http://seapowermagazine.org/stories/20170418-F35.html

Gripen E could perhaps be a good adversary for F-35/F-22 however probably too expensive… and also it will still take some time before it becomes available. Probably they will get some old F-16 and put AESA radars in them?

Also interesting for the few remaining sceptics that this is another confirmation that the F-35 is indeed starting to deliver.

Yes, it is starting to deliver against legacy fighters some decades old respectively, no one of what AFAIK has had any serious RCS reduction feature.
This not to thrash it in any way, just to keep things in the right dimension.

This is a private contractor using Kfirs (propelled by an J79) and first gen F-16 at best and he is not talking about combat maneuvering but about radars performances.
Any modern radar i.e. the ones onboard planes actually in production can track several tenths of targets hence the difficulties they are experimenting in this form of simulation.

I still think it looks shonky.

The canopy is flimsy and the whole thing is small. No reheat no the engines too? An optical turret that looks more suited to a UAV than a high speed LO jet.

Confusing….

If you assume public information on the Qaher 313 is a disinformation campaign designed to make it less likely that the developers will get bumped off as a result of the aircraft not being taken seriously and all the US satellites can make out is the rough shape of the wings then the real aircraft is more likely to be a cheap, slow and low flying CAS fighter that takes advantage of ground effect and can be launched aquatically given the history of the company. The position of the intakes could be explained by a requirement for takeoff on water.

Public information are conceived in the way to boost public support but even from the official ones (not fanboys or Farsi/Sputnik/Daily Beast level ones) it is stated that it would be a low level flying plane operating along this operative mode.

It’s a Sepah not Artesh project so it would operate along their not-conventional thinking warfare guidelines.

Think to it as a (tentatively) stealth Scorpion or AMX and you would get the idea.

And this is just the first real prototype so certainly would be refined as thing goes by.
Still a waste of money IMHO, for the eternal problem they have in coupling advanced design concepts (that they quite paradoxically are perfectly capable of deal with) with a hardware technology level still at a late seventies-early eighties level.

A pity, because the design is interesting: weird looking as it seems, its small wing /big lifting body fuselage is what IMHO you really need for a light attack stealth plane, allowing both good flying performances than viable payload.

To clarify my though better: I’m convinced that they are serious in trying to develop it i.e. that it is not a fake or something build only for propaganda/ funding request.
This because Iranians (and more specifically the IRGC) has this habit of trying to develop a lot of things in the same time: they start ten item knowing that one will work as intended, three would be a complete failure, the other would prove themselves somewhat working but not really worth the money spent of them.
So I will put Quaher between the second or the third of these categories.
They would so spend money in developing it but they would found that there are a million things that would give them more at a fraction of the price, once arms embargo would be lifted…

And you felt it appropriate to bring it up as a rebuttal to a completely unrelated topic. Anyhow, why would they buy F-15Es to replace F-15Cs? That makes little sense especially since there is likely to be zero difference (it may actually be more expensive) than an F-15E and an F-35A which the USAF really really wants to increase the buy rate form 60 to 80 if not closer to 100. So yeah the Pacific bomber threat will be dealt with by using a mix of fighters including the F-22A which already operates in the area, the F-35A which is heading to that area. If the argument is that the F-15C is badly needed to fend off Russian bombers than it is a rather poor argument. If that threat skyrockets you would need new aircraft anyhow either F-22’s or PCA and the latter is exactly one of the ‘options’ that is opened up by freeing up investment on the f-15C fleet.

Again ideally you would want to invest in retaining a highly capable F-15C fleet upgraded with AESA and GaN EW suite along with IRST, a gateway capability and structural modifications but you cannot pay “any cost” to get or retain that capability and if budgets remain at the levels the USAF expects them they may want to have another look at it. If given an option of acquiring an additional 140-150 F-35A’s as opposed to retaining 280 odd F-15Cs for 12 additional years it would be pretty safe to assume the USAF will choose the former. It is an entirely reasonable analysis and trade space and as mentioned had nothing to do with what we were originally talking about before you introduced this to the conversation as a straw man.

Bring it on, please just give a look back to the previous two pages.
You would easily see how it was not me the one that has inserted himself in a completely unrelated topic, it were you.
I have yust made you aware that I was asking another completely different thing from what you have tried to reply.
And it you that kept coming to me after I have written two times that I consider the argument closed.
So, this is my last direct response to you, so not to transform this in a sort of personal feud.
I will however keep on discussing the question of the relative status of the different air forces around the world with the others and I still look at what you would say on the topic with all the attention that they deserve.

There in lies your problem. You completely look past what people are actually saying and go of on your rants. none of the capabilities I mentioned require any of any significant USAF investment. These are US Navy and Army networks that are investing and expanding to meet this interoperability. Had you simply understood this point you would have saved yourself a lot of time.

So, it seems that You don’t have understood what I was asking for and I couldn’t care less about the content of your reply to something I never asked.
And this not because I not care about your opinion, just because I was not asking anything about money.
So why we keep on discussing on two totally different things?

I however does not retain to have lost my time at all given that someone has instead replied on the topic i was really asking for.

The idea is one of the proposals being looked at. Air Forces periodically look at their structures and chart the future course, closely pegging their future decisions to their budget and demands. The USAF has looked at both the option of keeping the F-15Cs till the 40’s and retiring them early in the past as well. Same thing with the F-16. If asked to re-evaluate their force structure, as one would expect under a new civilian leadership all these options will almost have to be considered again. That is why the media jumping on this aside it is a part of the normal process of developing a particular force structure out into the future. Upon completion of this the Air Force will present options to their civilian leader (SecAF) and the OSD which then will work with Congress to see which path to take. Keeping F-15C’s for 8-10 years more has an added cost over swapping them out for F-16s. It also has a capability component so both will be looked at to develop the future course of action.

There has been an F-15C, F-15E and F-16C upgrade and/or Life-Extension program being researche, funded and/or gamed for over a decade. They could pick 2 of the three or go for all three but a lot will depend on other factors, how the BCA does in its last FYDP and how the USAF addresses capability concerns as a whole. Its a finite pot and you have to trade one thing for another and their leadership will do this. If they get a Milestone A decision on a new PCA things will get easier and the same applies to if they get budgetary relief as they did with the A-10.

I have enough information to know where it is headed though through modernization and where it is likely to get to given the various things the USAF FYDP and beyond budget pans out. As I said in my last post, the USAF alone would have acquired over 500 modern fifth generation aircraft by FY20 (to put things in context Trump is finishing up on his FY18 proposal at the moment) and this is before they begin ordering the F-35A at its maximum annual planned buy rate of 60 aircraft a year. So yeah some of us have the ability to see what they have in the pipeline, what has already been committed to and what is going to be committed to in the short term. Long term is harder to predict hence I kept the reference year at FY20 to keeps things simple.

Something seems to have irked you when I enumerated some of the “active” and/or likely investment tracks and you went off on your rant. Again, I ask you which one of those things I mentioned is either not funded or not demonstrated or not a logical progression of some of the investments currently sanctioned for modernizing systems and architectures? Most aren’t even USAF specific, they are US Navy, Marine Corps, or Army specific investments and whether the USAF decides to retire the F-15C in 2025, 2030 or 2040 has no bearing on them.

No not me. Haven’t been to Bristol (Duke via Johns Hopkins)…

It seems me that I have not be able to explain myself well given that you are challenging me about something I have never contested.
I’m not at all interested in the fact that the USAF are actually spending american taxpayer’s money in financing some projects.
I was instead asking the partecipants to compare this constant push in searching some breakthrough technologies a.k.a wunderwaffe with the actual situation of the Airforce itself in terms of average age and combat readiness of its planes and the forwarded idea of retiring the F-15c line (that I consider just absurd but that is probably a fait accompli).

Given that according to you there is not any problem in this trend; ok, tout va bien.

It would only question it if one were taking those charts with perfect 400 km circles drawn around Latakia literally. There were problems with that then and there are problems with them now. One is that there is not a 400 km missile deployed there, and another is that altitude limits radar horizon to roughly 50-60 km for a low altitude cruise missile.

Certainly, and it’s because of this that a good AD system have to be composed by a series of different systems, overlapping one with the other and with different characteristics.
So also in the case of S-400, there also several battery of other systems like the Pantsir offering point defense against low flying cruise missiles and so on.
Even more difficult is to think that a system placed on the coast can offer a valuable protection to another target situated hundreds of km away from missiles taking a completely divergent approach route.
Hence the move to put several Syaaf air asset in Latakia airbase means that they are better protected, both politically than militarly.

The US Army is pursuing deeper multi service and multi domain integration for both offensive and defensive fires and networks.

The objective is to enable a wide set of assets to be interoperable like this and that is what some of these initiatives are tackling. It doesn’t matter if your cues come from an F-35, Predator, future fighter, unmanned aircraft, JTAC etc but that your offensive and defensive fires are closely integrated and can seamlessly upload and offload targeting quality data whether that is to an AEGIS battle management system to guide an SM6 or a future active SM2, or to the Army system to cue up a Patriot interceptor on on the offensive side as these processes and technologies advance to cover long range fires in the form of naval guns/EMRG and the Army’s LRPF. F-35 will be available with the Navy, Air Force and the Marines and will be there in quantity so it is a very good place to start (as the Navy and Marines have already done).

Let’s compare this bombastic future plans…

https://www.dodbuzz.com/2017/04/12/air-force-opts-to-keep-f-16s-flying-for-decades-longer/

…with the real situation of the force now.