According to AFM those Ukrainian gunships were operating without IR jammers or anything else resembling a self defence array capable of defeating MANPADS so the resulting losses were not exactly surprising.

IR jammers won’t work against dual waveband, or amplitude filtering IIR seekers, even DIRCM won’t unless it can fire at several frequencies at once. A modern AAA will also make light work of them. Helicopters are just big, obvious and slow and sit too close to potential and unexpected lethal danger.

Yes I agree. The RAF however are not making much noise about that capability (possibly because of internal politics pre SDSR) and no one else is bothered to my knowledge.

Storm shadow needs CFT however.

Well it’s debatable. Storm Shadow has a range of 300nm on a lo-lo flight profile, the Typhoon has a range of 2900km with just AAMs and internal fuel. Add a central drop tank and you’re still be looking at circa 2500km even with the Storm Shadows, giving a strike radius of at least 1811+km with no aerial refuelling even if you send the missile on the lowest flight profile and easily over 2000km for higher flight profiles. For many nations that is enough, it’s only really in fairly exceptional circumstances that one requires a longer range than that. In 1991 over Iraq, most airstrikes took places over <1000km in radius and the range offered with Storm Shadow and a central drop tank is enough to hit Baghdad from Yemen for comparison’s sake and more than enough to reach Tehran from Riyadh, without even entering Iranian airspace. In fact in 1991 the longest cruise missile strike was 1500km with a Tomahawk from the Gulf of Oman, strikes from the Persian Gulf were about half that range. For many an airstrike from more than 1800km away with 3 drop tanks isn’t really too realistic (or even necessary), unless the enemy is a) useless or b) thoroughly crippled wrt air power and air defence capacity, in which case mid-air refuelling becomes an option. It’s an easy fit and the potential is there though should there be any weird export requirements.

I know that all Tranche 3 aircraft have provisions for CFTs.

I see VSTOL jets as being mainly for the purposes of ground attack from forward airbases, although the original thinking was that they’d be needed because airbases could be bombed out during WWIII, but surely roads would be a better alternative means of take-off.

I could however make a good argument for the F-18E/F given that they’ve already operated F-18s, and may therefore be able to use existing jets for spares and the new training requirements for pilot and groundcrew would be somewhat reduced relative to a completely new fighter. Production and delivery timescales would also be reduced given the greater mass-manufacturing ability of the US relative to Sweden or France. It’s also the cheapest option, does the job of air-policing adequately and is likely to be better supported in terms of future updates and stores due to its origin. Two engines is always a nice to have as well, decent safety record too.

There is nothing arbitrary about the annexation of the Crimea, the eastern Ukraine and the only reason the Baltic Republics haven’t been gobbled yet up by Russia just like the Crimea and the Eastern Ukraine is because they are NATO members. If the Kremlin decides to bless the rest of the Ukraine with the joys of Putinism and park a thousand of it’s tanks and 50.000 troops on the Polish border who will have the backbone and the resources to support Poland? Germany? Britain? France? I’m not an American and I’m ashamed to admit it but I’m not holding my breath for even one of the European NATO countries to have the backbone to do that without a great degree of reluctance. The French live in a bubble, we Germans are reluctant to fight wars and our military is an unholy mess that doesn’t even have a working assault rifle and just barely manages to keep a dozen EF2000 fighter on alert, the British are loathe to do anything that keeps Russian oligarch money form flowing into their precious financial sector and their military is in no better shape that the German forces. Poland will go with American equipment and they will be well advised to do so because they are well aware of the fact that the Americans are by far the most likely to stand up to the Russians and help them without having to be kicked in the ass five times before they honour their commitments to the NATO alliance. The AH-64 is a thoroughly combat proven platform, sold by a vendor whose government is not likely to put an embargo on spare parts if Poland ever faces a serious threat from Russia.

*Sigh*:confused:

If what happened in Ukraine in February 2014 happened in Mexico, the US would have parked 50,000 tanks in Mexico the next day, then we have the historical precedent of ‘The Bay of Pigs,’ ‘Operation Northwoods’ and ‘School of the Americas’. It always helps to look at this thing from both sides. Historically it could easily be argued that the Ukraine had no right to retain Crimea after the collapse of the Soviet Union and one could view what happened last February as a coup launched off the back of a popular protest against a democratically elected government. I’m actually surprised Russia didn’t go much further, they did in fact receive an invite to help from the former democratically elected government, which would have given it much greater validity than recent NATO interventions and it could actually have saved lives, as it did in Crimea. The Ukraine itself was a misfit collection of provinces and ethnicities glued together by the SU and after that finished it was only a matter of time before it fell apart, much like Yugoslavia. Now it’s in the main governed by ultra-nationalists intent on cleansing the country of the Russian ethnicity and culture. Don’t get me wrong, Russia has done a lot of wrong in the past under the SU flag, but this isn’t an example of that.

1000 or 1500 T/R module for a given power output will give equivalent range. Besides it is not like rafale need to dedicate T/R modules to do jamming or com ,thanks to dedicated features. +/-70 degree FOV does give latitude enough for disengaging. That EF gone for swatch plate is an incentive to customer that were concerned loss of critical capability for the plane switching from MECA to AESA . This considering that as optimized as Captor M is,the range increase going AESA was not convincing enough.
As far as I know there will is ultimately only one version ,2 way link for meteor. Anyway while it provides info back, it is far from being a game changer in any way or form.
That RBE2 gained significant range by switching from PESA to AESA should not come as a surprise. The PESA are notorious for inducing power loss of up to 50 %+.
There are enough evidence of Spectra enabling passive shot BVR, as long as one cease to dismiss systematically those reported , the topic is enough hush-hush to not be too picky because it is reported by FAF personal .It won’t be long range BVR , I grant you that , but good enough for a fox 3 with a MICA IR .And no in the 6 o’clock ,the IR seeker of the MICA was not locked ,nor even tracking the target.
That this did not lead to an actual firing in the occurrence should not prevent from concluding when one claim DAS could do the same and any IR seeker can engage at up to 20 km at the same time.

With a given per module output, power increases in proportion to the number of modules. But you’re quite wrong about it just being about power output. The number of modules also increases the Gain proportionally and received power is proportional to Ps x G^2/R^4. Azimuth and elevation resolution also improves in proportion to 1/sqrt(N). AESA jamming also provides far greater X-Band jamming potential than conventional jammers.

http://www.dsp-book.narod.ru/skolnik/7913X_07a.pdf
http://www.radartutorial.eu/01.basics/The%20Radar%20Range%20Equation.en.html

Rafale’s Meteor link is only one-way, because it is the same legacy one that was used for the MICA. A two-way link added to a swash-plate advantage gives a shooter far more evasive flexibility after firing.

There is absolutely no evidence of significant Spectra BVR shots. The one at <20km required laser ranging, hence not passive and also below the range of modern missile IIR seekers and well below that of IRST. Then we have a rear shot at 7.8nm (reported range) using an IIR seeker missile that doesn’t rely on any information from Spectra and didn’t actually happen in reality because no missile was fired. It could be argued that any live test shot isn’t realistic vs a real engagement but when you don’t actually even fire the missile or hit anything it’s pure pie in the sky BS.

You see this is where your story falls down. Not reported because it’s secret, yet halloweene alleges a pilot blurted it on Twitter??:highly_amused:

IRST gives passive ranging as well as high precision bearing information and I know that live rear ASRAAM shots at ‘well over 5km’ have been executed at low altitude in testing. Modern IIR seekers, as fitted to the IRIS-T and ASRAAM can engage out to 25km. Testing information is scarce but that’s the claim on the IRIS-T datasheet, which is surely as good as a hypothetical non-shot at any rate.:D

http://www.selex-es.com/documents/737448/17674588/body_mm07797_Pirate_IRST_LQ_March14.pdf
http://defense-update.com/newscast/0309/asraam_loal_test_130309.html

AH-64E, no question. Best ATGMs (potentially upgradable to Brimstone or JAGM), most accurate gun, APKWS II, combat proven.

Pffft @ Russia invading Poland. Is that the same guy who suggested Austria and Germany might invade Switzerland? It amazes me when people fail to consider the full political backdrop of Crimea and look at it as some kind of arbitrary invasion that might happen to any Eastern European nation next week.