
The Strategic Consequences of F-22 Termination (2009) - gcv
http://www.ausairpower.net/APA-NOTAM-160209-1.html
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jacques_chester
For those wondering why Air Power Australia care so much about the USA's
military hardware, part of the APA agenda is to lobby for the Australian
government to obtain an export license for F-22s from the US Congress.
Currently no country has been granted such a license.

Australia is participating in the F-35 program, but there is a case to be made
that with its limited range and loadout, the F-35 doesn't suit Australia's
defensive requirements.

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james3
What are their defensive requirements then? As far as I know Australia does
not have any island territories not close the it's mainland. Would range
really be a problem for Australia's defensive needs?

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bigiain
With a combat radius of under 600 nautical miles, quite a lot of mainland
Australia would be outside useful range of existing airbases and supply lines.
600nm circles drawn around Darwin and Perth leave a fair bit of resource rich
WA coastline uncovered…

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demallien
It is not the defence of the mainland that creates problems. For example that
unprotected Western Australian coastline that you pointed to is substantially
covered if you take into the account the existence of bare bases such as
Curtain.

No, range is more of an issue because Australia's current defensive posture is
to try to stop any potential enemy in what is called the air-sea gap. That
means interdiction at long distances off the coastline. With aircraft carriers
being financially out of reach that leaves long range aircraft as the only
viable option. The f-35 is going to be a disaster for Australia's defence, we
can only hope that the US honours the goodwill that the purchase of those
systems was supposed to procure. Of course, they're going to be flying the
same crappy airframes, so meh.

Just one last thing in defence of the JSF though. It's unique capabilities in
takeoff / landing make cheaper aircraft carriers a real possibility. Of course
Australia hasn't actually tried to procure any such thing so it's only a
theoretical, but if tensions were to start to mount in Asia that is something
that could be rectified relatively quickly...

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dalek_cannes
The article repeatedly claims: "The F-22A Raptor is the only US fighter
aircraft design in existence or planned which has the capability to penetrate
and survive the advanced air defence weapons now proliferating globally".

I'm no air defense expert, but why do I have a hard time believing this?
Existing fighters, bombers and drones seem to work fine with most of the
countries the US is dealing with right now. If the US has to go to war with a
Russian or Chinese armed adversary, would small fighter planes play a huge
offensive role anyway?

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smacktoward
Most of the countries the US is dealing with right now don't have any kind of
modern air-defense network, or really even any air force. So US aviation can
make use of the skies over the battlefield uncontested. A battle against an
adversary who has those things (like Russia or China) would be different; the
US would need to be able to seize control of the air, and hold it.

Small fighters would indeed play a key role in that process, because they
would be the ones who would have to sweep the skies clean of enemy fighters so
that other aircraft (bombers, transports, etc.) could travel through them
safely. If the battle zone is inside the adversary's air defense network, that
would mean they'd have to be able to survive traveling through that network as
well.

I would bet money that within thirty years this mission will be entirely
handed over to UAVs/drones, since they're cheaper to operate and actually have
some advantages over manned fighters -- a drone can turn harder than a manned
plane can, for instance, because it doesn't have to worry about the G-forces
killing the pilot. But technology is not quite there yet today.

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r0h1n
You're absolutely right. Billion-dollar fighter jets may be a gravy train for
the Pentagon and defense contractors, but they may not be all that useful in
most war arenas the US is likely to encounter today.

Arguably the best illustration of this was the infamous "Millennium Challenge
2002", a massive war game involving 13,000 troops and $250M. Embarrassingly,
the US army got "defeated" within just the first few days by a ragtag bunch of
fighters, propeller plans, recreational boats and low-tech communication.

[http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/sep/06/usa.iraq](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/sep/06/usa.iraq)

 _" At the height of the summer, as talk of invading Iraq built in Washington
like a dark, billowing storm, the US armed forces staged a rehearsal using
over 13,000 troops, countless computers and $250m. Officially, America won and
a rogue state was liberated from an evil dictator.

What really happened is quite another story, one that has set alarm bells
ringing throughout America's defence establishment and raised questions over
the US military's readiness for an Iraqi invasion. In fact, this war game was
won by Saddam Hussein, or at least by the retired marine playing the Iraqi
dictator's part, Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper.

In the first few days of the exercise, using surprise and unorthodox tactics,
the wily 64-year-old Vietnam veteran sank most of the US expeditionary fleet
in the Persian Gulf, bringing the US assault to a halt.

What happened next will be familiar to anyone who ever played soldiers in the
playground. Faced with an abrupt and embarrassing end to the most expensive
and sophisticated military exercise in US history, the Pentagon top brass
simply pretended the whole thing had not happened. They ordered their dead
troops back to life and "refloated" the sunken fleet. Then they instructed the
enemy forces to look the other way as their marines performed amphibious
landings. Eventually, Van Riper got so fed up with all this cheating that he
refused to play any more. Instead, he sat on the sidelines making abrasive
remarks until the three-week war game - grandiosely entitled Millennium
Challenge - staggered to a star-spangled conclusion on August 15, with a US
"victory"."_

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pinaceae
oh come on, not this shit again. this has been debunked a thousand times by
now. he broke rules, he had motorcycle couriers work in lightspeed, etc.
classic exploit strat, more starcraft than real life. hence they reset, just
like blizzard would have done.

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venus
You're pretty dismissive, but I've read some pretty credible sources saying
that exercise was quite the upset. You cannot possibly expect enemies to
"follow rules" either. In a real war Blizzard wouldn't be able to "reset".

Intuitively speaking, too, I have great difficulty understanding how carriers
could possibly repel massed attacks of low value craft/missiles. And that's
not even counting the Dong Fengs, etc. I have a romantic nostalgia for
carriers as much as anyone but I can't see how they are anything other than
gigantic sitting ducks in the microchip era.

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fit2rule
In fact, the US Aircraft fleet is a huge sitting duck, just waiting to be
sunk. It can project power, sure - but only as a policing tool. In time of
total war, the carrier is useless - every potential American adversary has the
ability to sink these carriers with cheap, fast weapons designed for the job.
There is no defence currently in the field - the laser weapons (only possible
defense against supersonic smart ballistic nukes) currently being tested won't
make it in wide deployment for another 10 years.

The moment open warfare is declared, America will loose its aircraft carriers,
and trillions of dollars, thousands of lives. The only use for the Carrier
fleet right now is for America to project its police force around the world.

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forgottenpaswrd
I completely disagree.

The F22 termination is a good thing, it means the US stops wasting money that
could use to other things.

There is a "law of diminishing returns" in fighter aircraft that makes
improving them extremely expensive.

They are also designed by committee, with such expensive things risks are
minimized. It is big company thinking versus startups thinking.

In a real world those super expensive machines would me destroyed in a minute
by UAVs that can accelerate and decelerate 4 to 5 times what any manned
vehicle, and are 1000 times less expensive, and could be programmed for doing
risky things by Johny the geek.

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TheMagicHorsey
The articles conclusions seem rather devoid of reasoning. Why would an F22 be
the only way to access hostile airspace? The F22 is extremely expensive and
carries a crew onboard.

Remotely piloted drones can be used in a semi-disposable manner to access
hostile airspace. Manned aircraft are going the way of horse cavalry. We have
a lot of romantic attachment to fighter jocks, so we can't accept that they
are no longer relevant.

Missiles and drones. Face it people.

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knappador
"...many good men had career changes..." It's a little hard to believe
someone's on the high-ground while apparently unconscious of sexism. Might as
well hold up a flag with "entrenched cultural views of the establishment"
written on it. This doesn't aid the counter-argument against the notion that
the F-22 was designed to fight a "defunct Soviet threat."

Let's face it. Japan and China are feinting, in the way that nations do silly
things that ultimately get settled through war, at some random rocks with
natural gas nearby while only 10m gets spent on focus fusion development and
4trillion with a 'T' flows through the fossil fuels industry every year.
Meanwhile we seem to still fight wars on the back of outright lies ("yellow
cake?") and carry out dragnet surveillance to figure out Angela Merkel's plot
to bomb the white house. Let's just say I have some problems with the overall
priorities in this picture.

On the other hand, assuming defense(?) actually is important, we have carriers
that cost billions and are complete sitting ducks to anti-ship ballistic
missiles like that China has developed, which have stealthy, guided warheads
apparently. Good thing we have Aegis cruisers guarding them to intercept any
wayward missile bodies that might also impact the carriers. Military spending
is worse than healthcare.gov.

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mapgrep
> Central to whether the US can maintain its global strategic posture is
> having sufficient numbers of F-22 Raptor fighters

Assumes facts not in evidence: That we will wage, threaten to wage, or deter
against fighting a conventional war with either Russia or China, the only two
nations on the planet who could theoretically develop the capability to thwart
our current air power arsenal (F-15, F-18, etc). I mean: Really? A gunpowder
war against Russia or China?

There is a large body of evidence, including but not limited to the past 50
years of U.S. military history, that we are more likely to end up in a war
against guerillas, insurgents, terrorists, or third world regimes -- the
strangely named "low intensity conflicts." For which these very expensive (and
very cool, to teen boys) fighters are useless. Not suboptimal; useless.

And I haven't even begun to discuss how military power is only one component
of "strategic posture." For example, China's enormous economic engine is far
more important to its clout on the world stage than its military arsenal. Ask
Pakistan or North Korea how much respect and real power a fearsome military
buys globally.

This whole article is basically propaganda designed to puff up the importance
of a weapons program held over from the cold war. It could have been written
by Boeing (although even Boeing would have been more subtle). Its assertions
are laughable. ("Unless the US deploys a minimum of 500-600 of these aircraft,
it will lose the ability to access hostile airspace with acceptable losses in
aircraft and aircrew." We access hostile aircraft every day.)

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forktheif
You didn't actually read the article did you?

The vast majority of air defence systems the US has gone against are SA-2
which is late 1950s tech, SA-3, which is early 1960s tech and a few SA-5s and
SA-6's, which are late 60s tech.

Over the past decade and a half, things have started to change. Russia has
started exporting large numbers of modern air defence systems, and modern
digital upgrades to older systems. Systems that were designed from the start
to be highly resistant to jamming and decoys and to be highly mobile.

Air defences have suddenly got a lot more capable in many nations around the
world, while western nations are by and large still using the same defence
suppression tools they had during the first gulf war.

If the US needs to attack a nation like Iran or Syria, it will not be a rerun
of 1991. Instead of the US having a 20 year technological advantage over enemy
air defence, enemy air defences will have a 20 year technological advantage
over the US air force.

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mapgrep
No, if the U.S. needs to attack a nation like Iran or Syria, we will do
overwhlemingly _better_ at securing air superiority than we did in 1991. Their
pilots are more poorly trained, fewer in number, and less connected to a
functional comprehensive air defense system than Iraq in 1991.

It's nice that you know the NATO designation of a few old SAM systems, but
that's mostly orthogonal to the question of whether we need F-22s. The U.S.
system of establishing air superiority is just that: A system, of which air
superiority fighters are just one piece. The system is unmatched in the world.
And you've been watching too much Top Gun, kiddo.

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Narkov
I'm completely naive when it comes to this technology but surely drone
technology is making all these piloted war machines redundant?

Surely it must be easier/cheaper/faster to develop a pilot-less drone to
perform these tasks.

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lmkg
In the future, sure. At this very moment, no. The drones aren't good enough
yet. The American military would rather take the conservative & expensive
approach of developing a new traditional fighter until drones are good enough.
I have no doubt that drones are the future (they are a truly 'disruptive'
change, in the sense that they commoditize fighting power), but that future
may still be 30 years away.

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Narkov
I see what you are saying however clearly these traditional "new" fighters
aren't good enough either. I think everyone agrees that drones are the future
so why not dump the $$$ into development?

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mitchty
The answer is, they are, but we have aging airframes that need to be replaced
now. That is basically the F22/F35 right now. The F15/16/18's won't last
forever, and most early block number airframes won't survive the transition to
drones.

This is really no different than past fighter replacements. Like the
F80->F86->F104->F4 etc... (i'm intentionally skipping planes). Actually the F4
is a great example of where the accepted "future of air combat" was proven
wrong. As it turns out missiles weren't the best idea for the only armament on
an aircraft. Drones may end up in the same category and we still want manned
fighters, we might not yet want to go whole hog into as yet unproven
territory.

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sseveran
I will take 4000 drones please. I bet we could russell that up for less than
the price of those F22s. The world is changing so fast. You will be better off
with smaller weapons systems that can be evolved.

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d5tryr
Russell up? Is this 4000 drone army the revolution that Mr.brand is speaking
of?

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igravious
I believe they speak ironically of Bertrand R., he of philosophy and Campaign
for Nuclear Disarmament fame.

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d5tryr
it was a Russell Brand joke, nm...

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caycep
What was the deal about the funky oxygen tanks in these things?

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xolve
Propoganda.

