Tuesday, June 07, 2011

Stealth, the white elephant

Stealth is very expensive to make and maintain. There are other trade-offs too, for instance, the F-22 nose is smaller than the nose of F/A-18(E/F)s and F-15s so the latter jets can be upgraded to hold better avionics.

Aircraft usually have a service life of 30 years. So here's a problem, if anyone starts building radar sophisticated enough to track stealth aircraft (VHF/UHF beams), you can't just modify your fleet to counter it. Your stealth advantage is negated.

At least F-22s have their thrust-vectoring and supercruise abilities, so they would still make very capable air-to-air fighters. Very overpriced ones, but that's a sunk cost.

As far as I'm aware, F-35s do not have all-aspect stealth as F-22s do, so they will be easier to crack. F-35s have the flight envelope of an F/A-18 and no supercruise. Without stealth, you just bought a $115m gen-4 fighter with somewhat bigger load out. Bravo.

Anecdote: the USAF does not intend to use F-35s for air-to-air. That will still be the mission of their F-15Cs and F-22s, the F-35s will supplant (or supplement?) the F-16s for strike and SEAD roles. Take that as you will.

What I think is a better alternative? Active defenses. Electronic warfare. Get a better ARM up and running (I hear HARMs are terrible, and ALARMs are marginally better) and send in your Growlers and Wild Weasels. And if the enemy adapts, you just need to come up with a better jamming pod instead of scrapping the fleet.

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