Posted by
Duck Archer on Tuesday, February 10, 2009 2:52:13 AM
In Parts 1, 2, & 3, we outlined how advancing technology has ended the era of efficiently upgrading airpower by updating airplanes’ “‘internals” (like electronic fire-control systems and defensive countermeasures). In Part 4, we conclude by briefly outlining a couple of the most common objections.
Question: As shown below, do most objections to the F-22 ultimately reveal themselves as: “in the future we can do it this way because we now do it this way”?
Duck Archer challenges this blog’s readers to assess the thinking patterns in this essay, and then go forth to see if *any* F-22 objections don’t also end up putting cart before the horse!
4. So, the enemy won’t continue to adapt?
a. Some say the days of U.S. Air Force aircraft ‘going low’ are over.
Maybe. But forever surrendering part of the atmosphere is a foolish – and needless -- concession to the enemy.
Some have said, “Long-distance killing is the next-best thing to being there.” As ghoulish as the phrase may sound on first read, it has meaning. There will always be people wanting to do harm to others. The best way to be sure of ending the fight favorably is by being close enough for two very critical steps: to wield all possible force, and to be able to carefully assess the results. Long-distance ranges make things much tougher! Hence, “long distance” is merely next-best, something to do if you must. Another way to consider this point is the old adage, “Get there the firstest with the mostest” [emphasis added].
Also, how much of our fear of low flight comes just from a current inability to do so – with old-technology all-metal airframes? Which is the cart, which the horse? I bet there are circumstances today where we wish we had a real low-level ability with which to keep adversaries off-balance.
Deciding to stay high, to hit targets down low; isn’t that too much cart in front, to protect a horse the hard way?
- Who’d have imagined in the 1970s: an A-10 attacking from high-altitude? But the A-10 story may not be over. History teaches clearly “everything old is new again”. Tools change, though basic concepts remain time-tested constants.
- Consider the B-52: high, then low, now high again… (And the aviation enthusiast may note how the B-52’s history seems to mirror our aviation strategy generally … )
First, in the 1950s-1960s, the B-52’s combat realm was stratospheric, where it could operate essentially above anti-air weapons’ altitude limits. Then enemy air defenses shot down Gary Powers’ U-2, as the expanding network of SA-2 missiles gradually closed off the geography available to high-altitude airplanes. This development is what sealed the B-70 program at only 2 XB-70 aircraft. SoB-52s lost tail guns, but gained active electronic counter-measures (ECMs) to confuse radar signals – whether radars of ground units, of interceptor airplanes, or of air-to-air missiles.
But then advances in those SA missile guidance systems got too good for ECMs. In this newly lethal second B-52 operational phase, B-52 crews found themselves training at hilltop heights in very uncomfortably large & lumbering aircraft -- most certainly not meant for flight in very dense air! B-52s trained to make very-low-level attack flights, to sneak under radars (and hide behind terrain).
But this soon proved impossible, too, when enemy air defenses developed “look down see down” airborne radars – interceptors could now distinguish planes from ‘ground clutter’. So, in their third operational phase, smart engineers mated B-52s with stand-off weapons: air-launched cruise missiles (ALCMs). The B-52s could again fly in their designed high-altitude environment, sending the ALCMs into the “penetrate enemy air defenses” regions. In these days of ubiquitous Global Positioning System, we tend to forget how hard it was to figure out how to send unmanned weapons at hilltop height against well-defended targets.
B-52s today arguably fly in a fourth operational phase: traditional high-altitude conventional bombing. But this is carefully within skies completely dominated by USA air power. That’s the key: complete control of the air – at medium and stratospheric altitudes. But the lower altitudes are now lethal from proliferated hand-held weapons. All-metal airplanes are at risk. “Stealth” airplanes can fly at any altitude, largely with impunity … if we had them.
b. Some say our obsolescent all-metal technology can keep going.
Three challenges: costs of misuse, everything ages, times change.
(1) What is the cost, paid by using a plane in ways it was never designed for?
- What of the A-10 today? It madly sucks air, in a limited flight envelope ‘up high’. Its wings were designed for very thick air, not sparse air ‘up high’. It senselessly lifts heavy titanium cockpits well above its designed thick-air realm, eating fuel not just at new altitudes, but in the very clawing for altitude. Besides the wear & tear on the engine, sucking in comparatively rarified air, what is the needless cost in fuel? What is the required maintenance & engineering, to discover and capture some efficiencies of fuel & engine wear? What are the operational/survivability costs, from trying to maneuver in atmospherics for which the plane was not designed?
- Consider B-52 crews, going low. The plane was designed for warfighting from the stratosphere. So, down low, the B-52 crews got jarred nearly to death, yanking & banking among the terrain in a craft not designed for madly maneuvering in turbulent thick air so close to ground … Now, they can fight from designed altitude, but only in USA-controlled airspace. We don’t have enough airplanes, any more, to control all the airspace we’d like to all at the same time. And our combatant aircraft numbers keep dwindling.
(2) What is the cost, paid by using a plane for decades longer than originally designed for?
The answer must focus on a rhetorical question: How many air hours can we steal with good re-engineering & forward-thinking?
(3) What is the cost we must pay to the adage ”times change”?
The winning bet is that our future will include adversaries that close-off our current relative invulnerability ‘up high’. Maybe they will do it simply with overwhelming numbers of anti-air weapons – atop near-par aircraft in their own right. Then what will we do? That future may come sooner than we desire, if our adversaries have even half brains and even a little courage … which they seem to possess at the least. So ‘going low’ may again become the survivable way - but only if we have equipment to do it.
- As we already must admit, our adversaries note we don’t go low today. Inevitably, they’ll develop & field weapons that threaten us ‘up high’. F-15s, F-16s, and A-10s will get chewed up – if the geriatric airframes don’t break apart in flight of their own accord.
- When the enemy denies ‘up high’, we’re back to trying to terrain-mask our aircrafts’ sight, sound, heat, and everything else. And, we’ll then have to reflect on what the B-52 crews learned (even as they suffered skeletal problems): yank, bank, puke, crack apart. The Apollo 10 Crew may have pridefully radioed, from a few dozen miles above the moon: “we is down among ‘em”. But a spacecraft in the airless void behaves far differently than an aircraft in an atmosphere – and likewise different are the demands on the human body, its sense of balance, and resulting ability to fly & fight among the mental & physical fatigue.
One thing more. Certain of our adversaries/competitors are already developing & fielding stealthy airplanes of their own. These aircraft seem to be incapable of matching the F-22, but certainly overpower our current (non-stealth!) aircraft. This thought should be chilling: if we refuse to modernize, we may soon see our obsolete aircraft become irrelevant (where not shot down), and then we will have no air dominance at all. Anywhere. Not even over Boston, Miami, Seattle, or Los Angeles. Chilling!
Tying Up 4 Parts.
Times change. Old stuff gets ever more costly to maintain. Old stuff can be used in only so many new ways. These three sentences are truisms. They are objective reality, regardless how we might wish the world to be.
- Crossbows yielded to muskets, which gave way to rifles.
- Airships yielded to biplanes, which yielded to monoplanes; then jets pushed propellers aside.
- Likewise, ‘all-metal airplanes’ are going the way of the Model-T.
- All things go through stages from state-of-the-art to obsolescence to obsolete to antique.
The F-22/F-35 is the next step in the see-saw between offense and defense. To see current success and project to a decade from now is putting cart before the horse: you cannot actually get there from here; the competition will definitely beat you to the destination!
One cannot expect a winning fight when one’s airpower is obsolescent – more-less obsolete or antique – but one can expect to live like rats scurrying from one cave to the next, and losing manpower all the way. The last century of warfare has taught clearly – without exception – that absent control of the air (today’s ‘high ground’), you have only one hope of winning: morale. It’s frightfully costly to win by wearing down the enemy’s will to fight. Indeed, across the board, it’s far easier to win by eliminating the enemy’s ability to fight. We sure lost in Vietnam, but don’t forget the Viet Cong suffered horrendous losses for their win. Note how quickly we won Desert Storm when we dominated the air – and with far fewer casualties (on both sides) than any ‘experts’ feared, going in. Saddam’s front-line forces were all reduced below 50% before the ‘left hook’ decked our adversary in just a few weeks. Indeed, the last century of warfare bears out a truth: absent air control, you can win only in the very costly arena of morale.
Remember the equation: Threat = Ability + Intent.
The equation goes for assessing enemy threats. But it’s a 2-way equation. It also measures our ability to fight.
History marches on, whether we stay in step or not. We will abjectly need the F-22 in ten years, when its painfully slow production rates have fielded enough of the 183-airplane force in sufficient numbers to make a difference … at least, a difference in one spot of the globe. 183 is pitifully small. In objective reality, the USA is the richest country ever in world history – even after the mortgage balloon burst!
If the USA cannot afford an Air Force of F-22s (and an Air Force & Navy of F-35s), then it’s only because we foolishly THINK we cannot afford it! We need the F-22. We need to start & continue producing, now!