Alternatives to F 35- no holds barred and no F-35 stuff please
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TaiidanTomcat
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Avimimus said:
Have you been trolling me this whole time!! ;D
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;D
Now back to the matter at hand!
Concentrating for the moment on possible F-35A replacements, what about looking afresh at some of the old old JAST designs? In particular this one:
McDonnell-Douglas/Northrop-Grumman/BAe team submission, originally posted by overscan (PaulMM).
Or if that design is too radical for your tastes, what about going back further, to MRF. For example, something along the lines of this McDonnell Douglas concept (h/t DonaldM):
Now back to the matter at hand!
Concentrating for the moment on possible F-35A replacements, what about looking afresh at some of the old old JAST designs? In particular this one:
McDonnell-Douglas/Northrop-Grumman/BAe team submission, originally posted by overscan (PaulMM).
Or if that design is too radical for your tastes, what about going back further, to MRF. For example, something along the lines of this McDonnell Douglas concept (h/t DonaldM):
Avimimus
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I always found the McDonnell-Douglas/Northrop-Grumman/BAe prop attractive. It is mainly an aesthetic choice though.
Not really. I've been trying to see how well I could argue the point (taking my own arguments with a grain of salt). Working through the ideas suggests that this is somewhat viable. It'd make a good second line strike aircraft anyway and it does seem within reach to make a LO version at minimal cost (relative to other designs).
TaiidanTomcat said:
Not really. I've been trying to see how well I could argue the point (taking my own arguments with a grain of salt). Working through the ideas suggests that this is somewhat viable. It'd make a good second line strike aircraft anyway and it does seem within reach to make a LO version at minimal cost (relative to other designs).
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Grey Havoc said:;D
Now back to the matter at hand!
Concentrating for the moment on possible F-35A replacements, what about looking afresh at some of the old old JAST designs? In particular this one:
McDonnell-Douglas/Northrop-Grumman/BAe team submission, originally posted by overscan (PaulMM).
Or if that design is too radical for your tastes, what about going back further, to MRF. For example, something along the lines of this McDonnell Douglas concept (h/t DonaldM):
Why would you want to go to a design that failed to even earn itself to prototype stage?
Grey Havoc said:
If you were to find yourself in a situation whereby the F-35 was no longer available then starting off with another of the original contenders, whilst possible, will be extremely unlikely to gain traction anywhere. Besides, you might just as well go to the X-32 route since you have at least some flight data. Mind you, I think you have better chance of NASA announcing they are restarting Saturn V launches next year from Baikonur...
Mind you, I too did always find the McDonnell-Douglas/Northrop-Grumman/BAe team submission, very attractive. In fact, I had someone do some profiles of a developed operational version (developed along similar lines that the X-35 went through to become the F-35) for a story I did on another forum a while back:
***NOTE: Pure Fictional Rendering!***
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sferrin said:
The MD team submission was downselected in part due to politics, both interservice & otherwise, and partly because their STOVL version relied on a separate lift engine while the other two teams went with a single engine; not only was the preference for a single engine but it was felt that either of the two remaining team's approaches to the STOVL requirement would be less costly and time consuming to develop. (In the case of the X-35/F-35 however, that has arguably proved well wide of the mark!)
On the other hand, the USAF had few if any problems with the CTOL version, which makes it still a quite viable alternative as a F-16 replacement.
With regards as to the MRF design, the entire program got killed before it really even got started by a certain Administration who thought there wouldn't be a need for a proper F-16 replacement, even by the year 2015. :
(The original JAST program, which was then slated to replace the need for MRF, can't be really considered to have been aiming for a multi-role aircraft.)
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IIRC for JAST the MD team went with a Gas Driven lift fan while LM when with a Shaft Driven lift fan. It was NG that has a separate powered lift engine. Did this change before JSF submission?
http://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1995/1995%20-%200834.html
http://www.nps.edu/Academics/Institutes/Meyer/docs/Joint%20strike%20fighter.pdf
UK75,
I can't speak to the needs of the RN or RAF. I have to assume that, with two carriers, they are looking at an occasional show-the-flag tour of ports of call as backup to a more serious coalition reaction to more serious threats.
That said, from the U.S. forces 'Pacific Pivot' perspective, it appears to me to come down to three main issues:
1. How Deep you want to Hit.
If you are only striking within a couple hundred miles of the littoral boundary (say 400nm off shore to 500nm inland) the best bet is continued reliance on every-LO'er cruise missiles, possibly split between an extensible winged system with better high altitude ingress to protect against tailored AHM/APS/LLADS type defenses. And an aeroballistic, which is to say hypersonic, option. Mach 8 to 800nm is about a 10 minute trip and basically exceeds the 'flexibility' options of fixed wings, even in the immediate target area.
Take this out beyond a thousand nm, missile sizes start to get so huge that they are no longer really viable for even VLS launch.
Subsonics are no longer manned-practical as the 12-15hr mission evolutions will leave even a raised manning complement dead on their feet on the return trip and out of the fight for 2-3 days after that. Operational losses happen when you get dumb-tired.
Supercruise platforms are still viable and become essential if you are escorting LRSB/NGB as 'after B-2' platforms with a sonic-cruiser format themselves. CMs (from the bomber) are still going to be your weapon of choice however; simply because you are so far out on the radial that you are going to be both weapons and gas critical on a threat operating in their own backyard with plenty of bases to recover into because your are not able to suppress them. In particular, every pound of gas you expend in burner removes half an hour of reserve margin on the return trip and A2AD means you're not going to have tankers (USN supports USAF stuff). So it's better not to challenge within say a 200nm 'BRL' as standoff line if you can skulk, snipe and run.
Go to 2,500-3,000nm which is where you start to threaten the Chinese industrial base and you come to the instantaneous conclusion that the defenses and the operational period spent in threat airspace all but denies even the supersonic option as threat avoidance without escorts being even remotely possible. Hypersonics are the only answer here because they let you treat radials as range points. Think Frantic Joe and Shuttle Bombing.
2. How Much You Are Driven By Platform Value.
Defensively, the LHA-6 is not that much less pricey than a CVN, certainly not in terms of human costs and the associated price of the escorts in what -should be- an Amphibious Group, not an Escort Carrier system. Why put Marines in range of a DF-21D strike if you don't even intend to land them because this isn't that kind of theater? Why have a well deck and helo spot compromise to _fixed wing_ (E-2 is worth more than F-35B in terms of it's plus-up effects on systems like the SM-6 and ESSM-II with their ARH-OTH seekers).
In all of the above, we are stuck with the mistake that LHA-6 is as an upgrade to the Wasp when it should have been a dual-tramway system to allow the Marines to either have a FULL airwing of jets (40, not 25) or a mixed airwing with Helo-STOM and FW ops in a mixed cycle environment with optimized (skijump and arrestors, not requiring a cleared deck) airops by hull side. At which point, I am back at the F-35C/E-2/A-47 mix for superior reach. The bigwing Lightning may not be, ahem, 'ideal' for the fighter mission, but with EWPs and Meteor, it would beat the F-35B (same weight, smaller wing = lower Ps) black and blue.
OTOH, if you want to go with the idiot brigade and the LCS as throwaway inshore gunboating with predictable results (think 'Panay'), then, by all means, consider the F-35B system.
But do it in an unmanned platform.
Because if you chop 10,000lbs off the front end as cockpit and sensor weight and 10,000lbs off the back end as burner and empennage vestigials, you end up with a nice little flying wing around 20,000lbs in weight. And a 26,000lbst F135 engine which can spool up 18K, fore and aft, to land with. 36,000lbs of posted thrust is one fantastic hot'n'hi bring back margin. And while the nature of the fan thrust being what it is, you won't get great supersonics, without the burner, you would still have _very_ effective transonic accel from .8 to 1.2 which is where you end up fighting most of your ACM at anyway.
The point being that a UCAV with XTRA and EOTS can be just as valuable to a small SAG because it runs the radar horizon up a tall mast and gives you /something/ for standoff engagement (ideally a revised vision of LOCAAS but JCM/JAGM would do) without going to the Harpoon clutches on the aft deck. If you can get it to base off an Independence type helodeck.
3. What you think the Threat Level is going to be like in 30 years.
Myself, I see three key areas:
a. Cyber.
Which is basically a 'who knows' condition based on continued advances in the electronics industries of all the main players vs. the level of corruptibility (and accessibility) in peacetime nations suffering multiple espionage events, every day. In this, the Chinese are ahead in all areas with 50% of their 100,000 strong graduating class coming out as engineers vs. our miserable 13% of 20,000. They also have a 6,000 man professional hacking force which, I'm told, makes the NSA look like chumps.
b. DEWS.
I look at the Raytheon mortar killer (20KW to 500m), the Rheinmetall rocket killer (50KW to 1.5km) and the NorGrumman Skyguard TBM killer (100KW to 10km) and I see the future scaling up and out with modifiers like the Boeing relay mirror pointing experiment taking the lase lines up a short ladder before going out a long flat to get past the anaprop crud of slanting through the low altitude pollutant/obscurrents. By 2050, CAVU, a 1-2MW to 100km weapon in a digital FO configuration (no COIL recuperative/storage/thermo-acoustic issues) is not at all impossible seeming. And this will mean the end of tacair as a manned platform approach. The value of the deep-strike disruption of enemy rear area logistics and staging will of course mean that we will continue to -try- but it will all be super sneaky or supersonic, with a throwaway platform design.
HPM/HERF also will come to form a serious threat, though I believe, as long as this is not a cyber-insertive capability, VLO will have a high proportion of sealed-airframe integral defenses against it.
c. Hunting Weapons.
Think about the typical cost of even a 'cheap', single mission, Russian Su-35 vs. the titanic asking price of the nothing-well F-35. does 60-100 million sound about right? I doubt if even Chinese slave labor can do much to fix this because past a certain level you have to pay for the automan and resource costs of some truly exotic materials and processes which are beyond the skilled-craftsman level of capability, regardless. So, split down the middle at 80 million and add another 12 million for 10 AAMs. And another 2 million every year to train ONE man at 10-20,000 dollars per flying hour for a 20hr/month standard.
That's pretty stiff for a capability that doesn't, on it's face, seem to offer much vs. a 9M96 or 40N6 which lofts 3 million dollar missiles out of a 100 million dollar battery which doesn't itself face total vested cost loss to a stealthy AMRAAM shot.
But.
The problem with miss-iles is that they are literally one shot wonders whose effective WEZ envelope is defined by the distance at which their fire control radars can generate trackfiles to fling their ARH-onboard seekers into a proximal cube around the target where 'stealth doesn't really matter' because the weapons are so close they get returns anyway.
If the weapon is capable of flying 250km but doesn't get good acquisition and terminal performance overlay (target cannot radically change or exit A and E Pole envelope conditions before weapon arrives) until 50km, it is functionally no better than an SA-2, even if it says S-400 on the warranty.
A turboSAM changes the game. Entirely.
First, because it doesn't require a bus vehicle attached to a 10,000ft runway to shoot the threat down. You can launch it via catapult, off the back of a 5 ton truck, just like a target or recce drone (think Mirach 600 or Tu-349).
Second, because it doesn't trade endgame performance for rapid flyout to achieve target proximity before the LO ghosts off-screen. Rather, it takes it's own good time to rise up to altitude and then sweeps on at Mach .65 or so for a good 230-250nm. All in a platform (FIM-160 MALI) which is shorter than a Sidewinder and weighs 100lbs less than an AMRAAM.
Send up six of these 2 million dollar missiles and stagger them out in a skirmish line with 10nm separations and 15nm X60` detection thresholds and you have a total target search volume on the order of 1,500 cubic miles, moving forward at the refresh rate of 360nm per minute. Using hunting datalinks to coordinate their sweep and with preprogrammed beacon points for parachute/airbage recovery, they would be almost impossible to hide from while, upon acquisition, they would dogpile and make continuous (liquid fuel + atmospheric oxygen = rechargeable impulse) attack passes until the manned platform, heavy with bombs and gas on the ingress, ran out of expendables, energy, altitude and ideas. Reuseable for at least 10 missions even if you lose every single one in six missile division, shooting down a single high value platform (AAM + maneuver kills four and the final two share the kill), you still come out 2X6= 12 vs. 80 at a net gain of almost 6.5:1 in Loss Exchange Ratio values. Where you don't pay for a measely little 20 plane force of Flankers or Rafales or Typhoons but instead use cost equivalencies to purchase 20X80 = 1,600 million/2 = 800 TurboSAM you now have a _significantly_ larger force with which to gambit and regenerate constant sortie evolutions.
Such a system might be used to threaten tanker or endurant ISR platform orbits, jeopardizing raid success by means of their offboard enablers. Or to stage a one-way pursuit or even preemptive strike on the enemy MOB during the launch/recovery cycle.
The sheer NUMBERS inherent to not having to pay for a manned bus-force acquistion and initial training/spares/weapons package, instead concentrating all your available budget on 'ace level out of the box' kill effectors gives you operational freedoms that would allow even small nations to form a very vicious defensive threat to the largest of US force packages.
All while using (APU/Cruise propulsion) systems that are so ubiquitous as to be, for all intents and purposes, civilian tech based.
ARGUMENT:
Right now, the USN is still stuck in the traditional airpower modality of subsonics which require huge numbers of supporting platforms as missions to achieve success, even again moderate radial depths and defensive threat intensities. The USAF is starting to see that the F-35 doesn't serve them and the F-22 is not enough of a projective sortie geneation force (thank you so much, Mr. Hanlon) to be able to handle the kinds of envisioned threats that Taiwan and to a lesser extent, the DPRK scenarios represent.
OTOH, the USN cannot ignore the fact that rising Chinese sophistication means that they are no longer looking at Bear-D once or twice a day in the middle of a North Atlantic Missle Trap defensives zone a 1,000nm deep. Rather, you will see F2T2EA cycles of 10-15 minutes as satellite, UAV or JORN-type OTH-B targeting allows DF-21D ASBM to saturate any naval group inside 1,500nm. By the time you reach a 400-600nm radius point for F/A-18E/F or F-35C use, you will be 'three times dead' because you will not be able to rely on sublaunch missile systems to clear out mobile TELs when all of your targeting is dazzled or destroyed as the Chinese have shown themselves quite able to do.
The USAF ultimate solution is FALCON and the global precision strike capabilities it portends. But, as usual, in their pursuit of the ultimate as capability (largely to prevent the other services from immitating, by cost), they have exceeded the SOA by an enormous degree. Mach 25 to 10,000nm in 30 minutes 'or your next one's free' didn't work when we were talking the 400,000lb NASP and a titanium aluminide, metal matrix, airframe with slush hydrogen cooling and multicycle AIP-to-orbit as a TAV. It won't work with XTV-2 carbon-carbon and waveriding either. The Q and thermal-acoustics just chew up the airframe, something awful.
But what would work is a halving of the performance points and a switch to carrier from landbasing.
Mach 10 to 5,500nm means you only need to get up to 200-300,000ft before you light off a scramjet and to do that with modern rockets is /easy/. Just look at Ansari-X and four people to Mach 5. Straight past the SR-71 envelope.
The key is going to be something like an X-37/X-38 with a VG wing that retracts behind carbon shutters on the upper deck of the fuselage to provide low speed launch and recovery lift margins -only-. Retracting as you go through 300 knots with minimal maneuver requirements means you don't have to worry about stiffness, CL or pivot-moment effects (the wings are not linked) as a lifting body will fly quite well with low commanded G at this speed and above.
The other key being a shared Scram/Turbine flowpath under a shock-capture shaped belly.
Use an F414 (F/A-18E) or F100 (A-47) powerplant to get on/off the boat and up through about 40,000ft and Mach .8 before shutting off the jet and letting it air-cool before closing the cycle path doors and lighting the candle on a pair of ASAS/NCADE type solid motors in the wingroots to go up up and away.
This configurational geometry being equally important because it means that the jet engine and cockpit cabin can be safe in a separate, centermounted, environmental enclosure, fuel-cooled by a bathtub of JP-8 filling the LB fuselage. With the engine exhausting laterally over a USB coanda panel with ejector driven control flows on a thick trailing edge (see: DAEMON); this leaves the entire rear of the aircraft to be a hollow tunnel, suitable for use as a weapons train ejector, ala Vigilante.
If you launch in the ECS and recover in the SCS, you can hostage all of China's eastern industrial areas from Shanghai to Guandong. If you fly ECS to Al Udeid or perhaps Bagram, you can similarly threaten her Western military R&D centers from Chengdu to Shaanxi while additionally preventing a PRC endrun with Silk Route II internalized LOCs as oil and petrogas transport out of Iran and the Black Sea areas (China gains petro determinancy and she will decouple the Yuan from the Dollar faster than you can say BOHICA and the rise in global interest rates would destroy the U.S. debt service as economy, overnight...).
The kill effectors, as KEM Rods From God would behave much like MARVs with multi km/sec saturation of even high leverage DEW defenses. And because you could skip them like stones across a pond, your cross-track obliquity is going to be measured in a timezone worth of defensive standoff (say 1,200nm).
CONCLUSION:
While I still greatly admire their economic (zero training, low CPFH) and force structure (one nation, one air force, by law) utility I see UCAVs as a kind of primitive-area capability, ideal for policing crowded sealanes and monitoring cease fires as well as generally holding the enemy's feet to the fire with a persistent ISR option (much like Predator/Reaper) that can employ the entire U.S. Airpower modality instead of a by-thirds fraction of it. JPALS and AAR allow this to happen in ways that no manned carqual dependence ever could.
As soon as you start talking about the Chinese littorals zones however; even the UCAV is radius + loiter deficient in protecting the carrier while still providing adequate combat area persistence as sortie generation and DMPI numbers.
IMO, we have already lost the Western Pacific and would be wise to stop playing into China's hand as a function of 'protecting' her Stalking Horses in Taiwan and ROK. Taiwan does 90% of it's business on the mainland and is a mouse-eats-elephant managerial threat that the PRC leadership no more wants to reoccupy than a man wants to cuddle a rabid dog. Not least because Taiwan also provides backdoor access to Western Tech/Financing. ROK would kick the DPRK to the moon Alice if it weren't for DPRK nukes and so we should give them their own and let China consider what will happen if her own client state doesn't behave, less than 500nm from Beijing. KORUS costs more than it is worth in freebie consumer goods.
But if we want to play that game, we need to be able to functionally win it. Not play for a good second. And the economic indicators I see, suggest that we cannot afford the current plateau'd system enablement (new SEAD missile, new jammer, new escort) for what will remain a range-deficient, high risk, exposure of naval assets. Not when we could stick with the F/A-18 + A-47 as UCLASS and buy 100 hypersonic platforms to use as shuttle bombers with just a single hours flight time wrapping them a quarter of the way around the planet and thus totally freeing up our CVSF maneuver options.
All this with no required add-on platform support and no worries about copying by the 'Near Peer' technical espionage capabilities. Because the Chinese lack the fleet size and doctrinal experience to beat the USN in the Deep Blue as a secured approach to both sides of CONUS certainly would require for a similar straight-shot hostaging of our industrial heartland.
100 airframes @ 200 million dollars is only 20 billion total investment and if you add another 50 billion in R&D you have a less than a 1/3rd what we have already spent on the F-35.
IMO, this is the reality we face, if we dump JSF now. We are simply beyond the point at which tactical airpower, as a subsonic power projection system, can believably generate a followon before the threat and the targeting and the technology base exceeds the present day doctrinal paradigm for theater interdiction in an A2AD environment where the USAF is not a major player.
LEG
I can't speak to the needs of the RN or RAF. I have to assume that, with two carriers, they are looking at an occasional show-the-flag tour of ports of call as backup to a more serious coalition reaction to more serious threats.
That said, from the U.S. forces 'Pacific Pivot' perspective, it appears to me to come down to three main issues:
1. How Deep you want to Hit.
If you are only striking within a couple hundred miles of the littoral boundary (say 400nm off shore to 500nm inland) the best bet is continued reliance on every-LO'er cruise missiles, possibly split between an extensible winged system with better high altitude ingress to protect against tailored AHM/APS/LLADS type defenses. And an aeroballistic, which is to say hypersonic, option. Mach 8 to 800nm is about a 10 minute trip and basically exceeds the 'flexibility' options of fixed wings, even in the immediate target area.
Take this out beyond a thousand nm, missile sizes start to get so huge that they are no longer really viable for even VLS launch.
Subsonics are no longer manned-practical as the 12-15hr mission evolutions will leave even a raised manning complement dead on their feet on the return trip and out of the fight for 2-3 days after that. Operational losses happen when you get dumb-tired.
Supercruise platforms are still viable and become essential if you are escorting LRSB/NGB as 'after B-2' platforms with a sonic-cruiser format themselves. CMs (from the bomber) are still going to be your weapon of choice however; simply because you are so far out on the radial that you are going to be both weapons and gas critical on a threat operating in their own backyard with plenty of bases to recover into because your are not able to suppress them. In particular, every pound of gas you expend in burner removes half an hour of reserve margin on the return trip and A2AD means you're not going to have tankers (USN supports USAF stuff). So it's better not to challenge within say a 200nm 'BRL' as standoff line if you can skulk, snipe and run.
Go to 2,500-3,000nm which is where you start to threaten the Chinese industrial base and you come to the instantaneous conclusion that the defenses and the operational period spent in threat airspace all but denies even the supersonic option as threat avoidance without escorts being even remotely possible. Hypersonics are the only answer here because they let you treat radials as range points. Think Frantic Joe and Shuttle Bombing.
2. How Much You Are Driven By Platform Value.
Defensively, the LHA-6 is not that much less pricey than a CVN, certainly not in terms of human costs and the associated price of the escorts in what -should be- an Amphibious Group, not an Escort Carrier system. Why put Marines in range of a DF-21D strike if you don't even intend to land them because this isn't that kind of theater? Why have a well deck and helo spot compromise to _fixed wing_ (E-2 is worth more than F-35B in terms of it's plus-up effects on systems like the SM-6 and ESSM-II with their ARH-OTH seekers).
In all of the above, we are stuck with the mistake that LHA-6 is as an upgrade to the Wasp when it should have been a dual-tramway system to allow the Marines to either have a FULL airwing of jets (40, not 25) or a mixed airwing with Helo-STOM and FW ops in a mixed cycle environment with optimized (skijump and arrestors, not requiring a cleared deck) airops by hull side. At which point, I am back at the F-35C/E-2/A-47 mix for superior reach. The bigwing Lightning may not be, ahem, 'ideal' for the fighter mission, but with EWPs and Meteor, it would beat the F-35B (same weight, smaller wing = lower Ps) black and blue.
OTOH, if you want to go with the idiot brigade and the LCS as throwaway inshore gunboating with predictable results (think 'Panay'), then, by all means, consider the F-35B system.
But do it in an unmanned platform.
Because if you chop 10,000lbs off the front end as cockpit and sensor weight and 10,000lbs off the back end as burner and empennage vestigials, you end up with a nice little flying wing around 20,000lbs in weight. And a 26,000lbst F135 engine which can spool up 18K, fore and aft, to land with. 36,000lbs of posted thrust is one fantastic hot'n'hi bring back margin. And while the nature of the fan thrust being what it is, you won't get great supersonics, without the burner, you would still have _very_ effective transonic accel from .8 to 1.2 which is where you end up fighting most of your ACM at anyway.
The point being that a UCAV with XTRA and EOTS can be just as valuable to a small SAG because it runs the radar horizon up a tall mast and gives you /something/ for standoff engagement (ideally a revised vision of LOCAAS but JCM/JAGM would do) without going to the Harpoon clutches on the aft deck. If you can get it to base off an Independence type helodeck.
3. What you think the Threat Level is going to be like in 30 years.
Myself, I see three key areas:
a. Cyber.
Which is basically a 'who knows' condition based on continued advances in the electronics industries of all the main players vs. the level of corruptibility (and accessibility) in peacetime nations suffering multiple espionage events, every day. In this, the Chinese are ahead in all areas with 50% of their 100,000 strong graduating class coming out as engineers vs. our miserable 13% of 20,000. They also have a 6,000 man professional hacking force which, I'm told, makes the NSA look like chumps.
b. DEWS.
I look at the Raytheon mortar killer (20KW to 500m), the Rheinmetall rocket killer (50KW to 1.5km) and the NorGrumman Skyguard TBM killer (100KW to 10km) and I see the future scaling up and out with modifiers like the Boeing relay mirror pointing experiment taking the lase lines up a short ladder before going out a long flat to get past the anaprop crud of slanting through the low altitude pollutant/obscurrents. By 2050, CAVU, a 1-2MW to 100km weapon in a digital FO configuration (no COIL recuperative/storage/thermo-acoustic issues) is not at all impossible seeming. And this will mean the end of tacair as a manned platform approach. The value of the deep-strike disruption of enemy rear area logistics and staging will of course mean that we will continue to -try- but it will all be super sneaky or supersonic, with a throwaway platform design.
HPM/HERF also will come to form a serious threat, though I believe, as long as this is not a cyber-insertive capability, VLO will have a high proportion of sealed-airframe integral defenses against it.
c. Hunting Weapons.
Think about the typical cost of even a 'cheap', single mission, Russian Su-35 vs. the titanic asking price of the nothing-well F-35. does 60-100 million sound about right? I doubt if even Chinese slave labor can do much to fix this because past a certain level you have to pay for the automan and resource costs of some truly exotic materials and processes which are beyond the skilled-craftsman level of capability, regardless. So, split down the middle at 80 million and add another 12 million for 10 AAMs. And another 2 million every year to train ONE man at 10-20,000 dollars per flying hour for a 20hr/month standard.
That's pretty stiff for a capability that doesn't, on it's face, seem to offer much vs. a 9M96 or 40N6 which lofts 3 million dollar missiles out of a 100 million dollar battery which doesn't itself face total vested cost loss to a stealthy AMRAAM shot.
But.
The problem with miss-iles is that they are literally one shot wonders whose effective WEZ envelope is defined by the distance at which their fire control radars can generate trackfiles to fling their ARH-onboard seekers into a proximal cube around the target where 'stealth doesn't really matter' because the weapons are so close they get returns anyway.
If the weapon is capable of flying 250km but doesn't get good acquisition and terminal performance overlay (target cannot radically change or exit A and E Pole envelope conditions before weapon arrives) until 50km, it is functionally no better than an SA-2, even if it says S-400 on the warranty.
A turboSAM changes the game. Entirely.
First, because it doesn't require a bus vehicle attached to a 10,000ft runway to shoot the threat down. You can launch it via catapult, off the back of a 5 ton truck, just like a target or recce drone (think Mirach 600 or Tu-349).
Second, because it doesn't trade endgame performance for rapid flyout to achieve target proximity before the LO ghosts off-screen. Rather, it takes it's own good time to rise up to altitude and then sweeps on at Mach .65 or so for a good 230-250nm. All in a platform (FIM-160 MALI) which is shorter than a Sidewinder and weighs 100lbs less than an AMRAAM.
Send up six of these 2 million dollar missiles and stagger them out in a skirmish line with 10nm separations and 15nm X60` detection thresholds and you have a total target search volume on the order of 1,500 cubic miles, moving forward at the refresh rate of 360nm per minute. Using hunting datalinks to coordinate their sweep and with preprogrammed beacon points for parachute/airbage recovery, they would be almost impossible to hide from while, upon acquisition, they would dogpile and make continuous (liquid fuel + atmospheric oxygen = rechargeable impulse) attack passes until the manned platform, heavy with bombs and gas on the ingress, ran out of expendables, energy, altitude and ideas. Reuseable for at least 10 missions even if you lose every single one in six missile division, shooting down a single high value platform (AAM + maneuver kills four and the final two share the kill), you still come out 2X6= 12 vs. 80 at a net gain of almost 6.5:1 in Loss Exchange Ratio values. Where you don't pay for a measely little 20 plane force of Flankers or Rafales or Typhoons but instead use cost equivalencies to purchase 20X80 = 1,600 million/2 = 800 TurboSAM you now have a _significantly_ larger force with which to gambit and regenerate constant sortie evolutions.
Such a system might be used to threaten tanker or endurant ISR platform orbits, jeopardizing raid success by means of their offboard enablers. Or to stage a one-way pursuit or even preemptive strike on the enemy MOB during the launch/recovery cycle.
The sheer NUMBERS inherent to not having to pay for a manned bus-force acquistion and initial training/spares/weapons package, instead concentrating all your available budget on 'ace level out of the box' kill effectors gives you operational freedoms that would allow even small nations to form a very vicious defensive threat to the largest of US force packages.
All while using (APU/Cruise propulsion) systems that are so ubiquitous as to be, for all intents and purposes, civilian tech based.
ARGUMENT:
Right now, the USN is still stuck in the traditional airpower modality of subsonics which require huge numbers of supporting platforms as missions to achieve success, even again moderate radial depths and defensive threat intensities. The USAF is starting to see that the F-35 doesn't serve them and the F-22 is not enough of a projective sortie geneation force (thank you so much, Mr. Hanlon) to be able to handle the kinds of envisioned threats that Taiwan and to a lesser extent, the DPRK scenarios represent.
OTOH, the USN cannot ignore the fact that rising Chinese sophistication means that they are no longer looking at Bear-D once or twice a day in the middle of a North Atlantic Missle Trap defensives zone a 1,000nm deep. Rather, you will see F2T2EA cycles of 10-15 minutes as satellite, UAV or JORN-type OTH-B targeting allows DF-21D ASBM to saturate any naval group inside 1,500nm. By the time you reach a 400-600nm radius point for F/A-18E/F or F-35C use, you will be 'three times dead' because you will not be able to rely on sublaunch missile systems to clear out mobile TELs when all of your targeting is dazzled or destroyed as the Chinese have shown themselves quite able to do.
The USAF ultimate solution is FALCON and the global precision strike capabilities it portends. But, as usual, in their pursuit of the ultimate as capability (largely to prevent the other services from immitating, by cost), they have exceeded the SOA by an enormous degree. Mach 25 to 10,000nm in 30 minutes 'or your next one's free' didn't work when we were talking the 400,000lb NASP and a titanium aluminide, metal matrix, airframe with slush hydrogen cooling and multicycle AIP-to-orbit as a TAV. It won't work with XTV-2 carbon-carbon and waveriding either. The Q and thermal-acoustics just chew up the airframe, something awful.
But what would work is a halving of the performance points and a switch to carrier from landbasing.
Mach 10 to 5,500nm means you only need to get up to 200-300,000ft before you light off a scramjet and to do that with modern rockets is /easy/. Just look at Ansari-X and four people to Mach 5. Straight past the SR-71 envelope.
The key is going to be something like an X-37/X-38 with a VG wing that retracts behind carbon shutters on the upper deck of the fuselage to provide low speed launch and recovery lift margins -only-. Retracting as you go through 300 knots with minimal maneuver requirements means you don't have to worry about stiffness, CL or pivot-moment effects (the wings are not linked) as a lifting body will fly quite well with low commanded G at this speed and above.
The other key being a shared Scram/Turbine flowpath under a shock-capture shaped belly.
Use an F414 (F/A-18E) or F100 (A-47) powerplant to get on/off the boat and up through about 40,000ft and Mach .8 before shutting off the jet and letting it air-cool before closing the cycle path doors and lighting the candle on a pair of ASAS/NCADE type solid motors in the wingroots to go up up and away.
This configurational geometry being equally important because it means that the jet engine and cockpit cabin can be safe in a separate, centermounted, environmental enclosure, fuel-cooled by a bathtub of JP-8 filling the LB fuselage. With the engine exhausting laterally over a USB coanda panel with ejector driven control flows on a thick trailing edge (see: DAEMON); this leaves the entire rear of the aircraft to be a hollow tunnel, suitable for use as a weapons train ejector, ala Vigilante.
If you launch in the ECS and recover in the SCS, you can hostage all of China's eastern industrial areas from Shanghai to Guandong. If you fly ECS to Al Udeid or perhaps Bagram, you can similarly threaten her Western military R&D centers from Chengdu to Shaanxi while additionally preventing a PRC endrun with Silk Route II internalized LOCs as oil and petrogas transport out of Iran and the Black Sea areas (China gains petro determinancy and she will decouple the Yuan from the Dollar faster than you can say BOHICA and the rise in global interest rates would destroy the U.S. debt service as economy, overnight...).
The kill effectors, as KEM Rods From God would behave much like MARVs with multi km/sec saturation of even high leverage DEW defenses. And because you could skip them like stones across a pond, your cross-track obliquity is going to be measured in a timezone worth of defensive standoff (say 1,200nm).
CONCLUSION:
While I still greatly admire their economic (zero training, low CPFH) and force structure (one nation, one air force, by law) utility I see UCAVs as a kind of primitive-area capability, ideal for policing crowded sealanes and monitoring cease fires as well as generally holding the enemy's feet to the fire with a persistent ISR option (much like Predator/Reaper) that can employ the entire U.S. Airpower modality instead of a by-thirds fraction of it. JPALS and AAR allow this to happen in ways that no manned carqual dependence ever could.
As soon as you start talking about the Chinese littorals zones however; even the UCAV is radius + loiter deficient in protecting the carrier while still providing adequate combat area persistence as sortie generation and DMPI numbers.
IMO, we have already lost the Western Pacific and would be wise to stop playing into China's hand as a function of 'protecting' her Stalking Horses in Taiwan and ROK. Taiwan does 90% of it's business on the mainland and is a mouse-eats-elephant managerial threat that the PRC leadership no more wants to reoccupy than a man wants to cuddle a rabid dog. Not least because Taiwan also provides backdoor access to Western Tech/Financing. ROK would kick the DPRK to the moon Alice if it weren't for DPRK nukes and so we should give them their own and let China consider what will happen if her own client state doesn't behave, less than 500nm from Beijing. KORUS costs more than it is worth in freebie consumer goods.
But if we want to play that game, we need to be able to functionally win it. Not play for a good second. And the economic indicators I see, suggest that we cannot afford the current plateau'd system enablement (new SEAD missile, new jammer, new escort) for what will remain a range-deficient, high risk, exposure of naval assets. Not when we could stick with the F/A-18 + A-47 as UCLASS and buy 100 hypersonic platforms to use as shuttle bombers with just a single hours flight time wrapping them a quarter of the way around the planet and thus totally freeing up our CVSF maneuver options.
All this with no required add-on platform support and no worries about copying by the 'Near Peer' technical espionage capabilities. Because the Chinese lack the fleet size and doctrinal experience to beat the USN in the Deep Blue as a secured approach to both sides of CONUS certainly would require for a similar straight-shot hostaging of our industrial heartland.
100 airframes @ 200 million dollars is only 20 billion total investment and if you add another 50 billion in R&D you have a less than a 1/3rd what we have already spent on the F-35.
IMO, this is the reality we face, if we dump JSF now. We are simply beyond the point at which tactical airpower, as a subsonic power projection system, can believably generate a followon before the threat and the targeting and the technology base exceeds the present day doctrinal paradigm for theater interdiction in an A2AD environment where the USAF is not a major player.
LEG
"The U.S. Air Force's Ultimate What If: No F-35 and Many More F-22's"
James Hasik
August 14, 2015
Source:
http://www.nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-us-air-forces-ultimate-what-if-no-f-35-many-more-f-22s-13583
James Hasik
August 14, 2015
Source:
http://www.nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-us-air-forces-ultimate-what-if-no-f-35-many-more-f-22s-13583
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