Face it, all weapons manufacturers talk up their own gear and rubbish the opposition, even when they are manufacturing both weapon and countermeasure. The only realistic arbiter is war, and we haven’t had one of those for a long, long time. When a high-end conflict really does break out, I expect there will be almost as many unexpected and unwelcome lessons as were learned in 1914. Platforms and whole classes of equipment that are currently at the core of military inventories and planning assumptions will be found to be obsolete within the first few months of conflict. It’s like a bushfire: there’s a lot of old growth built up in them forests, just waiting for the spark…
And just as the experience of slaughtering Zulus, Tibetans, and other unfortunate natives did not exactly prepare the British for what they found on the western front, the recent neo-colonial experiences of the United States will not have prepared it for conflicts that may eventuate with e.g. China or Russia.
To some extent but testing has not demonstrated an effectiveness against IIR for flares and the maths is not in favour of brief target obscuration leading to a miss either. In a war I fully expect DIRCM would make it onto fighters surprisingly quickly if the enemy had IIR missiles but right now, no enemy actually does have IIR missiles, so the emphasis is not that great.
Nobody expected slaughtering Zulus to prepare them for WWI and nobody expects fighting ISIS to prepare them for WWIII.
Now this is ridicules. Why are you drawing scenario where any fighter starts turning when the missile is right up their @ss??
The whole point of sensors like PRESIDENT or similar systems is to give a pilot a heads-up, so that he can turn in time.
And what is this crap about hiding the plane for 1 sek..?? How the hell would you know?
Well you referenced a ‘brief moment’ in your earlier statement. How long is your brief moment exactly? My point was that brief moments do not lead to significant deviations of intercept trajectory, even under highly optimistic conditions. Missile’s move faster than you think, WVR, the missile is already up their backside as soon as it’s launched, especially if it has the newer 160+mm rocket motors. A missile travels 1km in a second and a plane can realistically only alter its true intercept point by a few dozen metres during the same period. And we’re talking about having to actually change their turn angle, if the missile sees the turn angle, it will counter it, so they must change it just as the missile loses sight. And this all assumes the flare can block out all frequencies in two bands simultaneously. Now if you spread out the energy over many frequencies like that, you tend to get dim flares, which are equally ineffective.
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