
Should Future Fighter Be Like a Bomber? Groundbreaking CSBA Study - hackuser
http://breakingdefense.com/2015/04/should-future-fighter-be-like-a-bomber-groundbreaking-csba-study/
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jewel
I'm writing a sci-fi novel about a future war between Canada and the United
States which mostly takes place between their fighter planes. For plot reasons
all planes are required to have a human pilot (as per international treaty),
but it seems preposterous that you'd have anything other than remote-
controlled or AI controlled airborne machines in the future.

Having to carry a human creates a huge number of constraints. You can't
maneuver as quickly due to G-forces, you can't make the fighters small, you
can't have them hide-in-wait on the ground for days or weeks at a time. Human
reaction time isn't as good, and humans can't coordinate with as many other
pilots as a computer can. Pilots are also expensive to maintain.

Anyway, just some thoughts. I'm not an expert on the topic, which is why the
novel is going to be a romance which just happens to be set in the future.

~~~
twic
If computer-controlled aircraft have the advantages of high maneuverability,
small size, fast reactions, and disposability, what do you get if you turn the
knobs on all of those up to 11, and then fit the simplest possible kill
mechanism? A very effective AI controlled airborne machine that already exists
- called a missile!

The only question is how you get the missiles to the battle (because being
small makes it hard to make them long-ranged), and how you get slow-but-
powerful human brains and large-aperture sensors near enough to them to make
effective use of them.

So far, we've got two ways of doing this. Firstly, by slinging missiles
beneath manned fighter aircraft which carry the brains, and sending those out
along with airborne early warning aircraft which carry the sensors (and more
brains). Secondly, by fitting them to warships big enough to carry plenty of
brains and radars themselves. The aircraft have the advantage of speed (and
altitude, if that matters), whereas the ships have the advantage of range (and
a few other things).

This battleplane idea can be seen as either converging the fighters and AEW
aircraft, or as transferring some of the attributes of the warships to the
fighters.

Alternatively, the idea could be seen as converging reality with a 1987
techno-thriller:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_of_the_Old_Dog](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_of_the_Old_Dog)

~~~
harperlee
So one unintended consequence of SpaceX is that we might end up with missiles
that can land, wait, and relaunch themselves when needed.

~~~
twic
Yeah, but they'll be constantly posting pictures of themselves on Instagram,
so they won't be hard to avoid.

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hackuser
To add to the article: Per one study by some leading defense thinkers, Vietnam
is the last time the U.S. had a large number of air-to-air encounters. There,
80% of encounters had been decided before the loser had a chance to defend
themselves. The authors conclude that situational awareness is key. [1]

[1] [http://csbaonline.org/publications/2007/03/six-decades-of-
gu...](http://csbaonline.org/publications/2007/03/six-decades-of-guided-
munitions-and-battle-networks-progress-and-prospects/)

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vilhelm_s
Sounds very much like the original concept for the F-111: a large aircraft
with long range and large payload, which can do both air-to-ground, and
beyond-visual-range air combat. Maybe the time is finally ripe.

Back then this was proposed top-down (by McNamara), and both the Air Force and
the Navy hated the idea. I wonder what they will think this time around.

~~~
erobbins
I was just thinking this.. "sounds like the F-111 all over again"

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jessaustin
Hmmm, it's not clear that "a database of “over 1,450 air-to-air victories”
around the world from 1965 to the present" can really help us understand a
world that is infested with aerial drones. A supermegabomber might well carry
enough missiles to drop scores of fighters before they even see it. What can
it do about a cloud of thousands of tiny autonomous jet-intake-seeking drones?
Even if it can see them, it can only disable a particular percentage. Then one
drone finds a jet intake and the supermegabomber is a sitting duck.

For the wars that will be fought in the very near future, a bigger plane is
mostly a bigger target.

~~~
sp332
A tiny drone won't have very good sensors so they can't find the plane. And if
you know where the plane is you should send a missile instead of waiting for a
drone to find a jet intake.

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djrogers
Kinda reminds me of Flight of the Old Dog - in that case it was 80's high-tech
stuffed in to a B-52, giving it 'escort' capabilities...

As many have pointed out, this type of air-to-air platform may make sense for
knocking out our current opposition, but when that opposition is all drones?

That's the real game changer - a drone wouldn't even have to 'launch' a
missile, you could build one with a secondary impulse engine that would turn
it in to a missile. Have dozens/hundreds flying on-station in high-
efficiency/high-boredom flight paths, all controlled over-the-horizon, or from
a standoff AWACs stop platform 100s of miles away.

The potential impact on naval warfare may be even greater...

~~~
soup10
Also, there hasn't been a full scale war with modern military technology in
decades. So nobody really knows what actually works and what just sounds good
in theory.

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nickhalfasleep
In short, they want a bomb truck that can lurk and loiter, it will carry
missiles, the missiles will be more maneuverable than any manned fighter.

Going to be a hard sell for a "Top Gun" culture of fighter jocks at the
pentagon.

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julie1
Bright article for once.

But, such a shame people don't understand what survival to the fittest means.

Bombers/planes are expensive. Some people think that if you are rich then
having expensive toys is good. Less people are able to buy them so you should
win the wars against almost all poor countries.

Right, it is a basic asymmetric situation. Survival to the fittest, is about
using your advantage.

Well, how expensive is it in a poor country to build and destroy an expensive
plane?

Stealth plane are stealth. They tend to absorb waves. Thus if you have a
distributed grid of electromagnetic emitters you probably have a very cheap
radar very efficient for detecting stealth plane. Once you have a vector,
shooting a plane that has a given cone of future is quite trivial.

Well, that is called a mobile network. I am no genius, but I see a potential
for reverting the assymetry. Ok, maybe I am wrong. But, war is assymetric. If
you can invest 1% of the sum in military expense compared to your ennemy to
defeat him, then you win in much more cases.

The fighter vs missile is known since they droped the MACH 4 plane studies
(dassault).

The point about war is we can't prepare for it because we never know how it
will look like.

My stupid opinion is: it is better to avoid war, and invest the saved money in
education of fine citizens that will be smart in face of a new situation
called war so that we may survive.

But one can also build very expensive planes... that can be defeated with very
small cheap education.

~~~
julie1
I think I could actually evaluate the price it would cost for building this
radar in one year (and quite a lot of cash for asking people that knows more
than me) and give and exact amount of money for building it. And one more year
for asserving missile on the target. And this means that we can know the cost
of this idea for a fraction of the cost of the F35. Which at my experience
means that it might cost just an order of magnitude more than the money to
evaluate.

Which still means that I am amazed at how much money we spend on expensive
weapons that one can defeat with far less money.

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kposehn
The platform I think will decide future air superiority is actually fairly
well evidenced here.

There definitely will be a need for high-performance/agile aircraft, but I
don't know that it will be the traditional fighter pilot. The main reason is
that the presence of a pilot creates an inherent limitation in performance -
you have to protect a sack of meat/bones/blood from G-forces, etc.

With that in mind, I could see missiles that are extremely maneuverable and
could spend a long amount of time tracking and eventually destroying a target
(such as an enemy fighter plane).

At a higher level, one of the most interesting weapons of the cold war was the
Phoenix missile. Designed for the A-12 (precursor to the SR-71), it was high-
Mach missile that would launch, go to high altitude, power off and then lance
down from above into the target. F-14's carried the missiles and were quite
capable of removing a large number of targets at well beyond visual range (a
"standoff" missile iirc). The biggest limitation was that the missiles
required constant illumination by the fighters for their targeting solutions,
which meant an opposing flight could attempt to close the distance to their
own range before the missiles struck (or escape the terminal envelope).

While I'm a bit out of date on current AAM tech, I think we'll probably see
missiles capable of this same type of performance but at even greater ranges
and altitudes. A larger standoff-fighter that is capable of extremely high-
altitudes (90k+ feet) that can loiter there could conceivably carry a large
number of missiles well away from the threat zone - over an international
border for instance - while still having target/kill capability.

500-mile range AAM anyone? Fascinating stuff.

~~~
greedo
AIM-54 was a Navy only project, not an A-12 armament. Perhaps you're
conflating it with the AIM-47? The Phoenix is a natural derivative of the
Falcon, but still a distinct system.

~~~
vilhelm_s
Fun trivia: in 1980 there was a study about modifying existing SR-71s to carry
AIM-54s, to shoot down Soviet AWACS planes. It never went anywhere, but it
sounds pretty bad-ass.

[http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,3780.0...](http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,3780.0/all.html)

~~~
greedo
Great link. I'm surprised that this was contemplated as I've always thought
the Moss and Mainstay were considered crappy AWACs. It's also interesting that
the Foxbat wasn't considered a threat to this mission. This also gives a lot
of insight into the role of the F-22 should we fight a near-peer opponent.

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bicknergseng
I feel like this is an obvious "duh" followed by "that doesn't go far enough."
I feel like the real question is "do we need fighters or bombers at all?"
Seems like we would just want delivery platforms for guided missiles since
dogfighting is to air combat as the line infantry is to ground combat.

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melling
For the same cost, maybe we should develop a few generations of unmanned
fighters? Perhaps even hypersonic unmanned fighters? Hopefully, some of the
R&D will make its way into the civilian sector. Defense projects ar incredibly
expensive. I'd like to get more return on that investment.

e.g NY to Tokyo in 4 hours by 2035.

~~~
twic
How about Brussels to Sydney in about 4.6 hours?

[http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/lapcat.html](http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/lapcat.html)

JFK-NRT is 6745 miles, BRU-SYD is 10398 - although the Reaction Engines plan
would be to go the long way round to avoid bothering people with the noise, a
distance of 10097 miles.

Generations of hypersonic unmanned fighters required: zero!

~~~
melling
Sure, I've been following hypersonic flight for at least a decade.

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramjet](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramjet)

We'll get there eventually. Have the DoD spend $1 trillion on development over
a decade and we'll get there faster.

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PaulHoule
Note that the F-35 is already barking up this tree.

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late2part
John Boyd is probably rolling in his grave.

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curiously
bullshit. you always need visual confirmation of your target by a human. no
matter what foe-friendly system you implement, it's down to visual range ID.
you simply can't do this better than strapping someone in a fighter. you can't
do this without high power to weight ratio and tight turning radius for dog
fighting scenarios.

we are seeing revitalization of McNamara's failed Standardization policy in
all fighter. The very fact that completely different plan designs came out for
different theaters and purposes show this. A-10 for low flying, heavy, armor
shelled plane. Tomcat that withstands naval capatapults and fly long range
with good fuel efficiency (variable swept wings), and eventually the Hornet
vs. using naval F-16 or F-15

~~~
rwallace
> bullshit. you always need visual confirmation of your target by a human.

That would rule out the Phoenix missile, and yet it was built, and the
Iranians of all people used it to considerable effect against Iraqi aircraft
in the 1980s.

~~~
curiously
well I don't know about that since operational history from Iran tends to be
shaky in credibility. I mean they have no training and maintenance
capabilities after the revolution when the American technician sabatoged the
Tomcats as well as critical parts.

Even the two times the Phoenix missile was fired they both failed. Not sure
how a completely cut off Iranian air force with no spare parts or maintenance
knowledge would've been able to fire at Iraqi, an equally incompetent force,
my guess is the Iraqi air force actually crashed before the Iranians did.

