Interesting:
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Mar 22, 2012 06:03
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Armyman25 posted:Interesting:     The M-50 was real, but didn't made it onto production. It was never nuclear. The rest of the story
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Mar 22, 2012 13:54
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grover posted:Overtime might not be paid, but an Airman's time is not free; burdened labor rate on a military enlistedman is actually WAY higher than for a civilian or contractor, even with additional people/OT included. You can't just factor in those 16 hours he spent on the aircraft, but the 2 years of training, the enlistment bonuses, the health care, the relocation expenses, the military retirement costs, etc. You hit the nail on the head about the whole cost per flight hour issue. Each of the services calculate it differently and utilize a number of methods that can skew the actual cost in either direction. You throw into the mix the work mix between depot and contractors as well as how you spread these costs over an entire fleet of aircraft and it becomes incredibly difficult to get a good answer of what the true cost for operating a given aircraft is.
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Mar 22, 2012 14:42
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priznat posted:A B-1B with a cylonesque sweeping red light where the cockpit is would look pretty drat cool. Requesting an animated .gif of this please. Here's a picture of my favorite cold war bomber from my recent visit to the National Museum of Flight by Edinburgh. Click for slightly bigger.  This particular Vulcan dropped a deuce in the Falklands.  But wait, what's with the Brazilian flag there?  It's too bad that it's left outside in the elements. It has definitely seen better days. Edit: VVVVV My bad, I thought it was a clickable thumbnail. I fixed it. EduardoEspecial fucked around with this message at 20:03 on Mar 23, 2012 |
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Mar 22, 2012 17:17
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EduardoEspecial posted:
I can barely read this. more info for other blind people http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Black_Buck
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Mar 22, 2012 23:22
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Warbadger posted:The F-35 may very well be a fine aircraft after a decade of work to fix the issues they find when it finally starts flying and to be honest the people making GBS threads on the project from a capability standpoint (criticizing the massive cost overruns is certainly called for) are loving retarded. Depends on how you define "making GBS threads on the project from a capability standpoint." An "air dominance fighter" that can only carry 4 air to air missiles (max load) and may or may not have a cannon on board is loving retarded. An interdiction platform that can only carry two 2,000 lbs class munitions is pretty dumb. When the program office/LockMart make absolutely ludicrous, easily disproven claims like "USAF studies show that the F-35 is at least 400 percent more effective in air-to-air combat capability than the best fighters currently available in the international market" I really don't feel bad about criticizing them both on a performance and a cost overrun basis, especially when the folks who aren't beholden to the program say things around the same time like "I wake up in a cold sweat at the thought of the F-35 going in with only two air-dominance weapons." (Granted, this has been increased to four, but the fact that this was even an option at any point speaks to the brainpower behind the people coming up with the requirements on this jet.) Since the JSF got brought up, here's yet another example of the program boosters getting caught in a bold faced lie. Short version: a Canadian defense (sorry, "defence") official said the other day that they "have not as yet discounted, the possibility, of course, of backing out of any of the program". The problem is that when the Canadian government was trying to ram through approval of fully getting on board with the JSF back in 2010 here's what the procurement minister had to say: quote:Let’s remember we are acquiring a fighter for the next 30 or 40 years. I would ask whether you would want your son or daughter or future granddaughter in yesterday’s technology or in the most effective and secure aircraft in the future. (emphasis added) The rub is that the document that lays out the "operational requirements" was a complete load of poo poo that the government blew out of its rear end a few weeks before it committed to the JSF program and that it has yet refused to release (despite the fact that the bulk of it is unclassified.) So either what the procurement minister said in 2010 is true and since the Canadian government is now willing to back out on the program the Canadian government is okay with risking the lives of their AF and sons/daughters/grandchildren and the future of their entire AF, or what the procurement minister said in 2010 was a complete load of bullshit. I think you know where I sit on that, but those really are the only two options (if we assume that governments are occasionally truthful). Of course, I suppose there is a third option...both of the statements were bullshit because governments will say anything to get what they want and all this latest announcement is is an effort by the Canadian government to play hardball with price negotiations, and since Japan is quite possibly doing the same thing it's going to be interesting to see if there's a domino effect with this, as everyone starts to make noises to avoid being the one left holding the bag for price increases vs playing hardball to get the original price locked in. daskrolator posted:You hit the nail on the head about the whole cost per flight hour issue. Each of the services calculate it differently and utilize a number of methods that can skew the actual cost in either direction. You throw into the mix the work mix between depot and contractors as well as how you spread these costs over an entire fleet of aircraft and it becomes incredibly difficult to get a good answer of what the true cost for operating a given aircraft is. Similar to the PAUC/APUC/etc bullshit you always see with any acquisitions program that is having money issues (most recently with the JSF). In theory it should be incredibly easy to separate the actual numbers from the bullshit, since each has a clearly defined set of what is and isn't included, but man, that isn't the case in reality. Doesn't help that the folks who know the most about it (manufacturer and program office) are usually trying to obfuscate the actual facts in favor of making things seem cheaper than they actually are. Flanker posted:I can barely read this. Specifically Black Buck Four and Five for the missile symbols, and Black Buck Six for the Brazilian flag.
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Mar 22, 2012 23:25
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This is the coolest version of the Black Buck refueling diagram I've ever seen. Honestly debated printing it out as using it as wall art at one time... Click for FUCKALLHUGE http://www.flickr.com/photos/36343059@N08/5333443916/sizes/o/in/photostream/
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Mar 23, 2012 03:08
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So basically they refueled refuelers, to refuel refuelers, to refuel refuelers, so they could refuel refuelers so they could refuel a Vulcan 6 times.
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Mar 23, 2012 03:23
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That kind of poo poo is why the cold war was so cool. Countries spent mad money to just make crazy poo poo happen, 90% of it was for the final destruction of mankind within 30 minutes and never used, and now sits outisde being snowed on. And to see that the brits, a minor player by the 1980s, pulled of that logistical madness, that is some stiff upper lip poo poo there chaps. quite. I wasnt coherent for my part of the 1980s, so i was never terrified of soviets, but i am more nostalgic for a time when there was another country just flat out making whatever we made because they felt scared. Notice the "concorde" thing behind the "nuclear bomber" ill bet the ruskie non-nuke-nuke-bomber timelined up with the flying reactor XB36 project.  Also, the hilarious saga of the f35 is more soviet style top down command economy than free market. We've sort of turned into a bullshit do nothing governing system since we lost the serious external threat to keep our poo poo together. I've always agreed with The War Nerd. We are investing our money in bullshit weapons that will seriously drive the empire of japan back across the pacific, and get the boys in europe home by christmas, the next time world war two part three kicks off. What scares me more than any soviets did is how much of a paper tiger our super expensive wunder weapons might turn out to be in this century. Posts by Grover and Iayaas give us some hope there are competent people involved in defense yet.
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Mar 23, 2012 04:14
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Raw_Beef posted:Posts by Grover and Iayaas give us some hope there are competent people involved in defense yet.  In all seriousness, this is probably the first time that sentence has been uttered anywhere on the SA forums.
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Mar 23, 2012 04:27
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Raw_Beef posted:What scares me more than any soviets did is how much of a paper tiger our super expensive wunder weapons might turn out to be in this century. I've always been of the opinion that in exercises both with our own armed forces and in joint environments, there's been this unwritten rule that the US has to play fair; no BVR engagements, etc. I would like to think that in a real SHTF WWIII scenario, traditional ROE is going to go out the window and we'll have F-15s, -16s, -18s and -22s flinging AMRAAMs from BVR. Maybe that's a misguided belief.
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Mar 23, 2012 04:40
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Raw_Beef posted:
The only incompetent people involved in defense are civilians. The military will do what it has to with the resources it's given, but that's hard to do when your day to day resources are based on some knucklehead's poll rating.
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Mar 23, 2012 04:54
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iyaayas01 posted:
You guys come in here and talk all serious acronymese about current gen/next gen weapons, and are in some way employed by the defense industry/military. Youre different from goons like me who can read volumes about declassified decommissioned weapons and yesterday's wars. I'll read the war nerd, and nod in total agreement, but hes just some fat gently caress never been. Maybe i should specifiy that i only follow you in this thread, and have followed it from way back. So youre a specific character of next gen weapons systems experts in a thread about the tools of yesterday's war machine. The closest ive come to the modern stuff was an f-22 parked next to an f-15 in an obvious YAY BOEING position next to the fence one random day at Boeing's part of King Co In'nat (aka boeing field) f-22 looked like it came from space. Raw_Beef fucked around with this message at 05:09 on Mar 23, 2012 |
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Mar 23, 2012 04:55
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co199 posted:I've always been of the opinion that in exercises both with our own armed forces and in joint environments, there's been this unwritten rule that the US has to play fair; no BVR engagements, etc. Based on what I've read open source, the AMRAAM's Pk is massively overrated as far as what Raytheon reports it being vs what it more than likely actually is in the real world. This is backed up by examples from combat employment. This isn't to say that it is a terrible or even inadequate missile, just that when you say that testing has generated a .85+ Pk but combat employment has shown a >.50 Pk I'm going to be a little skeptical...all the more so when you consider that almost all of the AMRAAM's combat use has been against less than challenging targets (export/less sophisticated variants of Russian fighters, less powerful light attack aircraft like the Super Galeb, helicopters, minimal to no EW support...hell, some of the shots weren't even really BVR.) That said, "playing nice" is not necessarily the case with exercises...it all depends on the exercise. Obviously we are not going to let everything hang out in a multi-national exercise, since everyone (even allies) are always trying to collect intelligence, but there are definitely some exercises (joint or otherwise) where things far more advanced than simple BVR engagements are worked on. I mean, without using these capabilities in exercises how would we employ them effectively in combat? e: Propagandalf posted:The only incompetent people involved in defense are civilians. The military will do what it has to with the resources it's given, but that's hard to do when your day to day resources are based on some knucklehead's poll rating. The F-35 program office is mostly uniformed folks.  Raw_Beef posted:You guys come in here and talk all serious acronymese about current gen/next gen weapons, and are in some way employed by the defense industry/military. Oh yeah, I was mostly being sarcastic, just because both of us have gotten massive amounts of poo poo for our alleged military technology fanboyism. But he's still wrong about the F-35  .Raw_Beef posted:The closest ive come to the modern stuff was an f-22 parked next to an f-15 in an obvious YAY BOEING position next to the fence one random day at Boeing's part of King Co In'nat (aka boeing field) I get to see F-22s every day when I go to work.  It's really not that impressive, especially when you know all its dirty laundry as far as mx stuff goes...but I still get a bit of a chubby whenever I'm out on the ramp and one takes off. iyaayas01 fucked around with this message at 05:15 on Mar 23, 2012 |
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Mar 23, 2012 05:05
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iyaayas01 posted:Based on what I've read open source, the AMRAAM's Pk is massively overrated as far as what Raytheon reports it being vs what it more than likely actually is in the real world. This is backed up by examples from combat employment. This isn't to say that it is a terrible or even inadequate missile, just that when you say that testing has generated a .85+ Pk but combat employment has shown a >.50 Pk I'm going to be a little skeptical...all the more so when you consider that almost all of the AMRAAM's combat use has been against less than challenging targets (export/less sophisticated variants of Russian fighters, less powerful light attack aircraft like the Super Galeb, helicopters, minimal to no EW support...hell, some of the shots weren't even really BVR.) I'm not saying *don't* practice dogfighting or other situations (I think we learned our lesson in Vietnam about relying on missiles / one tactic purely), I was simply theory crafting that in an all-out war situation, the ROE would be less "ok now let's test this" and more holy gently caress, we better gain air dominance or our ground guys are gonna have a hard time. As far as I know, the PAK-FA and J-20 are 5-10 years from being employed on the front lines; of those two, the PAK-FA is probably* the only jet that can give the F-22 a run for its money. China's carrier is pretty much going to be relegated to the South China Sea. Given a SHTF scenario where all bets are off and it's win or go home, I'd like to think that the advantage that our 4.5 and 5th gen fighters give us is realistic instead of relegated to paper. There may not be a whole lot of F-22s, but if you have an all-out-war situation, a kill ratio of 10 or 20 to 1 is a game changer. * either the PAK-Fa, or altitudes above 25,000 feet, who knows
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Mar 23, 2012 05:14
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re: AMRAAM stuff I've wondered about BVR ROI too. I've heard time and time again that many air-air losses (primarily Vietnam) were due to ROI requiring visual ID of target to prevent friendly fire, negating significant advantage in engagement range and stand-off firepower and giving more agile, less avionics-sophisticated opponents more of a fighting chance. Modern stealth tech extends the same advantages we theoretically always had, but that doesn't do much good if you still have to get close enough that the bastards can look out the cockpit and see you. Is there a belief that we've finally got IFF and coordination down to where we can avoid friendly fire with extensive BVR engagement?
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Mar 23, 2012 05:29
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co199 posted:I'm not saying *don't* practice dogfighting or other situations (I think we learned our lesson in Vietnam about relying on missiles / one tactic purely), I was simply theory crafting that in an all-out war situation, the ROE would be less "ok now let's test this" and more holy gently caress, we better gain air dominance or our ground guys are gonna have a hard time. From my understanding of air combat training the fighters will often simulate the BVR shots on their own as they move towards the merge and then press on with the WVR dogfight. It would be a bit of a waste to send up a bunch of fighters only to have one group simulate a BVR shot then turn around and RTB. One example of this I've got is in an F14 coffee table book I've got, one of the short stories was from back in the early days of the tomcats and eagles. "Some days everything just falls together We're on a Key West det, and we're tasked to fight 4v4 with F-15's out of Tyndall. They're up in the Florida panhandle, so we'll be in the areas over the Gulf of Mexico. And they're students - it's like the F-15 RAG. We figured they're students, lets give 'em a lesson. So after the phone brief, we get off early and fly low right up the middle of Florida instead of going due north over the water. They're all scanning south, and we come at them low from their nine o'clock. We shoot them all with Sparrows before they know where we are. Then we pull into them and kill them again with Sidewinders. They had one instructor with them in a two-seater. He said in the debrief that he saw us but kept quiet. I'm not so sure, but that's OK. The Phoenix wasn't in the rules, but for the hell of it we also shot them all from somewhere over Disney world. The radar was just perfect. On the way home, I remember thinking about the amazing power a Tomcat brings to the fight. I also remember thinking this is extremely cool. -Dave "Bio" Baranek" The book is Grumman F-14 Tomcat: Bye-Bye, Baby...! and its filled with amazing pictures each with quick little stories like that one.
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Mar 23, 2012 06:14
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Not trying to fisk you or anything, just have a couple of different points I'd like to address so I'm gonna break it up into a couple of replies:co199 posted:I'm not saying *don't* practice dogfighting or other situations (I think we learned our lesson in Vietnam about relying on missiles / one tactic purely), I was simply theory crafting that in an all-out war situation, the ROE would be less "ok now let's test this" and more holy gently caress, we better gain air dominance or our ground guys are gonna have a hard time. Absolutely, I was just saying that other than safety of flight stuff the ROE for a lot of the exercises is right at what we would be in a high intensity war...obviously that depends on the scenario and in some cases we may tie our hands either for a given scenario or for security purposes, but when people say that Red Flag is the closest that you can get to a real shooting air war, they aren't exaggerating. co199 posted:As far as I know, the PAK-FA and J-20 are 5-10 years from being employed on the front lines; of those two, the PAK-FA is probably* the only jet that can give the F-22 a run for its money. at the asterisk. I'll have more about the "run for its money" below.co199 posted:China's carrier is pretty much going to be relegated to the South China Sea. China's carrier is a "starter carrier," kind of like the Langley or Furious. That said, it's worth mentioning that it is still the most powerful carrier in the region (other than the U.S.'s) and China currently isn't trying to have a navy with global projection power (although they are definitely starting to deploy globally), just one that can project to the first island chain (the East and South China Seas) and possibly eventually venture further out towards the second island chain (Japan through the Marianas to eastern Indonesia). This will help with that, not so much for combat use (they have other weapons systems to use) but rather for political engagement. The issue with the 4.5/5th gen fighter argument is that it rapidly turns into a numbers game, one that the U.S. would more than likely not win. Let's look at a Taiwan Strait scenario...the U.S. would be operating from Guam, because unless China is letting their idiot generals command the first thing they would do is schwack Kadena on Okinawa, and if it's a shooting war the CSG is gonna be at a safe stand-off distance, not cruising down the Strait like they did in '96, so thanks to the short legs of the Super Bugs combined with the Navy's complete lack of organic tanking they would arguably more of a hindrance than help in any DCA scenario defending Taiwanese airspace (AEGIS ships not so much, but those bring their own set of challenges.) So if we go off it primarily being an AF show, each Raptor and Eagle would carry 6xAMRAAMs and 2xSidewinders. I'm not going to really talk about WVR combat, because with all-aspect heaters and helmet mounted sights (or not, in the case of the Raptor) it rapidly devolves into a furball where everyone dies. But with BVR, here's where the numbers game comes into effect...the U.S. has a limited number of both types of aircraft, and the tyranny of distance and the paucity of tanker assets means that the U.S. would only be able to have a limited number of fighters in the BARCAP over the strait at any one time. China's sortie generation rate is somewhere between 3.5-4 times that of the U.S. (factoring in total a/c numbers, distances required to get to the combat zone, etc.), so even if we use an extremely generous Pk for the AMRAAM (something like .75, which is ludicrous for reasons I'll discuss below), you're still going to expend all your BVR missiles before all the opposition is shot down, and then the leakers get through the BARCAP and take out the HDLD assets like AWACS, tankers, Rivet Joints, whatever, and you just lost the air war. The reason that .75 Pk is ludicrous is like I said above, this is nowhere near accurate...the combat use Pk is closer to .5, and that was against lower threat targets, which the PLAAF would not be. I didn't mean to imply that the Chinese would be employing a low tech zerg rush or anything, because that's not it at all...the bulk of the fighters they would be employing are 4+ generation aircraft like the Su-27/J-11, Su-30, and J-10, along with relatively advanced AAMs. The reason the operational concept works is because their aircraft are advanced enough to lower the Pk of the AMRAAM to unacceptably low numbers, which when combined with the tyranny of distance and overall lower U.S. a/c numbers means that leakers will get through. I think we've discussed it a few times before, but here's a RAND monograph on the subject from back in '09. I think there are some flaws with their analysis (not the least of which is that the acronym "AEGIS" does not appear once), which we can discuss when I don't have to catch a plane in 5 hours, but overall it does a good job of laying out the challenges of the scenario. The really disconcerting thing is that even with Okinawa and a CSG or two in play, the PLAAF still manages to overwhelm the BARCAP and get some leakers through. Snowdens Secret posted:re: AMRAAM stuff I'll just say that the primary reason for the visual only ROE in Vietnam was largely political, not technological (the Sparrow's abysmally low Pk is a different story), and that U.S. jets have gotten BVR kills since. kill me now posted:The Phoenix wasn't in the rules, but for the hell of it we also shot them all from somewhere over Disney world. The radar was just perfect. Riiiiiiiight. The Phoenix's Pk was ABYSMAL against anything other than a non-maneuvering big fat dumb happy Soviet cruise missile or bomber.
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Mar 23, 2012 07:03
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Raw_Beef posted:ill bet the ruskie non-nuke-nuke-bomber timelined up with the flying reactor XB36 project. The made-up nuclear M-50 (Dec. 1958) came out right after Sputnik (Oct. 1958), in an attempt to scare up some re-invigoration of the U.S. nuclear bomber program (and thus GE's nuclear jet engine program) which was languishing because clearer (but more boring) heads were prevailing. (radiation, radioactive jet exhaust, outpaced by ICBM technology, etc.) However, the Russians gamely played along too, flying a nuclear reactor in a Tu-95 in 1961. (the B-36 with the reactor flew from 1955 to 1957) The radiation killed all but three members of the two aircrews for the Tu-95LAL.
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Mar 23, 2012 07:25
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iyaayas01 posted: But really though, I'll be reading that pdf, thanks for the link.
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Mar 23, 2012 07:26
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iyaayas01 posted:good post (Have a safe flight!) Those are good points and the RAND doc is really interesting too; I think you linked it in the Aeronautical Insanity thread. The one thing I think our discussion here (and granted we are focusing on airpower, naturally) is the lack of AEGIS and other surface ships; I doubt we'd even let our aircraft near anything but the CVBGs without first pounding Chinese coastal airfields with S/TLAMs; the SuperBugs could assist with JSOWs, etc. That would reduce immediate response time as I doubt the PLAAF has the refuelling capabilities that Blue forces would. On the other hand, getting into any sort of face-to-face conflict with China (or Russia, for that matter) is a bad idea, namely because the collateral damage (economic, etc) would be disastrous. Wouldn't even need nukes to cause the end of the world. Totally TWISTED posted:Dale Brown There's also Barrett Tillman's book "The Sixth Battle", where the USAF loads up a squadron of B-1Bs with AIM-120s in the rotating launchers and takes out an entire Russian bomber squadron from BVR.
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Mar 23, 2012 07:43
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Totally TWISTED posted:Counter-point: That was the first Dale Brown book I read, when I was like 12. It was the best thing ever.And like I said, don't take that pdf as gospel because I agree with its conclusions but I still think it has issues, and the conclusions are by no means absolute or certain. It's an excellent jumping off point, though. This is another. It's on my "to-buy" list, and Andrew Erickson is basically THE guy when it comes to PLAN/PLAAF modernization. Here's a review/commentary/discussion on the book. co199 posted:(Have a safe flight!) Thanks, ERJ-145 and then one of United's Continental's slick new 737NGs with the super sweet DirecTV IFE...should be way better than that drat ATR-72 I flew in/out of Key West on last weekend. That's a valid point about AEGIS support and hitting the airfields with TLAMs, which like I said is my biggest point of contention with the authors of that RAND piece (although to be fair there is a political complication here about striking mainland Chinese territory, although that is kind of outside the scope of this discussion). In that vein, here's an interesting piece from Information Dissemination arguing that the AEGIS ships might be more relevant than a big deck carrier. His conclusion is less about their inherent relevancy and more about the fact that Naval Aviation has pissed the capabilities of the big deck carrier down its leg by going to an all Hornet/Super Bug (and therefore shortlegged) fighter fleet, continuing to refuse to come up with any sort of organic tanking ability, and not developing a fixed wing ASW aircraft to replace the (prematurely retired) S-3s. I will say that cooperation between the USAF and USN isn't what it should be...at the operational level it's not terrible but not great (i.e., having TLAM strikes tasked to clear the way for bombers) but at the tactical level it could use quite a bit of work (for example, how to integrate AEGIS, CSG aircraft, and a USAF BARCAP into a combined DCA force as opposed to just deconflicting between the three), which is why it is such a big deal that AirSea Battle actually be taken seriously and not just be the window dressing to justify the AF and Navy buying a bunch of fancy new toys. Ultimately, your last bit is the most important part...I only study stuff like this because any sort of conflict between the U.S. and China would be so costly it must be avoided, but a rising China poses unique challenges to the U.S.'s allies in the region, so it's something that must be managed as best we can. Knowing your possible military limitations and how that impacts policy is just one piece of that puzzle. co199 posted:There's also Barrett Tillman's book "The Sixth Battle", where the USAF loads up a squadron of B-1Bs with AIM-120s in the rotating launchers and takes out an entire Russian bomber squadron from BVR. There's actually been some semi-official (totally just blue sky/back of the envelope) talk about doing something just like that in order to help alleviate the missile shortage I discussed above. Case of life imitating fiction I guess.
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Mar 23, 2012 08:36
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iyaayas01 posted:so thanks to the short legs of the Super Bugs combined with the Navy's complete lack of organic tanking they would arguably more of a hindrance than help in any DCA scenario defending Taiwanese airspace (AEGIS ships not so much, but those bring their own set of challenges.)  I wonder how many F-18Es it would have taken to pull off Black Buck?
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Mar 23, 2012 13:34
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iyaayas01 posted:The Phoenix's Pk was ABYSMAL against anything other than a non-maneuvering big fat dumb happy Soviet cruise missile or bomber. Like a 4 ship of eagles that apparently had no situational awarness?
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Mar 23, 2012 15:55
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grover posted:Unlike the F-18C/D, the F-18E/F carries buddy stores; every super-bug can act as a tanker for any other probe-drogue aircraft (F-35, etc). And unlike its large lumbering air force counterparts, it's still a super bug with the same self-defensive capability of any other F-18E/F, and can thus provide refueling much closer to contested airspace with minimal risk. The Navy does have some refueling capability, but if you look at a couple real world examples like Desert Storm, OIF and Afghanistan, you see the distances involved (even in Desert Storm, when you still had the precision strike capability of the F-14D and its longer legs) were farther than the KA-6D / F-18 tanker capability. When you're dealing with 7 hour hop times, the racetrack capability of the big Air Force tankers is more sustainable than the relatively short distance the CV based tankers can go. Relevant pic: Superbugs refueling over Afghanistan (Click for huge.) 
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Mar 23, 2012 16:03
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iyaayas01 posted:Let's look at a Taiwan Strait scenario...the U.S. would be operating from Guam, because unless China is letting their idiot generals command the first thing they would do is schwack Kadena on Okinawa I wonder how long it would take to start using Clark Air Base or Subic Bay in the Philippines again. Scratch Monkey fucked around with this message at 16:10 on Mar 23, 2012 |
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Mar 23, 2012 16:08
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Dumbdog posted:Does any one have any more information about the UK RAF in the cold war? Or about Spains situation, how would things have gone down if the cold war went hot when they were under Franco? I used to work with a cool old guy who was on the staff of the US Naval Attache in Spain in the 60s. He was trained as a nuclear weapons officer on a Boomer. He claimed that he was involved in coordinating targeting of nuclear weapons in the Mediterranean. Spain was involved in all this . . . somehow. Roger is the classic awesome old man. I need to look him up sometime - he is Dos Equis's "Most Interesting Man in the Wold" in real life. He still SCUBA dives and hits on anything with tits and legs in his 70s. He's also a master winemaker. He owns.
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Mar 23, 2012 16:39
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Scratch Monkey posted:I wonder how long it would take to start using Clark Air Base or Subic Bay in the Philippines again. If Okinawa gets hit, the politics of Japan's involvement become more interesting, since the Ryukyu islands are part of Japan. Does all of this assume that Taiwan lacks runways, SAMs, or an air force? It seems like an island should be as survivable as a carrier or Aegis cruiser, although perhaps less manoeuvrable.
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Mar 23, 2012 18:25
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Frozen Horse posted:If Okinawa gets hit, the politics of Japan's involvement become more interesting, since the Ryukyu islands are part of Japan. I'd guess that if China attacks Japan their SDF is allowed to, you know, defend. As to how capable a defense the JSDF could actually muster, that's another story.
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Mar 23, 2012 18:34
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Buddy stores are a joke. The Air Wing has already shrunk considerably, and now you're going to use half of the available strike/fighter aircraft to haul gas? Not to mention the amount of gas they can carry is miniscule and offload capability is pathetic. A Carrier Air Wing will be unable to carry out anything more demanding than local air defense of the CSG without USAF tanker support.Scratch Monkey posted:I wonder how long it would take to start using Clark Air Base or Subic Bay in the Philippines again. Longer than you'd think (if it happens at all), just because those facilities no longer exist as far as a being a military installation goes. Even though it is an international airport now, all that gets you is a runway/tarmac space, maybe a couple of hangars if the Filipino government hacks off on commandeering some from the airlines that operate there, and then POL support. Everything else (munitions, specialized support equipment, maintenance spare parts, living areas) would have to be airlifted or sealifted in before we could start operations...and that is stepping around the political complications of getting the Filipino government involved in a Chinese-Taiwanese conflict. Of course, arranging more general political agreements before a conflict is another matter, and something that is currently in work. e: That's not to say that the USAF aren't pros at setting up a bare base and running ops in a speedy manner, but the primary LIMFAC in conducting an extended air campaign from one is gonna be munitions, since your combat aircraft can tac ferry them in, but as soon as they start expending you need to replace that, and unless you're willing to devote massive amounts of airlift to carry them in an inefficient manner (STAMP/STRAPP does exist, but it's intended for niche resupply, not setting up an entire bare base), they have to be sealifted off of the APF ships...and sealift is something that has a delivery date measured in days, not hours. The problem here is that as the RAND piece points out, any conflict here would be speedy in nature, something that is decided within a couple of days or maybe a week, not something where the APF would have time to come into play. It's fast, but not that fast. Frozen Horse posted:If Okinawa gets hit, the politics of Japan's involvement become more interesting, since the Ryukyu islands are part of Japan. Does all of this assume that Taiwan lacks runways, SAMs, or an air force? It seems like an island should be as survivable as a carrier or Aegis cruiser, although perhaps less manoeuvrable. If you read the RAND study they address that...without a MASSIVE effort in increasing the hardening of their airbases, the ROCAF is going to be a non-player due to the insane amount of SRBMs that China has positioned within range of the Taiwan (same reason the USAF would be hard pressed to operate effectively from Kadena). Even with hardening, their DCA efforts will be considerably degraded, as will their SAM sites and GCI/other air defense radars. That's also a fair point about the low SA Eagle drivers. iyaayas01 fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Mar 23, 2012 |
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Mar 23, 2012 20:34
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What does BARCAP mean? Usually I can google the acronyms in this thread but I assume you're not talking about Barclays Capital. 
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Mar 23, 2012 20:43
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^^^ BARCAP is BARrier Combat Air Patrol. Prior to Desert Storm and the F-14 helicopter kill, I think the only other USN F-14 kill was against the Libyans during the whole Gulf of Sidra thing, and that was with Sparrows. IIRC the only combat Phoenix kill was during the Iran/Iraq war when IRIAF Tomcats used them against the Iraqis. That's contested considering the lack of information we have about the IRIAF after the coup, but there you have it. Most experts believe the Iranians use(d) their Tomcats as a kind of AEW platform. Funny anecdote out of that is the Iraqis were aware of the AN/AWG-9 and so when the USN turned theirs on during Desert Storm, the Iraqis would turn and run due to the perceived threat from the AIM-54. Of course the counter argument to that is that the Iraqis ran from everything, so it's debatable. co199 fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Mar 23, 2012 |
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Mar 23, 2012 20:49
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iyaayas01 posted:Buddy stores are a joke. The Air Wing has already shrunk considerably, and now you're going to use half of the available strike/fighter aircraft to haul gas? Not to mention the amount of gas they can carry is miniscule and offload capability is pathetic. A Carrier Air Wing will be unable to carry out anything more demanding than local air defense of the CSG without USAF tanker support.
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Mar 23, 2012 20:52
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co199 posted:Funny anecdote out of that is the Iraqis were aware of the AN/AWG-9 and so when the USN turned theirs on during Desert Storm, the Iraqis would turn and run due to the perceived threat from the AIM-54. Of course the counter argument to that is that the Iraqis ran from everything, so it's debatable. They did run from everything. Their key objective in the air very quickly became force preservation, which is why they parked planes next to cultural monuments like Babylonian ruins, and sent some planes to Iran.
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Mar 23, 2012 21:14
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co199 posted:^^^ BARCAP is BARrier Combat Air Patrol. The first engagement against the Libyans in 1981 was with the two SU-22s that were shot down with Sidewinders The second engagement was was in 1989 against a pair of Mig-23s with 2 Sparrow misses, a Sparrow hit and a Sidewinder hit. Since the Phoenix was designed to smoke Bears, Badgers, Blinders, Backfires, and Blackjacks instead of fighters it makes sense that it only had 2 combat launches (both shots had rocket motor failures). The US would have had to have been in a more serious shooting war for there to be a loose enough ROE to let them fire off a missile at something far enough away that a sparrow couldn't be used. That said, I used to love lobbing 4 Phoenix's at enemy aircraft in USNF 97 and all the follow on games 
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Mar 23, 2012 21:32
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There were a number of Phoenix shots fired during the Iraq/Iran war, and an Iranian F-14 pilot claims to have shot down two Iraqi Mig-23s in close formation with one missile. The true number of aircraft shot down by Phoenix missiles in that war may never be known, though. They started with 285 AIM-54A missiles and 79 F-14As, and some are presumed to be remaining. So, there's still a (slim) chance we'll see Iranian F-14s launching Phoenix missiles against Israeli fighters. As I recall, all the missiles were shelved more than 25 years ago when the thermal batteries expired, but Iran has had plenty of time to develop new batteries.
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Mar 23, 2012 21:51
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They've had time to develop new batteries, but at the same time everything in the missile will be very old at this point. I mean the 2 missiles the navy tried shooting at that Mig-25 both had defective motors and I wouldnt be shocked if the age of the missles had been a factor in that.
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Mar 23, 2012 22:13
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Armyman25 posted:Interesting: How did they figure this was a nuclear powered aircraft when it clearly has jet engines? Or is that what nuclear aircraft engines look like?
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Mar 24, 2012 00:39
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Throatwarbler posted:How did they figure this was a nuclear powered aircraft when it clearly has jet engines? Or is that what nuclear aircraft engines look like?
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Mar 24, 2012 00:50
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| # ? May 10, 2024 08:52 |
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Buddy fueling is not, strictly speaking, useless, but the amount of give available and tanking time required to actually fill up multiple aircraft in a sortie which are supposed to move as a group is just stupid. edit: also, agreed on AMRAAMs being waaaaay overstated in their capabilities, and everyone knows it.
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Mar 24, 2012 01:16
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