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Dogfighting was supposed to be archaic and improbable in 1968 as well, since who was going to get close and maneuver when you had guided missiles? Then the loss

• ydcvjk 11y ago
  HN markdown/html editing is borken. Your links are too.
  • TeMPOraL 11y ago
    HN never had markdown/HTML formatting support.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
  • insapio 11y ago
    It's the exception in that it worked and was amazing.
    • switchbak 11y ago
      Well, it wasn't originally equipped with guns, which was a severe limitation that was exploited to great effect by the enemy.
• Already__Taken 11y ago
  Looking at those images[1], every defence manufacture has clearly had everything they know stolen haven't they. fixed links [1]: http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/amazing-photos-of-chinas-newest-stealth-jet-show-growin-1657003826 http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/amazing-photos-of-chinas-ne... [2]: http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/broken-booms-why-is-it-so-hard-to-develop-procure-a-1698725648 http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/broken-booms-why-is-it-so-h...
  • stupidcar 11y ago
    Worth remembering when people talk about how the US military budget is bigger than everyone else's put together. It doesn't mean quite as much when everyone else is just waiting for you to pour trillions into R&D then stealing the result.
    • adventured 11y ago
      If stealing information were the key, Russia would have the most powerful military on earth, with a combination of their espionage of US military technology over 60 years and their very substantial defense budget. It's drastically more difficult than that. The US military also doesn't spend trillions on R&D - R&D is the light end of their budget ($80 billion per year for R&D, testing, evaluation). Operations, maintenance, and personnel are the principle costs of the US military budget. You're talking about China (or Russia etc) stealing a fraction of that $80 billion total. The amount of that theft they can then actually put to use, is a further reduced fraction.
      • seanmcdirmid 11y ago
        And China is mostly stealing from Russia at this point (well, buying military hardware from them to copy).
  • adventured 11y ago
    Probably. This has always happened and will always happen. It's no different than the Soviets stealing US nuclear tech 60 years prior. Stealing the plans is the easy part. The challenge is building an integrated military system top to bottom, from engines to electronics. If it were so easy to keep up by stealing, China would have a dozen aircraft carriers by now.
• rhizome 11y ago
  I think it's most likely that the Pentagon and the contractors are taking each other for rides.
• Tuna-Fish 11y ago
  > Dogfighting was supposed to be archaic and improbable in 1968 as well, since who was going to get close and maneuver when you had guided missiles? Then the losses mounted, and they created TOPGUN. There were some actually good reasons to believe that dogfighting was a part of a bygone era. When those planes used in '68 were being developed, missiles truly had the kind of superiority that their designers expected them to have. Then better countermeasures and anti-missile tactics were developed, and suddenly dogfighting was relevant again. The first part is again true today. Missiles are easier to update than aircraft. Taking an air-to-air missile from the 90's and ripping out the laughably outdated electronics and replacing them with a modern CPU and targeting software makes it able to completely bypass all countermeasures available to current fighters. Right now, if an enemy gets to lock a missile at you from within the envelope where you can't simply outrun the missile until it's engine runs out, you might as well immediately eject. Your evasive maneuvers are not going to beat a missile that is getting mid-course updates from it's firing aircraft, which can tell your decoys apart from your plane, and which can plan and simulate the optimal attack vector in ways that the 90's missile designers could only dream of. Near future missile designs using much improved engines like ramjets or the throttleable ducted rocket with a secondary ram combustion stage on the MBDA Meteor seek to increase the engine performance and longevity of missiles to the point that you really can't ever even outrun them. So currently no aircraft can remain flying with missiles in the air. There is, of course, always the possibility that we develop new countermeasures that can beat modern missiles, returning dogfighting to relevance. However, even if missiles always beat aircraft in the future, that doesn't make a F-35 a good fighter. Because, if missiles always beat planes, why not just build lots of cheap planes with a lot of missiles?
  • rjaco31 11y ago
    Because stealth and sensors still play a huge role in your effective distance of engagement, don't they?
  • DennisP 11y ago
    So why don't ground-to-air missiles make all fighters obsolete? (If the answer is that they lack "mid-course updates from it's firing aircraft," that sounds like something that could be jammed.)
• philwelch 11y ago
  It's not entirely the Marines' fault. If there was enough room in the budget to credibly deliver a next-gen replacement for the F-16 and F/A-18 platforms as well as a separate Harrier replacement, the Marines would take it in a heartbeat. The problem is that the Joint Strike Fighter concept is a bean-counting "let's use one plane to meet everyone's requirements" program.
  • mcv 11y ago
    Several specialized fighters would probably be a lot cheaper, and they'd all be a lot more effective too. It's really the requirement of "it has to do everything and then some" that's crippling the design here.
  • cdash 11y ago
    Well, maybe we don't need a Navy's Army's Airforce. More importanly, VTOL is a just plain dumb idea and should not be used at all for a jet fighter.
    • jcoyne 11y ago
      This is due to hard feelings from when the Navy abandoned the Marines at Guadalcanal. Also tradition and territory is so important in the military. They aren't really capable of making some monumental change like doing away with Marine aviation.
      • philwelch 11y ago
        It's not so much that (Marine aviation existed before the U.S. entered World War I) and more to do with the fact that the Navy and Marines have entirely different aviation missions. The Navy specializes in fleet defense, naval warfare, and light bombing while the Marines specialize in close air support. Different mission specializations, unsurprisingly, call for entirely different technical requirements. Even if the Marines didn't have their own aviation, they would still need close air support from the Navy, and the requirement for a STOVL aircraft would still exist.
    • philwelch 11y ago
• InclinedPlane 11y ago
  > "What really makes dogfighting unlikely, is the fact that United States hasn't fought anyone with airplanes in 40 years." This is flat out wrong. The US fought Iraq twice, and Yugoslavia/Serbia, both of which had significant air forces. But in both cases the battle was so lopsided due to technological/numerical/logistical imbalances that the other side only had a few engagements before deciding to avoid doing so. In the first gulf war more than 2 dozen Iraqi aircraft were downed in air to air engagements. In the quasi-war that persisted between the gulf war and the invasion of Iraq there were numerous air to air engagements and downings of Iraqi aircraft. During the Kosovo campaign the Serbian military decided to try to test the mettle of their Mig-29s against NATO and got their ass handed to them by F-15s and F-16s. In the Iraq war the Iraqis decided to keep their aircraft grounded.
  • Spooky23 11y ago
    I've always been genuinely curious about this. Is this more about superiority of equipment, training, tactics or all of the above?
    • InclinedPlane 11y ago
      All of the above. US/NATO forces use effectively "combined arms" techniques. The first gulf war is an excellent example of this. First was intelligence gathering, mapping out SAM/AA and radar sites as well as their characteristics (frequencies, etc.) Early on a series of drones were launched to get the SAM radars to light them up, making it possible to locate and characterize each radar site. Then the first wave of attacks concentrated on taking out the ground based SAM infrastructure using conventional bombing attacks (say, tomahawk cruise missiles hitting the known locations) as well as radar-homing "anti-radiation" missiles (ARM). Additionally, because the radar signals characteristics had been determined that made electronic warfare and radar countermeasures that much more effective. Aircraft like the EA-6B Prowler and the F-111 would be able to send out specially crafted radar signals of the exact frequency and characteristics used by radar sites to spoof different radar returns, making the radar effectively unusable. Meanwhile, command and control systems were being hit including communication lines and upper echelon meeting places. The F-117, for example, was hitting high level targets in downtown Baghdad in the earliest moments of the gulf war. And then airfields were being hit, taking out runways and destroying planes on the ground. When the airplanes took to the sky they flew air superiority wings protecting bombing wings, and the battlespace is monitored by AWACS radar planes. So you have a high number of planes that are working in a coordinated manner and making use of tons of data from radar facilities and so forth vs isolated, unsupported groups of planes that have numerical inferiority. That alone would be a huge advantage even if the technology and the training were identical, but when you add in the edge that superior technology and training provide it becomes overwhelming. Also, most people know of the "Topgun" school, but most do not know the details. There were tremendous changes in the nature of aerial combat in the 1950s and 1960s as planes transitioned to jets and became capable of supersonic flight, onboard radar systems got added, radios became better, and a whole host of guided missiles became primary weapons systems. Air to air guided missiles have many limitations and need to be fired only under certain relative conditions of trajectory and airspeed between the attacker and target, and it's not always intuitive how to transition from a given relative configuration to one where firing a missile will have the highest chance of hitting the target. Additionally, maintaining an upper hand in air to air combat is tricky and requires a special set of skills. In the 1960s there were two seminal works that laid the ground work for training pilots in the future. One was the Ault report, which was a very brutal look at the performance of American pilots in Vietnam up to that point. It's not to say that those pilots were doing poorly, only that they were making lots of mistakes that could be avoided with better training, especially in terms of knowing how and when to fire their weapons to have the greatest chances of a hit. The other was the combined work of Col. John Boyd and Thomas Christie in formulating foundational theory of modern fighter jet combat. They came up with the idea of the OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) and "Energy-Maneuverability theory". The basic idea of OODA loop theory is that a pilot should be cycling through the Observe-Orient-Decide-Act phases as quickly as possible (without compromising the quality of each phase), and in so doing will maintain an edge in encounters. This is because the whole system, not just the pilot, is like an organism, and the OODA cycle time is characteristic of the reaction time of the organism. Having a faster reaction time is advantageous and can make it possible to steal the initiative from an opponent or to dull the advantage of the opponent having the initiative. This applies regardless of the maneuverability of the plane a pilot is flying, though more maneuverable planes tend to encourage a faster innate OODA-loop. EM theory forms the theoretical framework around which a pilot maneuvers their plane to avoid being at a disadvantage to the enemy while working toward gaining an advantage and to coming into a configuration where releasing weapons is most effective. That training has been the basis for fighter pilot performance in western countries since then, and it's resulted in extremely capable pilots.
• mcv 11y ago
  I read an article some time ago about how the US Air Force was more interested in fighters that looked like what they felt fighters should look like, rather than simply effective fighters; designed for missions that they wanted to be important, rather than missions that are actually used in reality; and of course big orders with manufacturers, because that's where the top of the air force retires. That article also pointed out that for those reasons, the air force hates the A-10, despite the fact that it's actually the most effective planes for one of the most common mission types that they have. But it's not what they want to do, and it doesn't look like an F-15, so it's no good.
  • ourmandave 11y ago
    One reason they're retiring the A-10 is wiring. It's inadequate for all the electronics they want to upgrade and to expensive to replace because the design is so tight you'd have to gut the plane. I imagine the option of having a microwaved Hot Pocket on a long mission without blowing the fuses would be nice.
    • mcv 11y ago
      So build a replacement for the A-10. If the idea is good, but the version from the 1970s is woefully out of date, then design something that does exactly that, but better.
      • jambox888 11y ago
        I was under the impression that the A-10 is fine for Afghanistan but useless anywhere there is good air defence - just too slow. That said it could be useful for blunting an armoured vanguard.
        • cbd1984 11y ago
          Who are we fighting who has a good air defense? Also, who are we fighting who would have a good air defense the second week of the conflict? (Don't say China. China has replaced Confucianism with Waltonism, as in Sam.)
• shiven 11y ago
  Interesting analysis. But a little title hard to read because HN does not parse HTML. Please see the formatting guidelines for further info https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc.
• a3n 11y ago
  The contractors' accountants know what they're doing.
• cafard 11y ago
  F-111 anyone?
• philjohn 11y ago
  If you read the excellent Command and Control you'll see the same thing happened with nucelar weapons, each branch of the miltary had competing requirements, tried to make land grabs for control of them etc. etc.
• justin66 11y ago
  > First, the Pentagon hadn't learned it's lessons from all the other times they tried to make one fighter for every service which almost always has failed. (The F-4 being the notable exception.) The F-4 was developed to be a Navy fighter and turned out to be a decent all-around fighter which the Air Force could buy. That kind of reinforces your point about design and development, really. > I don't think the Pentagon knows what it's doing. Actually, I don't think anyone involved knows what they're doing. All the right people are getting paid. They know exactly what they're doing.
  • merpnderp 11y ago
    So the F-4 is a great case study for why the F-35 should be dropped in favor of the SuperHornet :)