1.3 will go 15nm downrange. That same bomb off an F-35 is only about a 10-12nm ranged weapon.

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6. I’m not sure the wing planform could have met Navy KPP for bring back and trap.
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Neither was the USN, which was how they wanted it: just enough doubt to leverage the decision but not enough (ala F-111B NF-1 mods) to make them look guilty of changing the game to disqualify Boeing on purpose. Like you, they only required that the F-35 meet minimum specs because ‘the rest was aesthetics’. Bluntly, with such a major aerodynamic redesign on the F-32 PWSC there was little to be learned from the X-32. Just as the absent guts of the F-35 made it all but impossible to say whether a gallon could really be poured into a pint pot on the basis of (CBO warned since 1997) concurrent materials ‘predictions’ (a dream by any other name, a greedy optimist’s delusion remains) of weight savings.

With 9/11 having just occurred the month before the SDD announcement and most of Europe quite happy to coast on the F-16AM, while we could have restarted F-16CJ production or even shifted to the Blk.60 at any time, there was _no reason_ to commit to a downselect with such poorly understood concepts on the eve of a very expensive bootslogger campaign in SWA for which A-UAV like the Reaper and Predator (3,000dph and 900dph, respectively) were far better suited for everything from ISR to overhead CAS. Predators have been in the air for 42 hours at a time. Reaper (pre-ER) was more like 10hrs but both were vastly better than the 6-8hrs you could expect of F-16s and A-10s while having that enormous CPFH differential to allow more CAPs per day of given ops funding. We were only lacking in having a capable constellation-control MCS/GCS and that was fixed within 3 years, allowing a crew in the late morning of Creech to fly a night time sortie over AfG, put the drone into go-home mode and jump to late afternoon equivalent in Iraq.

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7. Like we mentioned before the F-35 has reached 50+ degrees Aoa and a moderate super-cruise at mach 1.2 That is hardly a straight and level.only modern F-117 analog
In fact sir we did have a 3 way competition, and Lockheed won.Are they perfect? No! Have the built the world best fighter to date? Yes.
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Rah-Rah. Shake that booty. You are such a good cheerleader. I’ll come to your pep rally any time. As no less than Jon Beesely himself has said however:

‘Most of superman is thrust trust and we don’t have the goose to carry the moose, everything the Russians do is about inertial forces carrying the jet through the flip which looks real sexy but is basically uncontrollable, the F-22 can point as it pleases and we can do everything the F-22 does, only without vector, we do it much slower…’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZWsaJDc8PI

Agility is to Maneuverability what quick is to fast. And if, post superman, you are going to end up going downhill for 1,500-5,000ft before you get sufficient airspeed under the wings to be a viable turn and burn platform again, you have just given whomever you _miss_ (because gunshots are notoriously unreliable, even with IFFC and you don’t have HOBS + LO, only one or the other) the topside of your airframe, allowing him to cut across the top of your turn circle and use _his_ K-74 or IRIS-T or Python-5 etc. to stick an expanding rod warhead in your ear.

The reality of air combat in a LO platform is that the very signature capabilities that allow you to get deep in the briar patch also mean you cannot afford, either by fuel, visual/radar/IR signature bloom (flat plating the airframe and drawing g-cons, in burner) or shot count to be sticking around in a maneuvering fight you don’t have to be in. Nose on, minimum deflection vertically for the speed range, max-pole the shot and slash out. Just like Snake Sez: Keep your fangs clean grasshopper.

And the F-35 cannot do that. It hasn’t got the shot count so how well it targets hardly matters. The weapons it does have prevents it from using truly spatially dispersed hunter:hunter sniping tactics because it’s a 7″ missile body, sized for F-16 use. Which means it has to fly around bunched up in gaggles, making for a potential multi-kill mazcat if a shadowing fighter can call up a Growler site and start flinging 9M96 by the bakers dozen at you. And of course, while it has the LO, it hasn’t got the smash to avoid the intercept geometry by being four miles higher and ten miles per minute faster than the threat can adjust to, like the Raptor or PAK-FA.

As for a three way competition, uhhhh, no. Not really. The big bad blue suiters reached right into DARPAs demesne, effectively got the UDS program director fired, stuck their skeletal fist around the program and snatched it out of the blackworld into their own special kind of ‘Coma’ ward where they sat on it in a deathwatch before stripping it of life-support funding, in 2001. On the eve of committing to a major war in SWA for which the F-35 was anything but the ideal loitering NTISR/CAS option. Had the UDS become the UOS instead of the J-UCAS sacrificial lamb, it would have exited the demonstration phase in 2006 and been ready to go right into production, meeting the Congressionally mandated 2010 period for 1/3rd of all long range strike to be unmanned.

And on simple things like radius and hold time, it would have wiped the floor with the F-35 which had only -begun- CDR on the CTOL version in 2006 and didn’t complete until 2008 or so. A CDR so full of holes as continuing lies about weight vs. structural integrity (i.e. why the PDR was a pencil-whipped wish list rather than a responsible exercise of program management authority) that they had to rebaseline the entire effort in 2010 anyway.

So. What I am saying is that you absolutely cannot trust anyone looking with starry eyed lust at a multi hundred billion dollar contract to tell the truth. Not the SPO chief, not the Company, not the DOT&E oversight group. They’re all compromisable as a function of coming from within the system which wants to justify it’s own existence with a new toy as fresh threat.

As such, the only responsible way forward is to fund by increments from vanilla X-jets through YF (FSD) levels of breadboard systems function and onto a final competitive downselect of an ‘as we would build it’ complete weapons system with ALL material/sensor/weapon/propulsion innovations being GFE held patents (helping the companies limp along on price+incentive by concentrating on _shared_ subsystem development costs) so that they can all work within a limited R&D allocation to both companies. No reinventing the wheel nonsense. Most importantly, you have to be absolutely ruthless to the ‘heroes’ group of operators because, in the final analysis, they are (by wars per decade) more union thugs than killable warriors as indeed, you ‘don’t want to risk them, unnecessarily’. If you can instead save half the price of a ‘fighter’ airframe which will spend 90% of it’s operational life looking for targets on a needle-in-wheatfield basis of sanitized nothingness. Before BOMBING what it does find, without any consideration of disparate performance levels.

Aircraft attack ground targets because ground targets seldom shoot effectively back.

We don’t do these kinds of separation of boyish customer from taxpayer wallet and missionized system optimization, instead trusting officers but not gentlemen to play honorably in light of the gravity of national defense which is at stake. And then we are surprised when they instead choose to serve their own interests in a completely corrupted system.

The criminal leading the retarded. Right off a dual cliff of deficiency act illegality and national techbase loss to smarter, hungrier, competitor states.

The Derpage is just astounding.

Since we are resurrecting old threads, I will quote myself from a thread I’ve created;

basic aerodynamic calculations of F-16 vs F-35 with F-16 airfoil and all other generic drag values:

Of course, there are a lot of assumptions, but claiming F-35 to be more similar to F-117 than F-16 is plain idiotic. IF F-35 has same fixed inlet loses, and drag coefficients as generic data from fluid mechanics book, and assuming it doesn’t improve the NACA airfoil F-16 has by the slightest, it will still match F-16 with any meaningful armament. However off my calculation would be, one has to also consider F-35 is hardly a generic and 20 years of development should improve on these graphs as well.

Base acceleration factor of an F-16C.50 is about 29 seconds. If you add tip weapons, this goes down to roughly equal value with the F-35’s ‘+8’ shortfall, it is true. But whereas an F-16 can drop 2X 370 gallon tanks and 4,000lbs of A2G and thus approximately 10,000lbs of gross weight to go from a ca 45K platform to a 27K equivalent; the F-35 cannot and indeed _must not_ due to it’s enhanced radius requirements (300 vs. 584nm).

As a result it as a weight and thus Ps cripple, despite having nominally as much IRT as the Viper does in full burner.

It is further compromised by a 50″ F135 carcass diameter, closer to that of the 55″ F101 on a B-1B than the 46″ of the F110 on the Viper. This is the true ‘STOVL penalty’ in action as the F135 fan is sized to a zero airspeed (no ram augment) requirement to sustain 18 out the back and while still retaining enough residual torque to spin up another 18Klbf out of the SDLF up front. Big fans need big compressor sections with massive pressure rise and from that equally powerful LPTs to keep all the spools turning. The Stochios required to keep all this in balance in turn require enormous core temps (3,600`F) as FUEL. Which is why the engine has a .889pph TSFC. And all this leads to more gas, more wingloading and _much more_ frontal area. Which never would have happened if the STOVL metric and the selfish motives of the UKRN and USMC were _stripped_ from the program. Because we would have had a twin and probably low end supercruise, with FOUR 2,000lb class weapons (16 GBU-53/SPEAR-3), totally changing up the hours-to-nm radius factor which currently puts the F-35 in a 10-12hr mission window to 700-800nm, with at least three tankings and only 2-3hrs in the combat area. Limiting the utility of all that ISR suite which should be MEP’d into a PERSISTENT platform (10-15hrs = drone) instead.

The U.S. doesn’t need a third air force, especially when the LHA-6 is just as obvious a target as any CVN-78, and ‘hardening’ doesn’t matter vs. DF-21/26. The UK are not even buying their original 138 jets and may stick with just 40 or so which means we have a gold plate solution whereby the least useful variant has debased the program by driving up costs and depressing capability so that the SMALLEST PERCENTAGE USER INVENTORY can have a capability which even they do use in peacetime because it is hard on runways and spikes’ the jet’s CPFH enormously.

Now look at the weapons delivery method: 12nm lay down of GBU-31/32 is about 6nm better than the GBU-27 on the Roach but is still utterly worthless in a netcentric GBAD condition where you have NEBO or Skywatch cueing very high power EPARs like Gravestone which can easily acquire the F-35 from 20-25nm out, using pencil beam search. And don’t tell me about how bad longwave is. The Russians have digital waveform processing (i.e. front and back end) which gives them perfectly useful, 3D, air search out to 200nm or more.

Compare this to an F-16 which has options on 40nm JSOW, 50nm SDB-I/II and 360nm JASSM-ER as well as advanced tail and expendible GaNi decoys and massive standoff support jam which _will not be able to accompany_ an F-35 force going to full depth. Growlers just don’t have the gas or the low-drag inherent to all the jammer pod parasitics.

Indeed, let’s look at the F-35 radius shall we? If you take IRT as 27Klbf and Flight Idle as 60% of that or 16.2Klbf, and assume you tank before crossing the fence, you are functionally talking about .889 X 16.2 or 14.4Klbs of fuel burn to crawl along at 300 knots. Remove 2,000lbs from the total fuel load as unuseable fuel coolant and another 3,000lbs as combat reserve for 550 knot transit of the last 50nm to the target and you are talking with an 800lb ullage swing, you are talking about exactly 1hrs flight time or 150nm, in and out.

This is why the (Australian Program Award announcement) ‘700nm combat radius’ was a lie. And the currently stated 584nm combat radius is ALSO a lie.

Why is this important, relative to ‘fighter performance’? Because, when added to the low shot counts and the very poor acceleration performance (closer to Hornet than Viper), it means you cannot go into a fight, supersonic, but must _sprint to pole_ to move from a 10-12nm, .5SSPK to a 15-20nm .3 SSPK. And given the massive heat of that hot core (second only to the DF30-6) you are going to be visible and NCTR ID’d, the instant you light the blower. Because QWIP level IRST can see the burner plume out to 50nm FQ and 80nm RQ and will see you, even in military, by 15nm at the latest. If they get a hot track with no RF, they can cue their IRBIS into pencil mode and use it to MCG (much bigger) ARH weapons (Izdeliya 810 etc.) into parameters from roughly twice the distance you can expect an AIM-120C7 to go in. And if they use Shooter:Illuminator, with a trailing honcho, the lead missileers (who can be at 650+ and not worry since they have the power and the gas and everyone sees them on radar anyway) will not only get dominante pole control but be able to pump out the sides of the fight so that your long range shots PK completely tanks.

Whoot!

Now let’s look at close combat as the wings. Instead of the clipped/modified deltas of the F-15/16/22 which have superb stall resistance, they are basically F-5/F-18 tapered trapezoids, shoved as far back as possible to keep transonic drag rise under control and reliant upon forebody lift off the weapons bay area to compensate. The problem with this is that you have a staggerwing effect. Even without opening the weapons bays to completely destroy the high-pressure aeros while prepping quickdraw missiles, as the forebody rises, it’s effective AOA goes up faster than the trailing primary airfoil’s does. Added to which is the close coupling between the F-35 tails and the wings which denies the option of (2` up LEF) ‘trimming in the tails’ to set the turn and (on the F-16) gain rather than lose 100sqft or so of effective lift as a genuine 9G capability.

Which is why the F-16, 40 years old, can do this-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBlP4cCRVmk

Despite having the lowest (27.5, without chin pods) alpha regime of any in-service fighter. May not mean much in a HOBS environment you say, but then again F-35 doesn’t have a HOBS missile or the ability to add one without directly effecting it’s already incredibly limited internal strike mission payload. And its a long, long, ways from your 6nm NEZ last-AMRAAM to the 4,000ft of 25mm gunzo followup.

On the F-35, the effective lift differential and lack of vectoring to trim the jet in results in a split lift curve as the reason why the jet is running at ‘transitional’ alpha limits around 20-23 units, when most jets are only entering this regime at 27 and it has a direct effect upon FLCS authority to continue pitch rates as the jet nears TRO territory and the flight controls have to start limitering thrown to keep the ‘carefree’ handling.

It is the reason why, despite having a nominal 60-70 absolute Alpha regime, the F-35 is in fact functionally on a monorail above 30` with ZERO ability to bring the nose across as the threat reverses and tucks under in the most basic of BFM snakes and rolling scissors. Because both the verticals and the stabs are having to _fight_ to keep the nose up and the jet is bleeding down, unable to generate lift to sustain even a 6G turn as the F-16 did against the F-4E shown here-

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/a3/13/f3/a313f3cfcfae12eac21ebe0c3821bc8c.jpg

So…

We have a jet that is dedicated to BVR with only two internal missiles in a typical strike role and those missiles having inferior performance compared to the R-77MD or the Meteor or the PL-15 _despite_ the fact that SSPK drops alinearly with range _before_ you add (SAP-514/518, GaNi) EW effects.

We have a jet which, at 60% internal fuel (7G max turn) and _zero_ bay weight (5,000lbs off the front end) cannot beat an F-16D for pitch rate or stabilized loaded roll, despite the latter having two bags and a -100 engine.

And we have an interdictor class mission weight and particularly fuel fraction penalty with pretenses of being a ‘fighter’ by jamming the biggest TSFC pig of an engine in it as possible, ruining it’s radius performance justification for being in a world where Hyper-SAM mean you cannot have tanker orbits malingering, just over the fence.

Did I mention it’s a 130 million dollar fighter which hasn’t met Lot-9 production cost reduction goals and NEVER WILL as we finally figure out we are bankrupt and cannot afford (and do not need) 2,400 of these engineering sandboxes?

And you call me ANGRY?!? I’m not angry. I’m _furious_. Because I have been looking at the numbers and making accurate predictions on this worthless beast since the mid-90s when I saw it start to threaten the F-22 which had true supremacy in all three primary areas of LO, EM and Weapons Load. I’ve seen it kill J-UCAS for nothing better than pilot egos and Hoffaesque ‘shop rules’ job security for the largest labor union on the planet. And now, just as I warned, we are looking at Hunting Weapons and SSL class DEWS that threaten to turn the entire world of Air Warfare on it’s ear interms of sustainable LERs in the first 2-3 days of banging out an operation bubble in which to FINALLY employ airpower to support ground forces in contact. Assuming we keep our Carriers and Airbases at least 1,500nm out on the radial because we cannot beat the Chinese on a 10 million dollar BASM vs. 10 million dollar SM-3IIa mechanical intercept capability.

So don’t tell me what this kluge is and isn’t. Because I know better than you why it’s so Klotzed (Yiddish: Dead Wood) up. I always have.

The F-35 is as much a ‘fighter’ as Roseanne Barr is an Olympic Sprinter.

AAM-N-10 adapted radar seeker technology from that of the BOMARC. AN/DPN-53/B I believe. Which, considering the fuselage of the BOMARC (@35″) was wider than the wingspan of the Eagle (@34″, 14″ diameter), was no small achievement. The big deal is likely going to be how the midcourse was handled. If the weapon has an ability to effectively double it’s range using a full on autopilot loft (with a mechanical guidance gyro platform) the weapon will not maneuver but will be capable of decent proportional intercept lead estimation. If it’s simply using a referent signal from the three large secondary apertures on the sides the nose, then it will have a fixed trajectory mechanic (so many seconds at such and such a plane index on the controls, possibly with an altitude input) and the weapon itself will be clumsy in flying a fixed trajectory mechanic without reference to target aspect or range rate changes until such time as the seeker reaches lightoff point downrange which will be conservative and apt to put the weapon right in the teeth of any forward facing jammer emitters.

A man I knew who worked on the program said that what would have made the Eagle great or guffawed (not his word) was the APQ-81 radar. Five foot dish, suspended in an upside down horseshoe frame with backing ‘birdcage’ supports and slung under a concentric hoop structure which spun the ENTIRE unit, rather like AI.IX, through 360`, using the equivalent of a giant washing machine motor on the inside of the radar azimuth traverse race. Elevation adjustment was through independent gimbals halfway down the horseshoe and electrical was through a separate shaft, running up the middle. Cassegrain antenna, FIVE FEET across, with a two element flood horn on the stalk, providing different beam widths which could be interleaved to provide simultaneous RWS/TWS level tracking and display feeds to the primitive analogue FCS computer. Massively powerful, for it’s day. ‘Twice the average as the AWG-9 peak ERPs’ was his description.

If you’ve ever seen the EA-3 which Pt. Mugu maintains with the Air SAR radar to map out realworld, in flight, target signatures, that is the radome which would have housed the APQ-81 for flight testing.

http://1000aircraftphotos.com/Contributions/Visschedijk/Additions/12195L-1.jpg

Assuming that the cheek arrays are CW SARH floods for tethering and that the missile has a fully proportional autopilot for adjusting the parabolic peak of the loft, the weapon will receive SARH modulant range indications from the F6D or the E-1 Tracer and use it’s own nodding seeker cut motions (like on STARM or AIM-54 JAT) to inverse gain track the jammer lobe through a series of gain for depression angle assumptions about range, tipping down at a point where the weapon seeker will go active, presumably high above any FQ jammer coverage (i.e. you have to fly into the sidelobe, through the main and out the back ‘plus some’, before the terminal dive).

If you can do this, within the electronics tech limits (volume, heat, power) of the time, this would effectively allow the weapon to walk up the barrage strobe line with little more than parent rough bearing and own vertical displacement adjustments before stooping down and detonating the W42 at a point where you were sure to prompt out the crew and probably poison any onboard weapons, just by proximity detonation within a 1,200ft blast globe.

Is this ‘good tech’? In comparison with period AIM-7C/D off of Demon or Phantom DLI, I would say so, because the targets the USN were projecting for the mid-60s were Mach 2 weapons carriers with long range supersonic standoff weapons of their own (i.e. Tu-22M with AS-4, replacing Tu-16 with AS-3) and there was simply no way to get up and out and on-speed to put a 15nm ranged weapon into parameters before the game shifted from archers to arrows. Even standing FORCAPs would be hard pressed.

Does Eagle compare well with Red Hebe in this? Dunno enough about the British program or it’s design goals to say. The USN always took their strategic mission a lot more seriously than the ‘Air Defense’ elements of the land based equivalents. Partly because they had the firepower and unpredictability of position to be survivable (you cannot protect a city or even airbase, really) but also because they knew their role as exponents in the nuclear strike mi$$ion funding lines would only remain theirs to own so long as they made it clear they were able to stand and deliver at a time and a certain target set, which the USAF couldn’t reach for hours longer.

IMO, what killed the Eagle was a sea change in the political command and control element which realized that the very intensity with which the nuclear mission was being gamed out could lead to a perception that that was the only club in the bag. This was later proven out by Cuba to an extent but it began earlier not after, with an initial period of drawing the claws back in in England and then Turkey. A process which, in my opinion, -led to- October as the Russians were given a bad signal saw a Pavlovian weakness and tried to test it based on the stimulus-response curve (i.e. we were pulling Thor/Jupiter before the crisis began).

This meant that Eagle and the Missileer were doomed as a function of Kennedy coming into office with a different doctrinal policy vision as much as by virtue of technical shortcomings.

Though the two may well have been tied together as the Eagle without the W42 may not have had the small, agile target, capacity to defeat an inshore MiG threat such as you saw with USS Higbee, where the LRAAM carrier is not in a position as FORCAP to either get the overland kill, in the clutter, or to defend itself and the outer picket/NGS screens without becoming vulnerable to both fast jet evasions, own-side radar lock frat and last-weapon-off-here-they-come! self defense issues.

Truthfully, a carrier’s survivability, inshore, can be measured in hours or at most a few days, something which has been known since the Fleet Exercises of the 20s-30s when we first used them to attack key nodes like the Panama Canal and Pearl. As a blue water system the options (Missile Traps etc.) are far more wide open which only leaves the type of aircraft and their ‘walk to a coast and start swimming’ profile to determine how big a threat the CVBG is before it runs shy of logistics for it’s escort group if nothing else.

If you see the world in colors of A2J, A-3 and A-5, with 1,300nm radii off a single tanking and 1-2 weapons per sortie, the ability to displace from launch points without any fixed targeting association actually limits the needs of the Missileer slow-intercept. If you see Strike as A-4/A-6 with 700nm range-not-radii and a one way trip deployment of single weapons on a diminishing airwing as sortie generation capacity, you have another view entirely and here the Missileer starts to become more necessary as the closer you are to the Bear’s Den, the more apt it is to get a sniff of you and come on the run with whatever they can scramble after a SIOP first exchange theory has put bombers into dispersal to avoid missile strikes.

Having a few jets up, all the time, thus begins to make a lot of sense rather than a couple squadrons of DLI which cannot get out in time to beat the AS-2/3 weapon launch (if radar even sees it).

Again, landwards is different. You can push permanent basing a lot further forward with land based ADGE/DCA in much greater densities but in turn you have to be sure they are only going to come along that axis rather than (for instance) through the GIUK Approaches, because your COG isn’t going to pull up it’s skirts and dash another 100nm in any direction to fool them and thus ALL launches can be from low level using simple coastal photo references and timed routes without any ASST required.

Sens,

Anyone who has done CAS knows that MANPADS basically end the fight until or unless helos and RT kill the shooters. Anything requiring a wagon wheel (ANG practice right up through the 80s) or a popup from a fixed IP heading is going to seriously get you _dead_, no matter what. Which means that a CCRP laydown is your best bet, preferably at night, (though this is not a clear delineation either because the Sovs had Pelengator fuzz-busters for a lot of their OMG troops and could theoretically shoot blind).

Keep in mind also that there were at least 2 and often 4 SA-7/14 rounds on each BMP because it was a lot heaper to give individual grunts ten shots than to give a gun or missile ADV a radar system that worked in clutter and didn’t eat ARMs every second whipstitch.

It worked better too because you could spread the pain out and cover your lagger AORs more effectively as you let the enemy get in through the outer layer before shooting him up, in front and behind along likely attack radials, hosing him either as he transited, somewhere between IP and target, or just after he had begun his popup.

Beyond this, nobody sees nuthin’ in a high threat environment with mixed forces, by eye. You have to be cued to it.

Including the A-10 drivers who were so short of thrust that they used to drive around with their boards cranked part open and their throttles all the way forward into mostly-slow mode then slam the brakes shut rather than wait for the TF34 to spool. Four thousand feet for the GAU and nominally 12,000ft for the Maverick were often reduced to a little under 2,000ft overall due to poor ambients and outright haze/rain in USAFE, especially in winter when it was always pissing something (sleet, snow, ice, rain) and ceilings could descend below 1,500ft, easy.

Instead of the MOB, you really rely on a TACP/FAC to give you an RSP like ‘Bridge’ or ‘House at Crossroads’ and then, depending on the weapon and the profile, you either toss with Mk.82 (2-3nm) or you lay down with a cheap cluster like Mk.20 (<200ft). If the latter, you hope for a zot on the TISL to correct the HUD steering with, last second and you ride it in as low as you can speed of pucker go.

The SLUF-D can do both of these, the A-10 cannot do either. It’s slow. It has no radar or moving map or GCAS with which to avoid the high tension lines and the rolling hills of blurred green and for the first two years in Europe, it didn’t even have the Penny.

The thing people have to be aware of is that the notion of a ‘full frontal assault’ as Clancy, Hackett and Coyle advertised would never have happened, IRL. The Soviets knew full well how dangerous it was to hold at a pre-leapoff staging area in the face of NATO artillery and so practiced, _hard_ to enable movement directly into the attack from the march column, usually by splitting forces into a two element wedge and envelopement or bypass pincer. This is Aufrollen or ‘roll up’ attacking into the flank of the defensive position, straight out of the German manual on surfaces and gaps and it is useful because it allows you to break away from the initial point of contact rather than ‘bunching and punching’ to get through it.

The Russians were (and are) _far_ more dangerous an opponent in landwarfare than we give them credit for. If you try to be a speed bump, they will fade right in front of you, drop RT and Air on your head and as the last shell falls, slam into you from both sides before leaving your twitching corpse behind for the 2EF2 to police up.

With this as a given, your best form of ‘CAS’ is in fact helicopter ATGW to stop the lead elements and blind them and then artillery to rapidly lay mines and DPICM on the likely dispersal routes of the enemy as he shifts. You -want- to give him a way out so that he moves into your funnel. Fixed Wing Air simply doesn’t shift and repass fast enough for the amount of effort you have to expend in protecting them with suppression of DCA and nobody was shooting at 155/203/MLRS as they splashed whereas a fast jet fight would always bring a threat response that just made things muddy as you lost your support about the time as the Red Force really plowed you under.

If there is a better way to do CAS, then, perforce, there is a better way to do BAI. Theoretically, that could also be indirect as the TACMS was supposed to be linked into the Pave Mover with a datalink to provide steering for TGSM cluster pops over GMTI as part of Assault Breaker.

However; that got all gnarled up in the USAF insistence on dominating the sensor platform as a massive airliner (utterly unsafe in the frontal area when compared to the Tacit Blue intended platform or the SOTAS/Orchidee backups) and ARMY/AF Roles and Missions dominance came to loggerheads, as usual.

The alternative was to push SOF forward with cross-FLOT ops and let THEM be your sensor network so that, again, you can nail these Fine Folks From The East with lofted or laydown as they are all clutched up in 300m spreads of road march on clogged LOCs.

Even more than for CAS, the A-7Ds night/all weather abilities and 450 knots on the clock with 4-6 whatever, a Jx and a Shrike gave you serious options for keeping the enemy’s heads down while plowing up their replenishment cycles, from halfway across East Germany back to Munich, _survivably_, at night, before things got serious. If nothing else, it’s speed and reach allowed the SLUFs come from the low countries or even England. While the A-10 was essentially stuck like a butterfly pinned to a collector’s board, by it’s association with the six primary FOLs spread across Germany, usually less than 50nm from the IGB. All of which would have been rocketed, moled and/or commando/air assaulted hours before the Real Deal.

Pushing fast jets away from the mixed FSCL/FLOT region is a viable ‘Forward Defense’ strategy because it allows you to break up the first wave assaults with an all-arms counter effort and then chop up your maneuver elements to hit the enemy using cellular AB21 techniques in a push-pull fashion which runs the enemy down rather than hard stopping him while the USAFE assets headed East to BAI clobber the 2EF2.

Anyone who tells you that CAS in a high threat environment is a job best done by low/slow, ‘armored’ whatevers should be quickly and vigorously encouraged to change citizenship and fly for the Russians. I imagine they still have a few Il-2s lying around in a forgotten depot somewhere and that’s about the level of Kurskian logic you are dealing with.