Posted on 06/16/2009 8:11:41 PM PDT by Nachum
Of course not, because the facts don't support your position. As Reagan used to say, you're entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.
“We don’t need advanced capabilities over our own territory.”
Pray tell me how that worked out for the Polish in WW2. Or the French.
Part of the function of a military is to be so overwhelmingly powerful and capable that nobody in their right mind would attack it.
And upgraded F15's and F16's are more than capable of doing that within our own territory.
No, they’re not. There is no way to add stealth to their airframes and engines, and if you look at the list you’ll note that a lot of the F-16 kills have been via IR missiles. Bolting a new radar on and adding new weapons carriage capability is just like converting merchant ships to be carriers - it never really works out.
Also, two F-15’s have been lost to ground fire in US service.
We don’t need stealth within our borders.
Incorrect.
Not economically, there isn’t. You would have to redesign the entire airframe, or at the very least modify it so heavily that you would need to recertify it all over again.
Doing a band-aid fix would also increase the weight and lower the performance of the aircraft. Take the F-16 as an example. Just to get radar stealth, not even IR stealth, you would have to swaddle the aircraft’s internals with radar absorbent materials, you would have to redesign the composite skin of the aircraft for radar absorbent materials including the air intakes, you would have to somehow come up with an internal weapons bay, and at the very least redesign or relocate almost all of the avionics to make room for the RAM and bay. And when you’re done, you’re still going to have an inferior aircraft to the F-35.
How do I know? I asked a Lockheed engineer friend of mine (from the F-35 project) about retrofitting the F-16, and he just laughed at me. Then he explained the same thing and saidthat it would be cheaper to just go ahead with F-35 production.
I haven’t the slightest doubt about the scenario you painted; the 9 is NOT a fighter, nor will it ever be.
Are you confident that there will be no uninhabited airframes in the air-to-air role in 15 year’s time...? My guess is that 3 or more countries will have multiple models acting in that capacity.
Standby terms like “ingress” and “egress” will have to be rethought; stealthy fighters will stay on station much more persistently. Fewer will be needed, and pilots will be called on for key decision-making steps only as those airframes encounter targets —they will then go back into an automated patrol mode, requiring no man in the loop for those long, dull stretches.
Later, some might need a pilot in the loop only at key junctures to assuage legal requirements, another area that will require considerable tweaking.
We are in the BEGINNNING, a little bit like when WWI biplanes acted in the recon role, later dropping crude fused bomblets by hand, and then later....??
AI research hasn’t really been going much of anywhere lately. There haven’t been any really major breakthroughs in over a decade.
I’m pretty confident that there will still be manned airframes in front-line air to air fighting in 20 years, let alone 15. The people that say that the AI drone will replace the manned fighter in that time frame are the same kind of people that said that the missile rendered guns on fighters obsolete in the 50s. We all know how well that worked out when the gunless F-4 appeared. Yeah, not so well.
It wasn’t until 40 years later that missile actually began to actually be able to get close to the promise made by the “gunless” advocates.
Restore them to pristine flying condition, those old early Eagles, Vipers, Hornets, Rhinos, Skyhawks and even old BUFFs to defend CONUS, since they don’t have the stealth and recruit junior but well-trained early 20s pilots to man them.
What? I don’t think the pilots manning the vintage and legacy aircraft are gonna be illegals, especially from Mexland.
But the dry desert conditions in SW United states aided their preservation.
There are 700 ex-USN Rhinos that have plastic wrapping.
Air superiority is the ultimate safeguard, and there is no substitute for it, offensive or defensive.
Yup - on the missile range, those early missiles looked great and got amazing kill scores - but when deployed to the field, they turned out to be almost useless. They wouldn’t lock up, would lock up something else, would lock up the sun instead, would go wander off god knows where, etc., etc. And when the small store of missiles were depleted.... the gunless F-4 was just an unarmed target.
More than one disgusted F-4 driver, having exhausted his not-so-smart munitions in close air support to no avail and not having any other weapons, was known to have ejected the missile rails from his aircraft as a “dumb” kinetic energy weapon against a ground target. Sometimes the rails did more damage than the actual munitions that had been on them.
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