Dogfight : F35 vs F16

[GScholz]

Considering the enemy... None of them.

If there is one thing this enemy has proved it is their will to fight against insurmountable odds.

[PJ_Godzilla]

CAS is a mission, not an aircraft. And it's not about how close your plane is to the troops, but how close to friendly forces you can safely deliver weapons and how fast you can deliver them. A B-1 circling above the fight dropping smart bombs fits that bill. And 24% is not a majority no matter how you try to twist it. Other aircraft fly the majority of CAS missions.

You maligned Pierre Sprey earlier, and John Boyd by transit, so let's dig a little deeper into the charts, because on their face, they tell us no more than sortie count, and are thus valueless.

More worthwhile metrics might include, for example, some kind of kill efficiency per sortie, or, better, per unit ord used, these  often being costly. Another good stat to check would be loss rates or damage rates per sortie. Regarding your Time-to-Target metric, he A-10 was conceived with exceptional loiter capability. Which is quicker to target? A B-1 taking off or an A-10 loitering in vicinity?

The sortie counts are worthless as an indicator of value in-role. Indeed, one could conceivably read them as a simple indicator that insufficent dedicated CAS aircraft are available in the form of the A-10 itself, leading to the misuse of birds like the '16.

Okay, now i'll malign Boyd a little: The F-111, while a horrible fighter, ended up being a pretty good/sophisticated strike/bomber aircraft and Boyd's protege Burton, who ripped the Bradley IFV for the acceptance testing used was unaware of how well suited said vehicle, in large part due to its light weight and mobility, fit into the maneuver warfare doctrine of his old mentor Boyd. God loves irony.

However, this desire to paper over the merits of an excellent CAS-specialized aircraft baffles me. I recognize that the load and range are very similar between the f-16 and A-10, but suspect the increased loiter capability, low-speed manueuverability advantage, and enhanced survivability of the hog make it a better aircraft in the anti-armor role.

I'd add, as a post-thought... those GAU shells are a low-cost mechanism for dispatching vehicles, certainly. OTOH,  I wonder about the relative cost issue of maintaining another unique aircraft. Adding F-16s drives you closer to a lower complexity solution in that regard, admittedly.

[GScholz]

... they tell us no more than sortie count, and are thus valueless.

Not if you only want to show that the A-10 is not the only CAS capable plane in service. Also the charts do tell us more if you take the time to read them: Total weapons released by aircraft with the A-10 having a 13% share.

Regarding your Time-to-Target metric, he A-10 was conceived with exceptional loiter capability.

Nope. The A-10 was designed as a flying tank destroyer. Fielded at forward bases in Germany the A-10 was supposed to make a short flight to attack the Soviet vehicle columns rushing through the Fulda gap, then quickly RTB and reload. The A-10 actually has a rather short range and takes a long time to get on station because of its slow cruising speed. In the Gulf War the A-10s had to get on the tanker to get to the killbox, and then get back on the tanker to RTB. Not ideal.

Which is quicker to target? A B-1 taking off or an A-10 loitering in vicinity?

A loaded question. The answer to the real question is: A B-1 loitering in the vicinity. Like they do now. The B-1 can loiter for a lot longer than an A-10 and can carry more than seven times the A-10's max ord load.

However, this desire to paper over the merits of an excellent CAS-specialized aircraft baffles me. I recognize that the load and range are very similar between the f-16 and A-10, but suspect the increased loiter capability, low-speed manueuverability advantage, and enhanced survivability of the hog make it a better aircraft in the anti-armor role.

There is no desire to paper over the merits of the A-10. However, it is time to wake up to the realities of the modern battlefield. As a counter insurgency (COIN) aircraft the A-10 is still awesome, but on the modern battlefield flying low and slow is death. These days sometimes even the insurgents have manpads, like the Turks found out a while ago.

The USAF and NATO air forces are rewriting the CAS mission based on how the battlefield has evolved. Traditional CAS was always a dangerous mission even before the proliferation of advanced and highly portable air defense systems. CAS in the future will not be low and slow, but high and unseen. Using affordable precision standoff weapons like the Small Diameter Bomb.

And btw. the GAU-8 is not cheap to run. At $65 per round (last time i checked) a full mag is going to cost $70,000. A SDB precision guided standoff bomb is $40,000. A JDAM costs $25,000. A GBU-12 laser guided bomb is $21,000. And if you use the GAU-8 liberally on every sortie you're looking at changing all seven barrels every 20-30 sorties.

[PJ_Godzilla]

I'll probe further on two issue and make a couple of comments without pulling the quotes.
1. Accepted - other aircraft are CAS-capable. But, we already knew that.
2. On the range issue, a comparison of F-16 and A-10 show ranges of approx 2200NM. Further, A-10 shows, at least per Wiki source, as having nearly a 2-hour loiter capability in the target vicinity, max (I'm sure that's just one profile). While I'd never disparage the range of an intercontinental bomber like B-1, how many of those are in the inventory (76, I thought...) and it's certainly a much higher-value target, albeit your point stands assuming complete and total air dominance. It's a different issue, granted, but it's hard to imagine B-1 as cost effective in a CAS role.
3. Accepted that sophisticated hand-held anti-air weaponry is potentially a game-changer in terms of the design brief... My question here is one of countermeasure capability. How does fast and maneuverable more effectively counter a MANPAD than slow and maneuverable? Or is it strictly a matter of that attack altitude, which drives intercept time for the manpad's missile (thus buying reaction time for the pilot) ?
4. As for the cost-effectiveness of the GAU, it'd be valuable to know the average "actual" rounds fired per kill, which would undoubtedly include some waste. What you've stated is the upper bound for usage. Clearly, one shot-one kill would be extremely cost effective but is probably not even within human capability, given the ROF and subject to the trigger settings (is fixed number rounds burst or single shot even a capability of the GAU?). 

In short, I see point 3 as potentially a design-brief game-changer of overriding import, one of which I'd only given passing consideration before, probably because, thinking honestly on the matter, I took for granted that the Iraqi forces in both Iraq wars should have had numerous previous gen weapons of the type. I mean, Stinger and RedEye are both old as dirt - and Iraqi army performance was poor generally... Doubtless the lethality of current-gen MANPADS has evolved significantly.

[GScholz]

1. Dave apparently didn't know.

2. The A-10 has a 1.5-2 hour loiter time in the CAS profile, but that only allows for a 250 mile combat radius. In the real world you can only deploy the A-10 into an uncontested airspace. And in uncontested air space any aircraft can loiter for a couple of hours as long as there are tankers available nearby. Without tankers an F-35 could probably loiter for at an hour, maybe 90 minutes with drop tanks on a 250 mile mission.

3. High and unseen. At 30,000 feet you're not going to see or hear a fighter. And in an F-35 the radars won't see you either.

4. Let's just agree that shooting at the enemy is not cheap. However, closing to such a range that the enemy can effectively shoot back is potentially much more expensive.





And the older Igla is still an effective weapon against low and slow aircraft. As this Turkish Cobra crew discovered to their demise.

[FLOOB]

Chuck Yeager says the F-35 is a waste of money.

[GScholz]

He also says the F-22 is a waste of money. And he's right in the sense that any weapon system is a waste of money if we all could just learn not to be stunninghunks to each other... But that's hippie talk.

[Oldman731]

Chuck Yeager says the F-35 is a waste of money.

That almost guarantees that it's a bargain.

- oldman

[EskimoJoe]

Considering the enemy... None of them.

If there is one thing this enemy has proved it is their will to fight against insurmountable odds.

You would be very surprised at how quickly they tend to give up and GTFO when CAS arrives, then.

Even with Apaches, which is another thing you guys don't seem to be considering for your CAS argument. Granted they're not long range players, they certainly fit in the short range protection and interdiction role. You have to consider the overlap. The F-16s can get there quick and suppress and potentially eliminate a target with their limited ordnance, where the A-10s might not be as quick they can show up when the F-16s are done and stick around until the F-16s come back, by which time the A-10s probably won't be needed back anyway. The F-35 doesn't really fill any gaps in this method. It's just kinda.. there. For no reason.

If anything, I fully support the return of B-52 fleets for the destruction of everything.

[Vraciu]

That almost guarantees that it's a bargain.

- oldman

No, it means restating F-22 is a waste of money that needs to be spent on its replacement--which ain't the Just So Failed T/A-35.

Again. Yeager said the T/A-35 is a waste of money as is RESTARTING the F-22 line.   He is correct on both counts. 

We should never have stopped the F-22 line to begin with nor started the Joint Strike Failure.   

[GScholz]

The F-16s can get there quick and suppress and potentially eliminate a target with their limited ordnance, where the A-10s might not be as quick they can show up when the F-16s are done and stick around until the F-16s come back, by which time the A-10s probably won't be needed back anyway. The F-35 doesn't really fill any gaps in this method. It's just kinda.. there. For no reason.

Except that the F-16s won't be around for much longer. In your scenario the F-35 and other platforms will replace both the F-16 and A-10.

[PJ_Godzilla]

And, I think that brings us full circle and to, since John Boyd was mentioned (by me), my question, probably already answered in the 55 or so preceding pages: can F-35 actually dogfight?

Maybe better, has anyone done an E/M comparison on the two? This would be a good time for Leon "Badboy" to make an appearance.

If F-35 isn't a decent match-up E-M -wise to F-16, then we're talking Century Fighter part II here, and I really don't care whether the  standoff gear promises standoff kill capability.

As for the CAS role, let's see what the new spec produces. If G. Scholz is correct, we'd be seeing a high-loiter, high-capacity standoff weapons platform that operates at 20K+. I'd question whether that now makes it a target for another, and possibly more dangerous tier of the air defense - SAMs. I'm certain it does, bt also suspect those are more easily suppressed than the sneakier manpads. 

[GScholz]

The early test with the F-16 that started the whole "F-35 lost to a 30-year old F-16" toejamstorm was done with the F-35 software being immature and limited to 5G. "Dolby" Hanche described the difference between the F-35 and a "light F-16" as the F-16 having the edge in sustained turn rate, while the F-35 had the edge in instantaneous turn rate, acceleration and climb. At the time he was flying the F-35A with the 3i software, limited to 7G. What the 9G capable 3f software does to the F-35's dogfight capabilities is yet to be seen. Or at least yet to be reported. My impression is that it is similar to an F-18E compared to an F-16, except with more thrust. A "light F-16" is a hard plane to beat in a dogfight. I know of only three planes that can do it, and they're all European double-deltas.

[GScholz]

And it's not really the standoff weapons that have reduced the need for extreme maneuverability in modern fighter designs, but the advancements in dogfight missiles. There is no longer any need to point the nose of the aircraft at the enemy. There's no real need to maneuver into a specific position in space relative to your target to fire your weapons at him. All you need to do is to look at the enemy with your helmet sight and send the missile on its way. This revolution started in the 1980s with the Soviet AA-11 Archer, and today all modern air forces have dogfight missiles with helmet mounted sights.

The focus on standoff weapons and tactics comes from the realization that in a dogfight between modern adversaries all aircraft involved are likely to get shot down because everyone will get their missiles off the rails. The lethality and sophistication of modern missiles is turning the air war into a game of hide and seek, where the one who gets spotted first gets killed by a stealthy missile launched by an adversary he never knew was there. It's turning into fast paced aerial submarine warfare almost.

[PJ_Godzilla]

Yes, yes... according to the billing, if the F-35 gets in the dogfight to begin, he's screwed up. However, reading the brief on F-35, it looks very much like a decent strike aircraft and an excellent asset for early penetration missions; those needed to take out the top tier of an air defense system.

I'd say, after that, you're better off sending 7 F-16s. Pity we can't re-spool the lines. Why 7? Because, at 18.8M per copy, that's how many you get for the cost of one F-35 STRIKE fighter.

It's reminiscent of the old "bigger, higher, faster" USAF mentality. Getting a specialized design brief produces special-role superstars. And this STILL applies, probably even more so, if the aspect of the missiles has increased so radically, as you state in subsequent post.

Wait for the new asc software..? Here's my general beef. If the thing is a strike aircraft, let's design it for strike and move on, satisfied with the knowledge that it can fight almost as well as an F-16 in the fighter role. By all means, develop the software, but let's get away from this crazy idea that a multi-role aircraft can specialize as well as a specialized aircraft - and then let's develop a specialized aircraft for the next-gen air superiority role. They've made a $130M Swiss Army knife after a 4+B development program. For that, two better aircraft probably could've been developed.