Ukraine Always Get What You Want

That's beginning. Air Force has a program where fighters get a drone wingman, which can cover him and also can be sent into high threat areas instead of the pilot taking that risk.

 

Ground forces are going to be armed to the teeth with cheap, accurate, shoulder-fired missiles that will bring down anything under 50K feet within a 10 mile radius. It’s just inevitable.

 

Eh. Measures, countermeasures. That game goes on forever, new advances happen, new defenses are put in place.

Remember also that the reason to use drones is that they are smaller, cheaper, and can perform maneuvers that a human pilot cannot endure. It's a sure thing that drones become more and more prevalent. Just as the Carrier Admirals muscled out the Battleship Admirals, the Air Force brass that favor fighter planes are going to be forced to accept drones over time.

 

Oh, you can take down an F35 with a shoulder missile? Cool.

 

It’s just a matter of time.

Getting Serious About SEAD: European Air Forces Must Learn from the Failure of the Russian Air Force over Ukraine

https://taskandpurpose.com/news/us-air-force-defeat-ukraine-russia/?amp

 

OK.

 

The Pentagon will not let the F-35 fail. They must’ve pumped at least nine figures, perhaps 10, into the program. Perhaps a fighter jet that’s supposed to do everything ain’t a great idea.

 

as was said here a year ago

 

Couple of points on this discussion.

Shoulder-fired surface to air systems are almost always infrared, or heat-seeking. the SA-7 is the most modern Russian/Chinese/NK/Iranian version. It has a range of 3.7 kilometers and can reach about 7500 feet. That (maximum) altitude decreases at range. Our countermeasures defeat the most modern warheads more than 95 percent of the time.

We aren't quite to the 50,000 feet and 10 mile range yet, and won't be there anytime soon. Additionally, those MANPADs aren't fired or connected by radar systems, so they must have eyes on the target to fire. That Russian assault of the airport that failed on day 1 was absolutely laughable. They flew aircraft in broad daylight at 1,000 feet into MANPAD country. We own the night. Nearly half of my 1,700 hours is under NVGs. We train constantly against integrated air defense systems. We plan against them and fly against systems that mimic those environments daily.

Now, vehicle-based radar-guided systems like the SA6 Gainful or SA8 Gecko are a different story. Those systems are many times dispersed across the battlespace and integrated by systems like the G/H band Giraffe radar and can eat your lunch. We use a combination of tactics, aircraft hardening, and SEAD to defeat those. We have developed low-level tactics capable of defeating those even in large helicopter formations. The Russian SU-35 has a radar cross section of about 1 square meter. The Chinese "fifth gen" fighter is about 3, which is about the same as the latest version of the F18. The F35 has a cross section of .00015 square meters -- or that of a golf ball. That's not to say it can't be seen, but working with the F22's systems, the penetration capabilities are just incredible.

We've learned a lot since this war began, but the biggest thing we've learned is that Russian doctrine is still Russian doctrine.

1.) Non-precision fires work. It's the biggest killer on the battlefield.

2.) They lack junior leadership to lead maneuver forces to consolidate gains created by artillery fires. We train NCOs and brigade staffs on that everyday around the world, especially at our combat training centers like the Joint Readiness Training Center, National Training Center, and Joint Multinational Readiness Center. We train junior leaders and staffs against a live and thinking enemy not constrained by American doctrine.

3.) While Russia has some really cool toys, they don't have as many of those really cool toys as we thought. Nor do they have as many that work. Their maintenance is terrible. Remember the convoys that failed early on? Many of them failed because tires were dry-rotted from not being moved in years. Our economy is about three times that of Russia and about twice that of China. We've got the money to pour into logistics to keep us from looking like Russia.

 

Fantastic insights, as usual.
Doesn’t it seem logical though that MANPAD advances over the next 20-30 years will catch up to and pass Gen 5 and even Gen 6 fighters? Isn’t it also simply a numbers game? Enemies can get hundreds of MANPAD and mobile rocket launchers for the price of one fighter (the latter of which has a severely limited supply, particularly when you factor in readiness).

 

Not really. MANPADS are IR systems that can easily be defeated by changing countermeasure mixtures (or cocktails) that mimic signatures and confuse them.

Radar is the bigger threat, and those systems are big, expensive, hard to hide, and can be jammed. As soon as they turn it on, we can see it and kill it. They'll get a shot off, but will die soon after.

 

Now, does any of this mean I'd be comfortable hearing my systems identify an SA7 or 8? Uh, no. But we ain't the Russians.