PAK-FA, T-50: News #4

havok wrote:

LMFS wrote:It seems hardwired in many Americans that acknowledging any merit to Russia is intrinsically anti patriotic.

That is where you are wrong. Seriously wrong. When I was active duty, we look forward to seeing Soviet jets. We have no problems giving praise where it is due. Of all the jets we hands-on examined, and we got lots of them, the exception that we really were negatively critical was the MIG-25. Belenko's defection was before my time, but our squadron was given a chance to see the full technical break-out of the jet and the -25 was a PoS.

LMFS wrote:In this case, Russians have been doing RCS measurements since decades and the mathematical basis of analytical VLO design was developed by a Russian,...

That is NOT true. I have Ufimtsev's text on my bookshelf. It certainly was not any sort of 'cookbook' for designing VLO shapes. If that is what you were implying. All Ufimtsev did was fleshed out the mathematical behaviors of reflections. Inferring any sort of military values to his work was the responsibility of the Soviet military and they fooked up. Live with it.

LMFS wrote:...so yes, talking about their lack of LO knowledge while the American stealth fighters have a dismal availability rate of 50% or below (AFAIK the F-22 needs some 30 hours of work on ground per flying hour) is definitely absurd.

This is where you are wrong. Seriously wrong.

If I tell you that it takes 5 man-hrs to tow one aircraft from one spot to another, would you believe me? Not likely. But that is what goes in the maintenance record and it is the truth.

You need the crew chief, tow truck driver, two wing walkers, and one tail walker. If you have no idea of what I just said, then your ignorance made my point. It will take at least 15-20 min to prep a jet for towing, then another 15-20 min to move it from one spot on the ramp to another, or to move it from the ramp to the hangar.

In peacetime, maintenance standards are high and QA roams the flightline. But in wartime, restrictions are loosened. Even those in civilian aviation maintenance do not take criticisms like yours seriously. You simply do not know what you are talking about.

LMFS wrote:To put it provocatively, if Russians manage to deploy an actual war-capable machine with the Su-57 instead an expensive toy like F-22 and F-35 they may well be the first ones in having a "real" 5th generation fighter in their arsenal.

You mean the Su is the real toy.

Wow, you jumped directly to my throat havok, I was not trying to be offensive. I can be dead wrong in many respects and stand happily to be corrected, but that doesn't make me different to any one else, expert or layman. Would have sincerely appreciated you addressing the apparently very low availability rate of the Raptors (and the rest of stealth aircraft) and amount of work needed to keep them operational, which are points of concern (in my opinion and also in opinion of many insiders) regarding its effective military value in a high-intensity conflict. This is what I think most forum users would like to see discussed, not how ignorant I am.

Regarding Ufimtsev: yes, I know that it was not a handbook to make stealth fighters, was not saying and not implying that. Apart from Lockheed's approach, Northrop was AFAIK  working empirically on RCS reduction so even without Ufimtsev's work, planes like the B-2 would have been developed nonetheless.  My whole point is that I find it plainly stupid to engage in that vicious criticism of a plane the West knows only very superficially, dismissing the achievements of the Russian scientific and industrial community as a whole, when at home there are huge procurement and operational problems with existing 5th generation fighters. And sorry, but yes, the Western media and establishment are currently showing an openly russophobic behaviour and not by far giving, as you claim, credit where credit is due. I am very happy that some levelled heads still are to be found in the military but the average analysis of Russian HW is simply dismissive or condescending at best.

LMFS wrote:

Wow, you jumped directly to my throat havok, I was not trying to be offensive. I can be dead wrong in many respects and stand happily to be corrected, but that doesn't make me different to any one else, expert or layman. Would have sincerely appreciated you addressing the apparently very low availability rate of the Raptors (and the rest of stealth aircraft) and amount of work needed to keep them operational, which are points of concern (in my opinion and also in opinion of many insiders) regarding its effective military value in a high-intensity conflict. This is what I think most forum users would like to see discussed, not how ignorant I am.

Regarding Ufimtsev: yes, I know that it was not a handbook to make stealth fighters, was not saying and not implying that. Apart from Lockheed's approach, Northrop was AFAIK  working empirically on RCS reduction so even without Ufimtsev's work, planes like the B-2 would have been developed nonetheless.  My whole point is that I find it plainly stupid to engage in that vicious criticism of a plane the West knows only very superficially, dismissing the achievements of the Russian scientific and industrial community as a whole, when at home there are huge procurement and operational problems with existing 5th generation fighters. And sorry, but yes, the Western media and establishment are currently showing an openly russophobic behaviour and not by far giving, as you claim, credit where credit is due. I am very happy that some levelled heads still are to be found in the military but the average analysis of Russian HW is simply dismissive or condescending at best.

LFSM, language used has its importance, same considerations expressed in a different tone can spark different reactions, so keep on with using the one you have used there and you will have reasonable and cold headed replies.
Such type of forums are made by dedicated and in many cases also competent persons, not just by fanboys and chauvinist, so let's stick to the first and let the other apart even in the choice of the tone of debate.
For the rest, you have your good part of reason in what you say: IMHO one of the evident advantages of the PAK-FA program compared to the F-22 is to have been started with a much mature evaluation of what stealth tech can possibly achieve ending up in a way better rounded up final item for what come to the coupling between operational flexibility with high tier performances than its american counterparts.
I would be however be much interested in what specifically Mig-25 was considered lousy by the US evaluation teams and if that judgement could be extended somewhat to MiG-31 also.

Belenko's defection was before my time, but our squadron was given a chance to see the full technical break-out of the jet and the -25 was a PoS.

Which shows a serious level of ignorance.

Did you judge it to be rubbish because of its poor operational performance as an interceptor, or was it because they used 1950s technology to produce an interceptor that was perfectly capable of intercepting anything America ever made to penetrate Soviet airspace...

Maybe shit sticks.

That is NOT true. I have Ufimtsev's text on my bookshelf. It certainly was not any sort of 'cookbook' for designing VLO shapes. If that is what you were implying. All Ufimtsev did was fleshed out the mathematical behaviors of reflections. Inferring any sort of military values to his work was the responsibility of the Soviet military and they fooked up. Live with it.

Without his book the US would still be building models and testing them design by design...

It was Ufimtsevs book that helped create the mathematics needed to predict RCS via computer... making everything into a weapon to murder people has always been a strong skill of the US... whether it was taking the blankets from disease patients and letting the native americans capture them, or just going out with a gun and shooting them.

If I tell you that it takes 5 man-hrs to tow one aircraft from one spot to another, would you believe me? Not likely. But that is what goes in the maintenance record and it is the truth.

You need the crew chief, tow truck driver, two wing walkers, and one tail walker. If you have no idea of what I just said, then your ignorance made my point. It will take at least 15-20 min to prep a jet for towing, then another 15-20 min to move it from one spot on the ramp to another, or to move it from the ramp to the hangar.

A crew chief and a truck driver and two wing walkers and one tail walker, plus the pilot and don't forget the woman who is there to tell any women in the crew or if the pilot is a woman that they are doing their job every bit as good as any man could do it... and of course if there is any heavy lifting to be done the men needed to actually do it.

But hang on... wouldn't you need all those people for every aircraft in the US AF... why is it that the uber stealth F-22 takes so much molly coddling and nothing else seems to?

I guess the F-16 doesn't need any real servicing... they just tow it a lot...

You mean the Su is the real toy.

Yeah... those F-35s and F-22s are real SEX toys... that is a fact... but not everyone is into suffocation games...

Would have sincerely appreciated you addressing the apparently very low availability rate of the Raptors (and the rest of stealth aircraft) and amount of work needed to keep them operational, which are points of concern (in my opinion and also in opinion of many insiders) regarding its effective military value in a high-intensity conflict. This is what I think most forum users would like to see discussed, not how ignorant I am.

The reason they are high maintainence is that every panel is sealed... so if you think their might be a problem instead of just unscrewing the panel and having a look... maybe popping out a few parts and swapping them for new parts and then screwing up the panel again... with an F-22 or F-35 for that matter you have to be a gib stopper... you have to sand and cut open the panel... do your checks and then replace the panel and tape up the seams and coat the tape and then let it dry before you can get airborne...

And sorry, but yes, the Western media and establishment are currently showing an openly russophobic behaviour and not by far giving, as you claim, credit where credit is due. I am very happy that some levelled heads still are to be found in the military but the average analysis of Russian HW is simply dismissive or condescending at best.

Of course they are angry... we beat the Russians in 1990, so why are they not trying to emulate us and give us access to all their mineral and energy resources... why don't they just bend over and do as they are told and just be our colony.

The western media can go screw itself... and the western governments.... meaning Washington because all others are their bitch, can go screw itself too.

Smile politely, and cooperate where it suits Russian interests... and otherwise just agree to disagree and expect cooperation in Asia or central or south america or africa... lots of people there who want to trade and cooperate and mutually grow and develop.

Russia cannot develop with an American hand on the top of their head holding them down.

I would be however be much interested in what specifically Mig-25 was considered lousy by the US evaluation teams

The problem with the MiG-25 was that it was the big boogeyman that the F-15 was designed to compete with when they thought the MiG-25 was a Soviet F-15.

They even copied the layout and design of what they could see of the MiG-25 to achieve what they hoped would be parity, but they had no fucking idea of what the MiG-25 was... they thought the MiG-25 was going to help them invade europe and take over countries because that is what they thought the Soviet Union wanted.

In reality that is what the west wanted so the F-15 was the ideal plane for them.

For the Soviets WWII had just finished and the threat was the USAF and WWIII with strategic nuclear bombers... of course the new MiG-25 was going to be an interceptor and pretty much nothing else.

Just the same as the F-22... it is a sniper designed to take down an enemy airforce with non stealthy aircraft... it is supposed to supercruise at medium altitude and launch long range attacks with AMRAAM and strike down all the enemy aircraft from long range for the purposes of invading a country with a strong airforce and a strong air defence... their problem is that the primary country they were planning to invade now can see and shoot down stealth aircraft and the proliferation of the S-400 system means the number of countries they can play their ace is dwindling and they know it.

The Su-57 on the other hand is intended to defend home airspace and to hunt stealthy aircraft... hense L band radar and IRST sensors to find threats... x band low visible threats.

marcellogo wrote:
Such type of forums are made by dedicated and in many cases also competent persons, not just by fanboys and chauvinist, so let's stick to the first and let the other apart even in the choice of the tone of debate.
.

Agree. Not here to play ego games and also not willing to derail or allow others to derail the thread because they thought I was waving a red rag at them.

havok wrote:

If I tell you that it takes 5 man-hrs to tow one aircraft from one spot to another, would you believe me? Not likely. But that is what goes in the maintenance record and it is the truth.

You need the crew chief, tow truck driver, two wing walkers, and one tail walker. If you have no idea of what I just said, then your ignorance made my point. It will take at least 15-20 min to prep a jet for towing, then another 15-20 min to move it from one spot on the ramp to another, or to move it from the ramp to the hangar.

Well, maybe in USA.

We towed aircraft around the airfield in 10 minutes with 2 men on occasion.

But by the book it was:

Tractor driver, 1 technician for inspection, two conscripts. On new position another technician waits to "accept it", and thats it. All together like 10-15 minutes.

LMFS wrote:Wow, you jumped directly to my throat havok, I was not trying to be offensive. I can be dead wrong in many respects and stand happily to be corrected, but that doesn't make me different to any one else, expert or layman.

When you said that Americans are 'hard wired' to be anti-Russia in everything, I see no reason to take you seriously.

LMFS wrote:Would have sincerely appreciated you addressing the apparently very low availability rate of the Raptors (and the rest of stealth aircraft) and amount of work needed to keep them operational, which are points of concern (in my opinion and also in opinion of many insiders) regarding its effective military value in a high-intensity conflict. This is what I think most forum users would like to see discussed, not how ignorant I am.

In peacetime, standards are strict and the maintenance tempo is not what we would call urgent.

I will give you an example...

In the F-111 cockpit, all models, the Turbine Inlet Temperature (TIT) gauges have -- literally -- color paper tape, green and red, at their outer diameters. Like this example...



Every crew chief has his own stash of small items like these tapes. If a TIT indicator has its range marker tape peeling off, that would be a 'Code Two' write-up.

Code One is when a jet land with no issues. Lockheed Martin have a trade magazine call -- what else -- Code One.

http://www.codeonemagazine.com/index.html

Code One. Also known as Zero Defect (ZD).

Code Two. The jet can fly, but usually bypassed by scheduling.

Code Three. The issue rendered the jet grounded.

In the case of our TIT indicator. I will write it up during post sortie debrief. The debriefer, always someone from maintenance, will classify the peeling green tape as a 'Code Two'.

By the time the aircraft form -- AFTO 781 -- leave Debrief and into the crew chief's hands, at least one hr passed. This time is entered into some statistic chart somewhere in the bureaucratic ether.

When the crew chief sees the TIT write-up, he may have to remove the indicator from the cockpit to remove the old peeling green range marker tape, clean up the surfaces, then apply new green range marker tape. When he removed the TIT indicator from the cockpit, that is a Code Three write-up. He has to create a maintenance record of what was done to the jet. A missing indicator, especially of vital engine data, would definitely ground the jet. There is literally a hole in the cockpit instrument dash, no?

As the crew chief work on the TIT indicator, he MUST have the necessary Technical Order (TO) for removing said instrument. It does not matter if the crew chief has yrs of experience on the jet. Tool Crib usually have several copies of the appropriate TO but if all of them are signed out, the crew chief cannot work on the jet. If QA catches him removing the TIT indicator and there is no appropriate TO in the immediate area, that is another write-up, and this one will get the CO's attention in the morning. The crew chief, his immediate supervisor, and the maintenance flight chief will be in front of the CO's desk explaining why not. It does not matter if it is the nightshift. No one gets any sleep. If the CO is busy elsewhere in the morning and got into the squadron at noon, still no one sleeps. The whole time the jet is grounded.

All because of an old and peeling green instrument range marker tape.

I did not exaggerate. Not one atom's worth. The USAF is THAT serious.

Let us say that the crew chief have all the necessary tools and the appropriate TO, but as he removes the TIT indicator, a lock screw is dropped somewhere in the cockpit.

Now that is Foreign Object Damage (FOD) status. This would be a Code Three write-up and the jet is grounded. FOD will get QA involved from start to end, until that small lock screw is found. We do not want a loose screw toss around in the cockpit during maneuvers, do we? Do YOU think it is easy to find something dropped in the cockpit? Have YOU even been inside of a fighter jet cockpit, even at an airshow? I dropped a pen and that grounded the jet for 4 hrs. I had to bring beer the next day as penance. So for a job -- removing a green strip of paper tape -- that usually takes at worst 5 minutes, the jet ended up officially grounded for several hrs. All of this is entered into the records.

But let us say that nothing so dramatic happened. The crew chief put brand new green range marker tape on the TIT indicator. Does that mean it is over? Absolutely NOT.

Assuming he had to remove the TIT indicator from the cockpit, and that constituted a Code Three write-up, the re-installation of the indicator had to be signed off. If the crew chief is a 7-level, he can sign off his own work. But if he is a 5- or lower 3-level technician, he has to wait for a 7-level to sign off. And that may take time.

In removing the TIT indicator from the cockpit, he had to disconnect the electrical connector in the back of the indicator. Now that the electrical connection have been disturbed, full functionality must be ascertained. In other words -- an engine run. There is no simulator. The engine must be fully in operation to verify that the electrical connection is good.

An engine run requires: a cockpit man, a ground man on the intercom, a ground man by the fire extinguisher, and usually another ground man just to make sure the area is cleared of anyone and anything else.

If the crew chief is not engine run certified, he must find someone who is. Usually a 7-level. There is no need to go to afterburner (AB). Just start engine and cycle up/down a few times to verify that the TIT is working within specs.

So how many hrs do you think have passed since I wrote up that peeling green range marker tape?

I fully expect you and others to laugh at US for going to this extent over something so trivial like an old peeling green range marker tape on an engine instrument. But that level of attention to details, you could call it petty, is what separates professionals from amateurs. And from life and death. I really do hope the Russian Air Force is NOT like US...

On a war footing? I would not care one bit about that green tape.

This is why we USAF people -- the ones on the flightline -- do not take seriously these media reports about how much work is involved in maintaining our 'stealth' fighters. If the F-22/35 go to war, they will fight in the best condition they are. Our adversaries would not know where the F-22 came from when they die. When I was on the F-16, with the exception of the Israelis and our European allies, I would not even get in the cockpits of the non-Euros F-16s. You can figure it out for yourself who they are.

LMFS wrote:Regarding Ufimtsev: yes, I know that it was not a handbook to make stealth fighters, was not saying and not implying that. Apart from Lockheed's approach, Northrop was AFAIK  working empirically on RCS reduction so even without Ufimtsev's work, planes like the B-2 would have been developed nonetheless.

You are correct. The reality is that without Overholser finding Ufimtsev's work, Lockheed would be at worst 5-7 yrs later in the F-117 project.

LMFS wrote:My whole point is that I find it plainly stupid to engage in that vicious criticism of a plane the West knows only very superficially, dismissing the achievements of the Russian scientific and industrial community as a whole,...

This is where you are seriously wrong.

Remaining with the military side for now. The issue that the military have with Soviet/Russian hardware is at the manufacturing end, NEVER at the theoretical front. We know that the Soviets/Russians produced many of the world's finest aerodynamicists. Their airframes proves it. But excellent aerodynamics do not win battles, let alone wars.

Any aircraft, civilian or military, is a conglomeration of compromises. By the time an ideal design with outstanding -- not merely excellent -- aerodynamics make it to the final product, cockpit ergonomics, less than desirable engine, avionics that are below peers, or even poor fuel quality, could make that final product less than capable than its peers. We in the Western militaries are fully appreciative of the minds that produces our competitions. But we are jeering at whoever make the final products. Sorry, but not really that sorry.  

LMFS wrote:...when at home there are huge procurement and operational problems with existing 5th generation fighters. And sorry, but yes, the Western media and establishment are currently showing an openly russophobic behaviour and not by far giving, as you claim, credit where credit is due. I am very happy that some levelled heads still are to be found in the military but the average analysis of Russian HW is simply dismissive or condescending at best.

Am not here to speak as a representative of the Western media. I know what it is like to fly hard TF over the mountains and into the valleys of Scotland, and what 9g feels like in an F-16 over the Gulf of Mexico in an hr long free-for-all. No one in the media have that kind of hard experience. So when they are writing on a deadline, what make you think they would -- think?

In the end, do not worry about the casual readers of such articles. Worry about people like me.

Finally...Just an FYI to you and the other guy...

The F-15 did not come from the MIG-25 as you guys would like to believe. Both the F-15 and MIG-25 came from the A-5 Vigilante, whose original design had twin vertical stabs until the US Navy requested a change. Russian fanboys always love to trumpet the false 'fact' that the F-15 was a 'response' to the MIG-25.

havok wrote:

LMFS wrote:Wow, you jumped directly to my throat havok, I was not trying to be offensive. I can be dead wrong in many respects and stand happily to be corrected, but that doesn't make me different to any one else, expert or layman.

When you said that Americans are 'hard wired' to be anti-Russia in everything, I see no reason to take you seriously.

As an American I can definitely say we ARE hard wired to be anti-Russia. It's the result of a lifetime of propaganda. If you haven't yet recognized this at whatever your present age, it's just illustrates the ubiquitous nature of the propaganda; you're like a fish that can't see water. The fact that you even made this an adamant point of dispute is impressive.  

havok wrote:
Remaining with the military side for now. The issue that the military have with Soviet/Russian hardware is at the manufacturing end, NEVER at the theoretical front. We know that the Soviets/Russians produced many of the world's finest aerodynamicists. Their airframes proves it. But excellent aerodynamics do not win battles, let alone wars.

If US/western aircraft didn't suffer inferior aerodynamics vis-a-vis Russian counterparts, I do believe you'd be expounding a different perspective as to its practical importance.

havok wrote:
Any aircraft, civilian or military, is a conglomeration of compromises. By the time an ideal design with outstanding -- not merely excellent -- aerodynamics make it to the final product, cockpit ergonomics, less than desirable engine, avionics that are below peers, or even poor fuel quality, could make that final product less than capable than its peers. We in the Western militaries are fully appreciative of the minds that produces our competitions. But we are jeering at whoever make the final products. Sorry, but not really that sorry.  

So, again, any criterion in which you perceive advantage for US/western aircraft--rightly or wrongly--is given much weight. Those which may favor Russian aircraft are categorically dismissed. Yet it is others who are "fanboys." Um, okay.

PS, as a point of style, recommend laying off the emojis a bit. You're nearly as excessive as Vann7 in that regard.

BKP wrote:

havok wrote:
Any aircraft, civilian or military, is a conglomeration of compromises. By the time an ideal design with outstanding -- not merely excellent -- aerodynamics make it to the final product, cockpit ergonomics, less than desirable engine, avionics that are below peers, or even poor fuel quality, could make that final product less than capable than its peers. We in the Western militaries are fully appreciative of the minds that produces our competitions. But we are jeering at whoever make the final products. Sorry, but not really that sorry.  

So, again, any criterion in which you perceive advantage for US/western aircraft--rightly or wrongly--is given much weight. Those which may favor Russian aircraft are categorically dismissed. Yet it is others who are "fanboys." Um, okay.

PS, as a point of style, recommend laying off the emojis a bit. You're nearly as excessive as Vann7 in that regard.

This last of BKP  hit straight to the point about certain debates "a la F-16.net" i.e. reducing comparations between different planes   to a single point of perceived advantage in order to declare the other one not just inferior, that's would be a debatable habit in itself, but a PoS pure and simple.
So, Avok  you have still not replied to my own: what exactly made your team to consider MiG-25 a particolarly lousy fighter plane and such a consideration would apply to MiG-31 as well?

havok wrote:
When you said that Americans are 'hard wired' to be anti-Russia in everything, I see no reason to take you seriously.

Well, in reality I said "many" Americans, very consciously so not to include the ones that do not behave like that.

havok wrote:
In peacetime, standards are strict and the maintenance tempo is not what we would call urgent.

I will give you an example...

I fully expect you and others to laugh at US for going to this extent over something so trivial like an old peeling green range marker tape on an engine instrument. But that level of attention to details, you could call it petty, is what separates professionals from amateurs. And from life and death. I really do hope the Russian Air Force is NOT like US...

On a war footing? I would not care one bit about that green tape.

Thanks first of all for the first hand information and the reference to the Code One Magazine which looks excellent material, much appreciated. I agree that discipline and attention to detail are not dispensable when operating something so complex as an air force, unless you want to defeat only yourself. But you are right, the exaggerated example you present sounds to me like succumbing to unnecessary bureaucracy. Peace time should train for war time, not being an exercise in futility. That means, if I have the biggest discipline in peace time but run over the process in war time because I don't have time for bureaucracy I have lost an awful lot of time during my training and I'm very likely to screw it up big time, very fast as soon as I forget something important. Just IMHO

havok wrote:
This is why we USAF people -- the ones on the flightline -- do not take seriously these media reports about how much work is involved in maintaining our 'stealth' fighters. If the F-22/35 go to war, they will fight in the best condition they are. Our adversaries would not know where the F-22 came from when they die. When I was on the F-16, with the exception of the Israelis and our European allies, I would not even get in the cockpits of the non-Euros F-16s. You can figure it out for yourself who they are.

Two issues here:
> One of the main western claims regarding Su-57 is that it is not really "stealth" (whatever that should mean). If a Raptor with let's say 0,0001 (or whatever number of zeroes somebody wants to put there) sqm front RCS is not maintained to the last minute detail, flare spots will start to grow like mushroom and very soon he will be no better than the apparently crappy Russian fighter which was designed from the beginning not to care about levels of perfection that cannot be kept under war-time conditions. Not that I know the RCS of the Su-57 is not good, but in case it is, it could well be due to Russians making a different choice and saving huge money with it, not simply being sloppy or incompetent.
> I am more sceptical than you regarding how easily the F-22 would wipe the enemy fighters off the sky, but as it happens to me often, I don't really know who you are thinking on, or if you even care who the enemy is and where/why the fight would take place. I am sure you understand the difference both in terms of legitimacy and difficulty, of fighting on and for your own land and doing it just following orders and for aggression. If you really think the Russians are willing to conquer Europe and only US prevents that, I guess you are not being realistic and are strangely ignoring that their military posture is defensive while the American is an offensive one. Only possible full scale war against Russians would be at their borders, with their supporting assets and under their escalation rules, and it would be to death. Simply basing the F-22s and supporting them would be a nightmare. You know it. So, depending on who you take on and in what theater, things would not be so easy as you anticipate.

havok wrote:
This is where you are seriously wrong.

Remaining with the military side for now. The issue that the military have with Soviet/Russian hardware is at the manufacturing end, NEVER at the theoretical front. We know that the Soviets/Russians produced many of the world's finest aerodynamicists. Their airframes proves it. But excellent aerodynamics do not win battles, let alone wars.

Any aircraft, civilian or military, is a conglomeration of compromises. By the time an ideal design with outstanding -- not merely excellent -- aerodynamics make it to the final product, cockpit ergonomics, less than desirable engine, avionics that are below peers, or even poor fuel quality, could make that final product less than capable than its peers. We in the Western militaries are fully appreciative of the minds that produces our competitions. But we are jeering at whoever make the final products. Sorry, but not really that sorry.  

Again, many issues to comment but just trying to be brief:
> US owning the reserve currency is used be able to pay for luxurious levels of manufacturing and technology (and manufacturers obviously know this). Sometimes this is good and important, sometimes is just expensive. A Kalashnikov is not manufactured to the tolerances M-16s are, but the fuckers never break and in the end people fighting prefer them because they are tough and simple enough for war.
> Cannot really compare a US fighter with a serial Su-57 in terms of manufacturing but again no US guy can so all opinions in that regard are premature. And even if the later is simpler than let's say a F-35, how can you reliably infer the military value of that difference from a really neutral point of view that factors in all relevant variables and different doctrines?
> US, as a de facto empire (sorry but lets call things by its name) needs technology to be have the overwhelming military superiority that allows to sustain the status of continuous war in which it lives. A (at least by now) defensive/reactive nation like Russia only needs to sit, watch and deploy what works best to make themselves a hard-enough nut to crack to be safe, be against conventional, nuclear or proxy attack. So it is not really about a pretended race for dominance and whose killing machines are best but essentially about deterrence. And Russia is currently achieving that for less than a tenth of what the US expends. So their approach is completely correct IMO

havok wrote:
Am not here to speak as a representative of the Western media. I know what it is like to fly hard TF over the mountains and into the valleys of Scotland, and what 9g feels like in an F-16 over the Gulf of Mexico in an hr long free-for-all. No one in the media have that kind of hard experience. So when they are writing on a deadline, what make you think they would -- think?

In the end, do not worry about the casual readers of such articles. Worry about people like me.

It is great that there is still the military guys, who put their lives on the line and know that war is not for fun, if not we would all be toasted by now. So no, I am not at all worried about people like you but about the politicians that declare wars in which servicemen must fight. And they create consent through those journos that we all somehow dismiss but whose role is crucial. Many of us are sincerely sick and tired of them further encouraging Americans to kill and get killed by making them feel invulnerable, which they are not

havok wrote:
Finally...Just an FYI to you and the other guy...

The F-15 did not come from the MIG-25 as you guys would like to believe. Both the F-15 and MIG-25 came from the A-5 Vigilante, whose original design had twin vertical stabs until the US Navy requested a change. Russian fanboys always love to trumpet the false 'fact' that the F-15 was a 'response' to the MIG-25.

Well, I never mentioned this and really have no opinion on who inspired who, but as said above it makes more sense for the US to make the heavy lifting in their quest for hegemony and for the Russians to take advantage of it. As far as I can perceive, many Russian fighter designs are inspired in previous American research projects. In the end US could have just saved the money and deprived Russia of so many ideas but opted for the arms race instead.

BTW, thanks for your civil tone this time and excuse some provocative stances of mine

When you said that Americans are 'hard wired' to be anti-Russia in everything, I see no reason to take you seriously.

Hard wired is one way to say it, but a much better way to say it would be brainwashed.

All because of an old and peeling green instrument range marker tape.

I did not exaggerate. Not one atom's worth. The USAF is THAT serious.

We get it... but it does not change why the F-22 has 30 hour maintainence per flight hour and an F-15 or F-111 does not... or does F-22 use special tape that has to be removed over a period of three hours and two hours to replace it to keep the tape stealthy?

I fully expect you and others to laugh at US for going to this extent over something so trivial like an old peeling green range marker tape on an engine instrument. But that level of attention to details, you could call it petty, is what separates professionals from amateurs. And from life and death. I really do hope the Russian Air Force is NOT like US...

So in a nutshell in these two sentences, you first say... the USAF is anal, but it is the difference between an amateur and a professional... it can mean life and death and you hope the Russian AF is not anal and professional like the USAF and their people will therefore die.

You are correct. The reality is that without Overholser finding Ufimtsev's work, Lockheed would be at worst 5-7 yrs later in the F-117 project.

Without his maths models you can't make a computer programme to simulate with, so each design has to be built as a model and tested with a real radar... you can't just build a thousand model shapes and then run a computer programme to determine which is best.

The F-117 had flat facets because it reduced the amount of calculations needed... as computing power increased curves could be calculated... without the mathematical models there would still have been an F-117... it would have been even flatter... and rather less stealthy. The B-2 would have existed too of course but both aircraft would have taken a lot longer to design with rather more hit and miss, they would have been less stealthy and the B-2 would also have been heavily faceted and much less aerodynamic too.

But we are jeering at whoever make the final products. Sorry, but not really that sorry.

And that jeering shows such ignorance it is funny.

I remember in the late 1980s when western "experts" first saw MiG-29s up close... first of all they said they were copies of the F-16 and F-18, but on close inspection they called them out as being poorly made with mallets... gaps between panels and poorly fitting parts were considered evidence that these aircraft were 20 years behind western planes at best.

Of course during tests in the 1990s and other revelations have since made them bite their lips... minor surface bumps and gaps had no effect on aerodynamic performance... in fact sometimes gaps make an object more efficient as they make the air follow the surface better like the dimples on a golf ball make the air flowing past hug the shape of the ball reducing the drag shadow the ball creates moving through the air.

Little things like sensor fusion had modern radar, plus IRST, plus helmet mounted cueing systems as standard on all MiG-29 and Su-27 fighters were largely ignored... high off boresight IR guided AAMs were not considered something superior western pilot training could not overcome... even little things like the existence of anti radiation AAMs was and still is largely ignored by the west... but in the 1980s in a dual between an F-16 and a MiG-29 the MiG-29 has BVR missiles and when they get close its IR guided missiles were better and the way they could be used made them vastly more capable... so the secret would be to stand back and have a BVR dual... except the anti radiation R-27E homes in on the radar signal of a fighter guiding a Sparrow AAM, so if an F-15 tries to stand back and fire sparrows at the Soviet plane the soviet plane can launch an R-27EP and then turn away... the R-27EP is faster and longer ranged than the sparrow and uses a lofted flight path to further increase speed and range... so the R-27 will hit the F-15 before the Sparrow can hit the MiG... once the F-15 is hit the sparrow will miss.

All of a sudden the F-15 can't use BVR Sparrow, the F-16s doesn't have any BVR missiles, so the MiG-23s and MiG-29s and Su-27s can shoot BVR missiles at NATO planes outside their reach... if they try to get close they have a reasonably good chance against the MiG-23s, but tests against German MiG-29s showed WVR combat against a high off boresight AAM from a Fulcrum or Flanker and the NATO fighter is probably going to lose.

That is big news for NATO who was supposed to win because of better training...

The F-15 did not come from the MIG-25 as you guys would like to believe. Both the F-15 and MIG-25 came from the A-5 Vigilante, whose original design had twin vertical stabs until the US Navy requested a change. Russian fanboys always love to trumpet the false 'fact' that the F-15 was a 'response' to the MIG-25.

Hahahaha... yeah... that is exactly how I remember it the MiG-25 looks nothing like a Vigilante and a Vigilante looks nothing like a MiG-25 or an F-15.

The MiG-25 was revealed to the west with little warning and the US had to develop an aircraft that matched or exceeded its performance fast...

The Soviets have been in that situation too.. The B-29. The Sidewinder. The Space Shuttle.

The F-15 was a copy of the MiG-25s layout because that is what they wanted to match and they figured if they used the same design, but put in better US components and US knowhow they would end up with a superior machine.

What they didn't know was what the MiG-25 was actually for and therefore ended up with a completely different aircraft.

You could argue the F-15 was a better aircraft than the MiG-25, but as the MiG-31 and the MiG-29 and Su-27 and Su-57 are all based on the same layout, as is the F-14 and F-22 and to a degree an F-35 is a single engined MiG-25 I would say the MiG-25 was the most influential aircraft design of the 20th Century, and that the Su-57 is better than the F-22, while in the interception role the MiG-31 is better than any model F-15.

what exactly made your team to consider MiG-25 a particolarly lousy fighter plane and such a consideration would apply to MiG-31 as well?

You have answered your own question... the MiG-25 was a mach 3 super boogey man fighter plane able to intercept all US bombers and shoot down all other western fighters simply because its mach 3 speed meant it could pick and choose fights and operate from the high ground.

Once they got their hands on it however they found it was mostly made of steel so it was much much heavier than they thought it was... it was also much cheaper and still capable of doing what it was designed for.

Its radar was old technology, though it was enormously powerful too, but they were expecting to be surprised at how advanced it was, and they ended up surprised about how such simple and relatively cheap technology went in to making something so capable in the narrow fields it was expected to perform.

A Kalashnikov is not manufactured to the tolerances M-16s are, but the fuckers never break and in the end people fighting prefer them because they are tough and simple enough for war.

American small arms are all intended to be long range sniper rifles and that explains the cost.

As they found in Afghanistan, an M16 might hit the target at 800m on a range with no crosswind but in real combat they weren't hitting targets at more than 200m, and when they were the targets werent always going down because they used M4 carbines whose muzzle velocity is not great enough to cause the bullets to fragment as they tumble through the target at any range... so they were pretty much as lethal as .22lr in many cases. Not that .22lr doesn't kill.

Many of us are sincerely sick and tired of them further encouraging Americans to kill and get killed by making them feel invulnerable, which they are not

Many Soviets went in to Afghanistan thinking they would sort things out pretty quickly... my fathers generation went to the Pacific war safe in the knowledge those dumb japs can't make decent planes... they make them out of rice paper which means they can't fly them in the rain...

I am sure a lot of brits went to WWI thinking they will teach those damn germans a thing or too just like they taught those natives in the colonies... except it turns out when the enemy has artillery and machineguns too it isn't so easy...

[quote]As far as I can perceive, many Russian fighter designs are inspired in previous American research projects.[/qutoe]

Most of those perceptions are based on ignorance... simply the west didn't know any better.

A good example is when the west saw pictures and film of the Polikarpov I-16 they immediately thought it was a copy of an american aircraft called a geebee racer.

Except the polikarpov has no wing struts and cables to support the wings and it had retractable undercarriage and much better guns, though it did use a licence produced American engine.

Or for that matter when the west saw the AK it immediately assumed it was copied from all over the place... from the Garand to the German assault rifle from WWII.

Imagine a rifle with a 25 round curved magazine firing a 120 grain bullet at about 650m/s from the barrel fitted to this rifle... it can fire in single shot and in full auto burst mode... sounds like an AK... but it is actually Federovs Avtomat produced in small numbers in 1916. He also produced a whole family of weapons including LMGs and rifles to go with it.

Of course Garands rifles are never examined to see if any parts in his weapons were copied from Federovs guns.

The thing is that there were literally thousands of prototype designs of the AK... literally thousands... if it was a copy why did they need so many?

It is the same with everything... the west never saw the competition to replace the AKM so they assumed the AK-74 is just a smaller calibre AKM with a new muzzle brake... they never saw the dozens of other designs competing for the competition... balanced recoil mechanisms are all the rage for new AKs, but there are balanced recoil designs from Soviet designers from WWII... bullpups too... but these days because there is no knowledge of the development history of Soviet hardware it is assumed to be copies... the Tu-160 is a copy of the B-1A... really?

Have you seen the enormous numbers of designs they tested and rejected before settling on the design they ended up building... the forge that is used to create the enormous titanium box structure for the swing wing design could only be produced in the Ukraine... now in disrepair, but now reproduced in Russia ready to make new Blackjacks and new PAK DAs...

The Soviets made no bones about the situations where they copied things directly... often they bought production licences like with the Maxim machine gun, the Nagant revolver, the Dakota transport aircraft, but other times they just copied what they needed.... usually because there was no time or no reason to develop their own actual version. The B-29... they already had several 4 engined bombers but nothing with strategic reach that they needed so they copied the B-29. And despite US propaganda the Tu-95 is not an extended B-29 copy. The Sidewinder was completely different compared with their own missiles for air to air use.

Find a cross section of an AA-1 missile and it looks like an AS-7/AS-10/AS-12 (Kh-25) family missile with rear mounted antenna, mid mounted side angled rocket exhausts and guidance and warhead and control motors all mixed up and complicated to make and to service.

In comparison the Sidewinder was basic and modular and simple... seeker in the nose tip, warhead behind it and control surfaces, then rocket motor and rear control surfaces and rocket exhaust at the very back.

It would take time to adopt that modular simple design... which you could argue peaked with the R-27 family of modular missiles, so rather than keeping the AA-1 they just copied the Sidewinder... they used their own more powerful rocket motor and their own seeker design... not perfect but better than nothing.

The Space shuttle was another example but it is also a good example of not actually copying while appearing to...

The US space shuttle was designed by NASA and they spent 2 billion designing the shape based on state of the art design in materials etc etc.

Why would the Soviets be so arrogant to assume they could do better... so they took the basic shape and used it but they fundamentally changed the rest of the design.

The US space shuttle is like an C-130 transport plane with an enormous fuel tank slung underneath it to carry all the fuel it needs to get into space with... however the enormous weight means the engines on the shuttle alone wont even get the whole thing moving... it would sit on the launch platform and run its motor until something overheated and failed or enough fuel was burned that it started to slowly rise off the ground as it got lighter.

The two solid rocket boosters are like JATO packs for a heavily loaded C-130 to take off.

The reusable nature of the main fuel tank makes it more expensive... the solid rockets are very expensive and toxic.

The rocket engines inside the shuttle that burns the fuel from the enormous external fuel tank weigh 10 tons.

The resulting 120 ton shuttle has a payload of 10 tons or so but it needs to also land with ten tons of engine too.

The Soviet Buran is a totally different design... the Buran itself is a glider with a payload capacity of 20 tons and it weighs about the same at about 120 tons but it is launched on an Energyia rocket that is not reusable and is much cheaper than the 600 million dollar US Space Shuttle launch.

More importantly if you want to build a space station you can remove the Buran and put a payload on the back of the Energyia rocket they way the Buran goes on there and take complete payloads of 120 tons to earth orbit... 3-4 launches could have gotten the ISS into space and meant only three connection points needed... quicker faster easier and much much cheaper.

the space shuttle is excellent for flying up to objects in orbit and capturing them... fixing them and releasing them... to transport people they are both dreadfully inefficient... to transport cargo the Energyia rocket is excellent and affordable.

If the Space shuttle was launched with its cargo bay full of cargo (10 tons) and landed with a full cargo bay, and the entire 10 tons was magically transmuted into gold that could be sold to defray the cost of the launch the launch would still cost about $300 million US dollars.

havok wrote:
In peacetime, standards are strict and the maintenance tempo is not what we would call urgent.

I will give you an example...

In the F-111 cockpit, all models, the Turbine Inlet Temperature (TIT) gauges have -- literally -- color paper tape, green and red, at their outer diameters. Like this example...



Every crew chief has his own stash of small items like these tapes. If a TIT indicator has its range marker tape peeling off, that would be a 'Code Two' write-up.

Code One is when a jet land with no issues. Lockheed Martin have a trade magazine call -- what else -- Code One.

Very nice summary about the status of the US airforce.

So, few things :
-every air force around the world using the same administration described by you. I go forward, every medical instrument, aviation and automotive manufacturing business using the same administration requirements. And actually every loss making company has the same issues described by you. On this week I actually described the same to the management of a company, for the question " why we loose money on this business?"

The difference is not the adherence to it, but rather than the capability of the business ( management) to organise it properly.


So, key problems identified by you:
1. Lack of skills from the management ( officers) . If the aircraft grounded for days with "code two " problems because lack of certified personal then the officers organise the work has no clue about the training level of his team. There is issue with the tool / spare supply as well, based on the tool crib issues.Again, it is a problem with the skills of the officers.
2. Skill level of the team. The problem you described is revolving around the issues of skill, so if there is no certified guy for this, that and so on . The training is the most expensive to give, but this distinguish the capable team from the incapable.

Root cause: overstretched organisation OR very inefficient and unskilled management.

So, surprise surprise, if in peace time the skill level under the rug, then during war time the American fighters will fall from the sky like leaves in autumn.
Bypass the administration is not the solution, skill improvement is the solution.


Again, check you story: the lost time was due to the lack of skills, not due to the administration requirements. It will be worst in wartime, when everyone has magnitude more jobs.


And finally, the F-35 INCREASE the required skill set, the complexity and integration of it make the problem solving more time consuming, means if there is an issue to maintain the current F-1x fighters, then the F-35 will be impossible feat to maintain OR the number of aircrafts has to be decreased.

So, it the US can run with X money f-1x 1000 fighter , then it will be capable to run with the same amount of fighters with 2X personnel, or half as much with the same amount of personnel.

I don't know the actual multiplier, but it has to be somewhere between 1.5-2.5.

LMFS wrote:I agree that discipline and attention to detail are not dispensable when operating something so complex as an air force, unless you want to defeat only yourself. But you are right, the exaggerated example you present sounds to me like succumbing to unnecessary bureaucracy.

The point of that example -- you seems to have missed. And it looks like the other guys missed it as well. Mr. Singular-Transform now have another notch in his anti-US holster on how inefficient and incompetent is the US Air Force. Plus one for his country, wherever that is.

The point of that example was that you cannot trust the media's report about how much is involved in maintaining our 'stealth' platforms. The reporters do not care about the details. Theirs is about sensationalism. It is about making US 'look bad' in every way. What I posted was a worst case scenario that could and have happened to every military. Something that every takes for granted all of sudden ballooned into, as Americans say it, a 'federal case'.

An aircraft is not a car. If you do not like your car, you can get another at your convenience. But when you are working on a jet fighter, at the end, it is someone else's life that depends on the quality of your work. That is why there are checks, double checks, and balances. That is why there are strict rules and stern enforcement of said rules. That is why some things on one aircraft takes longer/shorter to do than on other aircrafts.

I am not here to dispute/refute the supposedly 30 hrs maintenance per hr of flight for the F-22. To make everyone happy, I will agree that is true. But then -- so what? Do people think that some USAF personnel will mutiny if they find out they got assigned to the F-22/35 or B-2? No, they will take that assignment as the high point of their military time, whether that time is just one enlistment or a full 30 yrs career. If it takes 30 hrs to maintain the jet so that in one sortie, the jet shoot down several enemy fighters, who benefits? Certainly not the other guys.

Enemy Pilot: "Yeah...I got shot down by the unseen F-22. But now the Americans will have to spend 30 hrs working on it. Bwaaahhaaahhaaa...!!!"

These articles are not meant to illuminate a complex issue. They are meant to inflame and keep the gullible ignorant. Too bad YOU just fell into that group.

LMFS wrote:Peace time should train for war time, not being an exercise in futility. That means, if I have the biggest discipline in peace time but run over the process in war time because I don't have time for bureaucracy I have lost an awful lot of time during my training and I'm very likely to screw it up big time, very fast as soon as I forget something important. Just IMHO

This is where you are wrong. Note I said that 'wrong' repeatedly.

If discipline was abandoned when deployed to a war zone, then where are crashes?

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf/appendix/whitepaper.html

The Air Force flew 59% of all sorties, with 50% of the assets and incurred only 38 % of the losses. The mission capable rate for Air Force aircraft was 92 % --- higher than our peacetime rate.

There were no 'fudging' of statistics. In deployment to war, the stakes are now for real. The pilots you see getting into the cockpits? They can die from your work or from enemy actions. YOU have an influence on which way that pilot can die.

LMFS wrote:Two issues here:
> One of the main western claims regarding Su-57 is that it is not really "stealth" (whatever that should mean). If a Raptor with let's say 0,0001 (or whatever number of zeroes somebody wants to put there) sqm front RCS is not maintained to the last minute detail, flare spots will start to grow like mushroom and very soon he will be no better than the apparently crappy Russian fighter which was designed from the beginning not to care about levels of perfection that cannot be kept under war-time conditions. Not that I know the RCS of the Su-57 is not good, but in case it is, it could well be due to Russians making a different choice and saving huge money with it, not simply being sloppy or incompetent.

If you cannot maintain the -57 under war time conditions as under peace time, do not assume that we cannot for our F-22s.

LMFS wrote:> I am more sceptical than you regarding how easily the F-22 would wipe the enemy fighters off the sky, but as it happens to me often, I don't really know who you are thinking on, or if you even care who the enemy is and where/why the fight would take place. I am sure you understand the difference both in terms of legitimacy and difficulty, of fighting on and for your own land and doing it just following orders and for aggression. If you really think the Russians are willing to conquer Europe and only US prevents that, I guess you are not being realistic and are strangely ignoring that their military posture is defensive while the American is an offensive one. Only possible full scale war against Russians would be at their borders, with their supporting assets and under their escalation rules, and it would be to death. Simply basing the F-22s and supporting them would be a nightmare. You know it. So, depending on who you take on and in what theater, things would not be so easy as you anticipate.

I have been to two Red Flag, once in the F-111 and once in the F-16.

So here is the real deal...

Once you are in the air, politics and everything else are killer distractions. The goal is to accomplish your mission, whatever it is. If you care about the greater goal of your country and if you disagree, then exit the force. Accept whatever punishment that may come your way. But once you are in the air, it would be foolish to distract your mind from your mission. The enemy pilot is not going to care if you share his attitude about your country, or not care. He maybe more focused on his mission -- to kill you -- than you are focused on yours.

As for the F-22's claimed lethality? Yes, I am THAT confident. The harsher reality is that the F-22 is only an experiment for US. The next killer is the F-35. And the so-called 'sixth-gen' fighter and bomber passed the conceptual phase. I have said this before -- that we defeated 'stealth'. It means that whoever comes up with his own 'stealth' platform, it is Dead On Arrival (DOA). China's J-20 is for intimidation of Asia, not US, and the Chinese knows it. Russia's Su-57 is in the same boat.

LMFS wrote:Again, many issues to comment but just trying to be brief:
> US owning the reserve currency is used be able to pay for luxurious levels of manufacturing and technology (and manufacturers obviously know this). Sometimes this is good and important, sometimes is just expensive. A Kalashnikov is not manufactured to the tolerances M-16s are, but the fuckers never break and in the end people fighting prefer them because they are tough and simple enough for war.
> Cannot really compare a US fighter with a serial Su-57 in terms of manufacturing but again no US guy can so all opinions in that regard are premature. And even if the later is simpler than let's say a F-35, how can you reliably infer the military value of that difference from a really neutral point of view that factors in all relevant variables and different doctrines?
> US, as a de facto empire (sorry but lets call things by its name) needs technology to be have the overwhelming military superiority that allows to sustain the status of continuous war in which it lives. A (at least by now) defensive/reactive nation like Russia only needs to sit, watch and deploy what works best to make themselves a hard-enough nut to crack to be safe, be against conventional, nuclear or proxy attack. So it is not really about a pretended race for dominance and whose killing machines are best but essentially about deterrence. And Russia is currently achieving that for less than a tenth of what the US expends. So their approach is completely correct IMO

My intent was to dispute the baseless indictment that we have only contempt for Soviet/Russian aircrafts.

Every analogy has a point where it is no longer valid and becomes useless as a comparator. The more technologically complex the item, the shorter the useful life of any analogy that maybe used in a discussion. In short, there is no comparison between the AK-47 and the Su-57. A rifle do not require its operator to be able to read/write. That fact alone immediately disqualified the AK-47 as an analogy.

If you take two master fencers, neither one is going to be happy with a 'just good enough' weapon. No, they will demand the best and on the open market, they can get the best and their skills will determine the outcome of a duel.

But jet fighters do not exist on the open market and buyers are usually politically restrained on how they shop for their countries' defense. Not only that, the operator of the jet fighter must be the elite of society just to learn how to fly it, let alone how to fight with it.

Let me ask you this...

Does the Russian Army -- or any army for the sake of discussion -- trains its units on small arms tactics that does not include the machine gun, which includes the automatic rifle? Of course not. Tactics that do not includes repeating firearms are simply too stupid to even contemplate.

The machine gun irrevocably changed how battles are fought to the point that if your army do not have the machine gun in all of its variations, you already lost the war before it even started. The aircraft carrier changed naval tactics probably forever. WW II was the first time fleets fought each other without seeing each other, and most likely the last time that will happen. The list of technologies that if not determine the outcomes of wars then at least trends the wars -- is long.

Currently, even though low radar observable platforms are relatively new, the few conflicts, not wars, in which they were used trended the course of those conflicts, and if you can trend the course of a process in your favor, you do whatever is necessary to maintain the technological advantages that enabled you to have that kind of influence. So for 'stealth', we do both to maximize our lethality in using 'stealth' as well as on ways to defeat it. That means if the Su-57 has difficulties seeing the F-22 while we on ground and air can see the Su-57, it does not matter the RCS gap between the two fighters. You already lost.

LMFS wrote:It is great that there is still the military guys, who put their lives on the line and know that war is not for fun, if not we would all be toasted by now. So no, I am not at all worried about people like you but about the politicians that declare wars in which servicemen must fight. And they create consent through those journos that we all somehow dismiss but whose role is crucial. Many of us are sincerely sick and tired of them further encouraging Americans to kill and get killed by making them feel invulnerable, which they are not

When I said that you should worry about people like me, I mean that people who have actual experience in the issues under discussion who can debunk claims. Like the maintenance hrs on the F-22. No, I do not mean the F-22 specifically. But with just one example from my F-111 days, I pointed out the folly of taking shallow news articles as serious and truthful sources about complex issues.

LMFS wrote:Well, I never mentioned this and really have no opinion on who inspired who, but as said above it makes more sense for the US to make the heavy lifting in their quest for hegemony and for the Russians to take advantage of it. As far as I can perceive, many Russian fighter designs are inspired in previous American research projects. In the end US could have just saved the money and deprived Russia of so many ideas but opted for the arms race instead.

That -- the highlighted -- make no sense.

If we do not develop, you say the Soviets would not have? Is that what it meant?

Where is that idea ever proven, that if country A do not develop its defense, hostile country B would not be able to develop its own defense?

GarryB wrote:

Why would the Soviets be so arrogant to assume they could do better... so they took the basic shape and used it but they fundamentally changed the rest of the design.

This sums my point pretty much. The one so keen in being number one needs to do the greatest effort, the others just need to check how things turned out for him, take what is useful and improve what is not optimal. As far as your level of doctrinal thought, basic science an industrial capabilities do not lag too much behind, you come to the same point (er even to better results) only slightly later and at a fraction of the costs. It would be simply stupid not to use that strategy if you do not have endlessly deep pockets.

I don't know so much about Soviet history as you, but take a look at PAK-FA program and it is again the same thing: wait for the US to develop their proposal and then improve on it in the aspects that make sense, limit features that do not compensate their cost. Now we hear a bout Lockheed and Pentagon floating this idea of reactivating F-22 lines / making a hybrid with the F-35 / letting Japan pay for it. When in some years something like this turns a reality because pipe dreams like PCA, lasers and so on are simply many decades in the future and a solution is needed now, they will admit it was the Su-57 and possibly J-20 that made this reaction necessary, but for now they say the Su-57 is crap and F-35 much superior, while knowing that in reality Su-57 is conceptually a much better approach to a true multi-role, affordable 5th generation fighter without major weaknesses that puts both F-22 and F-35 directly at risk.

Havok wrote:You are correct. The reality is that without Overholser finding Ufimtsev's work, Lockheed would be at worst 5-7 yrs later in the F-117 project.

That is completely false.

For one PTD has been much more foundamental to B2 Spirit program than to F-117; in facts ,as anyone can easily understand, capability to compute re-radiating cones both for shadow boundaries and caustic diffracting regions (where OTD mostly fail) was literally critical, above all for designs incorporating asymptotic curved edges, including the successive US fighter type designs.

As said by the same Kenneth Mitzner (the Northrop theoretical seminal and development mind, togheter with F. Oshiro, behind B-2 and Tacit Blue) B-2 program would have been practically impossible without the PTD:

"I cannot imagine the B-2 having been designed without the influence of his work," Dr. Mitzner added. "Let me put it this way: without Ufimtsev, today's stealth aircraft would probably have looked the way the speculative artists portrayed them, before their real shapes were publicly disclosed"

Also today the most advanced solution system of equations for computing diffraction fields generated by, so called, VLO and ULO aerodynamics objects are kept in Federation's Institutes, not US ones , with a theoretical understanding edge that in those decades even widened.
What US brands can instead surely boast is the large scale production mastering, with all the related making and maintenance engineering know-how cumulated, of similar complex LO vehicles.

The ridiculous story, likely created, from thin air, by part of some westener with very small knowledges and instead very big grudge about the fact that this true "allowing" technology for all western stealth designs was coming from directly Soviet Institutes (a thing that deeply worry them......and at reason i can add) circulating about how the,supposedly, "less evoluted" F-117 faceted design was created using PTD because of the limits in processign capabilities of computers of the times while the "most advanced" B-2 ,F-22 and F-35 designs has been created using different, unspecified, US-developed theoretical basis is a true offense to human intelligence.


П. Уфимцев works was deeply examined in two instances by two different Soviet military Scientific Commissions and rightly considered publicly releasable.
Hard radar data (in the latests years coming also from Syrian airspace control) most than 50 years later, give today perfect reason to the correctness of the scientific assessment of the time.

havok wrote:
The point of that example -- you seems to have missed. And it looks like the other guys missed it as well. Mr. Singular-Transform now have another notch in his anti-US holster on how inefficient and incompetent is the US Air Force. Plus one for his country, wherever that is.

The point of that example was that you cannot trust the media's report about how much is involved in maintaining our 'stealth' platforms. The reporters do not care about the details. Theirs is about sensationalism. It is about making US 'look bad' in every way. What I posted was a worst case scenario that could and have happened to every military. Something that every takes for granted all of sudden ballooned into, as Americans say it, a 'federal case'.

Right, I did not notice you were talking about journalism. I guess they have their goals, most of the time justify further expansion of military budget, which is paradoxically the source of most problems in US military, as far as I can tell.

havok wrote:
I am not here to dispute/refute the supposedly 30 hrs maintenance per hr of flight for the F-22. To make everyone happy, I will agree that is true. But then -- so what? Do people think that some USAF personnel will mutiny if they find out they got assigned to the F-22/35 or B-2? No, they will take that assignment as the high point of their military time, whether that time is just one enlistment or a full 30 yrs career. If it takes 30 hrs to maintain the jet so that in one sortie, the jet shoot down several enemy fighters, who benefits? Certainly not the other guys.

Enemy Pilot: "Yeah...I got shot down by the unseen F-22. But now the Americans will have to spend 30 hrs working on it. Bwaaahhaaahhaaa...!!!"

Ok, that is more or less coming to the point I was wanting to discuss...whether the sortie generation of these planes is high enough. Do you have an opinion on that? I of course assume anyone assigned to work on those will take it as a big honour.

havok wrote:
These articles are not meant to illuminate a complex issue. They are meant to inflame and keep the gullible ignorant. Too bad YOU just fell into that group.

I know is a complex issue and I'm very aware of the risk of oversimplifying it. But again, allusions to my person are not the topic at hand and in fact will only put you in a bad light.

havok wrote:
This is where you are wrong. Note I said that 'wrong' repeatedly.

Yes I noticed. Sadly you keep repeating all the time.

havok wrote:
If discipline was abandoned when deployed to a war zone, then where are crashes?

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf/appendix/whitepaper.html

The Air Force flew 59% of all sorties, with 50% of the assets and incurred only 38 % of the losses. The mission capable rate for Air Force aircraft was 92 % --- higher than our peacetime rate.

There were no 'fudging' of statistics. In deployment to war, the stakes are now for real. The pilots you see getting into the cockpits? They can die from your work or from enemy actions. YOU have an influence on which way that pilot can die.

Good that you brought this point up. If Desert Storm is your concept of war (I would rather say "conflict", as you put it later, is more appropriate), mine is Eastern Front in WWII. I guess it is not necessary to explain that we re not talking about the same, at all. Being able to build up forces at will to use Irak as a punching bag is not exactly what a real war would look like. Do not care so much about those statistics as true reflection of the challenges of war, sorry.

havok wrote:
If you cannot maintain the -57 under war time conditions as under peace time, do not assume that we cannot for our F-22s.

War will massively affect the conditions under which operations are to be executed. Russian fighters i.e. can be operated from unprepared and damaged bases as a standard. F-22 not so much as far as I know, and have much shorter legs than Sukhois of both 4th and 5th generations (not to talk about range of Russian missiles). This fact would force them to operate in the shadow of constant attacks or depend on highly vulnerable assets like tankers. I do not want to oversimplify but see issues, to put it mildly, to operate in such conditions.

havok wrote:>
I have been to two Red Flag, once in the F-111 and once in the F-16.

So here is the real deal...

Once you are in the air, politics and everything else are killer distractions. The goal is to accomplish your mission, whatever it is. If you care about the greater goal of your country and if you disagree, then exit the force. Accept whatever punishment that may come your way. But once you are in the air, it would be foolish to distract your mind from your mission. The enemy pilot is not going to care if you share his attitude about your country, or not care. He maybe more focused on his mission -- to kill you -- than you are focused on yours.

Agree, distractions are not allowed in such circumstances. But do not think that fighting for the very existence of your land, your people and your life is not a superior state of mind. That is where you would be seriously wrong.

havok wrote:
As for the F-22's claimed lethality? Yes, I am THAT confident. The harsher reality is that the F-22 is only an experiment for US. The next killer is the F-35. And the so-called 'sixth-gen' fighter and bomber passed the conceptual phase. I have said this before -- that we defeated 'stealth'. It means that whoever comes up with his own 'stealth' platform, it is Dead On Arrival (DOA). China's J-20 is for intimidation of Asia, not US, and the Chinese knows it. Russia's Su-57 is in the same boat.

This is gold:
> F-22 is an experiment. Yes it is. That is the reason why I and many others think that Su-57 has an "unfair" advantage on it. The B-2  is a "beta" version as well.  Now "stable" versions are needed (F-22 & 35 hybrid, B-21) that can actually be operated, hopefully without bankrupting the air force.
> F-35 is kinetically not capable of doing what F-22 can (air superiority compromised). It does not have the range and payload your F-111 had (bomber role sub-optimal). The fact that there is an increasing amount of talk about reactivating the F-22 lines is a proof that the airframe is not a safe bet for air superiority roles (and even for deep penetrating strike). Let's see how this saga ends.
> PCA is far in the future, you know it. Too far even to talk about it. Budgets increase but capacity of the services to keep their aircraft maintained and operating (without crashing left and right) is degrading. This is not the scenario for thinking in new Wunderwaffen don't you think?
> B-21 is as said a 1.0 version of the B-2, so this is expected to actually work fine.
> Still don't understand why the rest are expected to be DOA. I mean, technically. How can you be so sure if you don't have access to those aircraft? This is mind blowing, really.
> China and Russia build up their military at high speed mainly because they have US at their doorstep, literally. This is the elephant in the room, so frequently ignored by Americans. "Intimidation of Asia" is a projection on them of your own behaviour, sorry to say. If you don't spend one second in the rest of my answer it is ok for me, as much as you sincerely try to understand this, because this is important.

havok wrote:
Currently, even though low radar observable platforms are relatively new, the few conflicts, not wars, in which they were used trended the course of those conflicts, and if you can trend the course of a process in your favor, you do whatever is necessary to maintain the technological advantages that enabled you to have that kind of influence. So for 'stealth', we do both to maximize our lethality in using 'stealth' as well as on ways to defeat it. That means if the Su-57 has difficulties seeing the F-22 while we on ground and air can see the Su-57, it does not matter the RCS gap between the two fighters. You already lost.

Of course, technology is critical in war. Period.

But: you keep seeing the potential conflicts with other powers as completely symmetrical, which they are not. There is one aggressor and one defender. One side is on their home turf and the other is not. Which side do you think US is likely to take? Where do you think the fight would take place? Not in continental US, that is for sure. This biases your analysis, since lets say a China or a Russia fighting at their doorstep have more assets than US could ever mobilize. And they have a comprehensive anti-stealth strategy being deployed, in the whole range of technologies and approaches you can imagine. They have a clear advantage in that scenario, which is the one they are preparing for. Some hypothetical conflict where US has an overwhelming advantage will not happen and thinking about it is a loss of time.

havok wrote:
When I said that you should worry about people like me, I mean that people who have actual experience in the issues under discussion who can debunk claims. Like the maintenance hrs on the F-22. No, I do not mean the F-22 specifically. But with just one example from my F-111 days, I pointed out the folly of taking shallow news articles as serious and truthful sources about complex issues.

Fair enough. No fear of being debunked when wrong, on the contrary

havok wrote:
That -- the highlighted -- make no sense.

If we do not develop, you say the Soviets would not have? Is that what it meant?

Where is that idea ever proven, that if country A do not develop its defense, hostile country B would not be able to develop its own defense?

No, what I mean is very easy: if you insist in having military supremacy you are going to end up paving the way the others are going to go through. If you want to avoid this, easiest way is renounce to supremacy and embrace deterrence as military strategy. This would be ten times cheaper of US and better for the world.

Mindstorm wrote:
That is completely false.

For one PTD has been much more foundamental to B2 Spirit program than to F-117; in facts ,as anyone can easily understand, capability to compute re-radiating cones both for shadow boundaries and caustic diffracting regions (where OTD mostly fail) was literally critical, above all for designs incorporating asymptotic curved edges, including the successive US fighter type designs.

As said by the same Kenneth Mitzner (the Northrop theoretical seminal and development mind, togheter with F. Oshiro, behind B-2 and Tacit Blue) B-2 program would have been practically impossible without the PTD:

"I cannot imagine the B-2 having been designed without the influence of his work," Dr. Mitzner added. "Let me put it this way: without Ufimtsev, today's stealth aircraft would probably have looked the way the speculative artists portrayed them, before their real shapes were publicly disclosed"

Also today the most advanced solution system of equations for computing diffraction fields generated by, so called, VLO and ULO aerodynamics objects are kept in Federation's Institutes, not US ones , with a theoretical understanding edge that in those decades even widened.
What US brands can instead surely boast is the large scale production mastering, with all the related making and maintenance engineering know-how cumulated, of similar complex LO vehicles.        

The ridiculous story, likely created, from thin air, by part of some westener with very small knowledges and instead very big grudge about the fact that this true "allowing" technology for all western stealth designs was coming from directly Soviet Institutes (a thing that deeply worry them......and at reason i can add) circulating about how the,supposedly, "less evoluted" F-117 faceted design was created using PTD because of the limits in processign capabilities of computers of the times while the "most advanced" B-2 ,F-22 and F-35 designs has been created using different, unspecified, US-developed theoretical basis is a true offense to human intelligence.


П. Уфимцев works was deeply examined in two instances by two different Soviet military Scientific Commissions and rightly considered publicly releasable.
Hard radar data (in the latests years coming also from Syrian airspace control) most than 50 years later, give today perfect reason to the correctness of the scientific assessment of the time.

Now, that is interesting Mindstorm:

> I assumed that B-2 came from a different school of LO development (Northrop) which had been tasked with extensive measuring RCS of diverse military vehicles and had therefore an empirical and more intuitive understanding of how to get LO design. I see now I was wrong.
> What are the military consequences of those "most advanced" solution system of equations for calculating RADAR returns that you say Russia possesses? Could they allow for novel LO or VLO shaping and technologies? How do you know this, if I can ask?
> Are you implying that US VLO designs are only supposedly stealth but not in practice? In what regards?

havok wrote:
The point of that example -- you seems to have missed. And it looks like the other guys missed it as well. Mr. Singular-Transform now have another notch in his anti-US holster on how inefficient and incompetent is the US Air Force. Plus one for his country, wherever that is.

The point of that example was that you cannot trust the media's report about how much is involved in maintaining our 'stealth' platforms. The reporters do not care about the details. Theirs is about sensationalism. It is about making US 'look bad' in every way. What I posted was a worst case scenario that could and have happened to every military. Something that every takes for granted all of sudden ballooned into, as Americans say it, a 'federal case'.

I think you simply don't understand ....

The documentation supposed to take small portion of the job. If it create a burden and it blocking the works, then something seriously wrong in the system.

And "wrong in the system" means like understaffed maintenance support, compared to the requirement, lack of background support from the manufacturers in the form of training / improvement in design and procedures , and so on.

havok wrote:

An aircraft is not a car. If you do not like your car, you can get another at your convenience. But when you are working on a jet fighter, at the end, it is someone else's life that depends on the quality of your work. That is why there are checks, double checks, and balances. That is why there are strict rules and stern enforcement of said rules. That is why some things on one aircraft takes longer/shorter to do than on other aircrafts.

I am not here to dispute/refute the supposedly 30 hrs maintenance per hr of flight for the F-22. To make everyone happy, I will agree that is true. But then -- so what? Do people think that some USAF personnel will mutiny if they find out they got assigned to the F-22/35 or B-2? No, they will take that assignment as the high point of their military time, whether that time is just one enlistment or a full 30 yrs career. If it takes 30 hrs to maintain the jet so that in one sortie, the jet shoot down several enemy fighters, who benefits? Certainly not the other guys.

Enemy Pilot: "Yeah...I got shot down by the unseen F-22. But now the Americans will have to spend 30 hrs working on it. Bwaaahhaaahhaaa...!!!"

Still you don't understand the economics of war.

Read Sun Tzu.


So, if you have the US ( 300 million pop) and Russia ( 150 ) and China ( 1200 million) then the US can maintain its supremacy only if it can be 5 times more efficient to kill peopl than the others.

It means if China spending 100 hours to fly a fighter for one hour, then the US has to be capable to do that job in 16 hours, OR the US airplanes are outnumbered by the enemy.


It is a simplification, but the important thing the same: the US maintained its position due to the highly efficient manufacturing, that pumped out cheap and reliable fighters jets in high volume COMPARED TO CCCP/PRC.

havok wrote:
This is where you are wrong. Note I said that 'wrong' repeatedly.

If discipline was abandoned when deployed to a war zone, then where are crashes?

At that point of time the US spent close to twice as money for the military than now, and that was at the end of a long high spending period.

The pilots and maintenance guys had the training, the equipment was new,so everything was easy.

But now the training level is low, the equipment and personnel stretched to the limits.


C'mon , last year the US NAVY had FOUR collision including two involving top level destroyers. All investigation had the same result : lack of training , lack of skills .

LMFS wrote:Right, I did not notice you were talking about journalism. I guess they have their goals, most of the time justify further expansion of military budget, which is paradoxically the source of most problems in US military, as far as I can tell.

Right...And Soviet/Russian journalism are pure in hearts and actions. Perhaps you should take journalism lesson, notably the research bit. Considering under the Obama yrs, the US military downsized. I was active duty during the Raygun yrs, and the US military downsized on his second term. The criticism about the 'military industrial complex' got stale as in decades ago.

LMFS wrote:Ok, that is more or less coming to the point I was wanting to discuss...whether the sortie generation of these planes is high enough. Do you have an opinion on that? I of course assume anyone assigned to work on those will take it as a big honour.

What exactly is 'high enough'?

LMFS wrote:I know is a complex issue and I'm very aware of the risk of oversimplifying it. But again, allusions to my person are not the topic at hand and in fact will only put you in a bad light.

You did oversimplified it. You and everyone else in this forum. The Americans have a saying: "If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck. It is a duck."

When you read that the F-22 required X man-hrs for maintenance, did you ever wondered if YOUR non-experience in aviation maintenance could have influence your understanding of that article? You took it on faith that the article's reporter knew what he/she was talking about. You knew NOTHING about how the USAF maintains its hardware. I gave you an example of how much work could take for one scenario and ALL of you effectively shrugged it off. If you take what I said seriously it would mean an admittance that your perception maybe wrong and that is unacceptable in light of being critical of US. Your minds are already made up. I debate this subject not because I believe there is a chance of changing your minds, but because for every active participant, there are plenty of silent observers out there. It is their minds that matters to me.

Have you even heard of FOD? Even civilian pilots are afraid of those initials.

Did you know that Boeing and Airbus have allowance for missing panel fasteners?



For the USAF, no such allowance.

So what make you think that your criticisms of the F-22 has any validity?

Right now, many of those silent readers are rethinking that article. Unlike you guys, they are objective.

LMFS wrote:Yes I noticed. Sadly you keep repeating all the time.

And sadly, it is true. You are debating a subject -- military aviation maintenance -- that you have no experience in it. What do you expect me to say when you are patently wrong in your perception?

LMFS wrote:Good that you brought this point up. If Desert Storm is your concept of war (I would rather say "conflict", as you put it later, is more appropriate), mine is Eastern Front in WWII. I guess it is not necessary to explain that we re not talking about the same, at all. Being able to build up forces at will to use Irak as a punching bag is not exactly what a real war would look like. Do not care so much about those statistics as true reflection of the challenges of war, sorry.

I was in DS. Were you in the Eastern Front back in WW II?

DS was not a 'real war'? Care to tell that to the Iraqis?

Desert Storm changed warfare irrevocably and you can be your next yr's salary that Russian military academies are teaching it. Before the shooting, everyone predicted that while the US-led coalition would win, the US as lead would suffer 'Vietnam War' level casualties. The Soviets and the Chinese took special pleasure in making those predictions. After all, they trained the Iraqi Army and equipped it. They knew how well their hardware works. It turned out we were more in danger of fratricide than of the Iraqi Army, Navy, and Air Force.

I will put it this way...

You guys on this forum works hard at pointing out the 30 man-hrs maintenance required for the F-22 as 'proof' that the jet is not worth the investment.

What do you think the world think when they saw the Americans pulling Iraqi MIGs out of the sands? Maybe MIGs are not worth the investment?

Desert Storm is not our ONLY way of waging wars. Those who were not participants understandably worries on how the Americans will fight the next war. Those who were participants do not want to piss US off. They seen first hand how we fight.

LMFS wrote:War will massively affect the conditions under which operations are to be executed. Russian fighters i.e. can be operated from unprepared and damaged bases as a standard. F-22 not so much as far as I know, and have much shorter legs than Sukhois of both 4th and 5th generations (not to talk about range of Russian missiles). This fact would force them to operate in the shadow of constant attacks or depend on highly vulnerable assets like tankers. I do not want to oversimplify but see issues, to put it mildly, to operate in such conditions.

When you have no experience, oversimplification is what you MUST do. You have no choice. People made the same 'analyses' about US in DS as you said just now. They were wrong then.

I once taught Aircraft Battle Damage Repair (ABDR). Does the Russian Air Force have a similar training program? Do you know if it does? Do you even care if you know?

http://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/127818/robins-instructors-provide-aircraft-battle-damage-repair-training-to-allies/

Anyway...The program involves everyone, from pilots to maintenance to logistics to even scientists.

Did you know that to substitute a damaged push-pull rod to make the battle damaged aircraft Fully Mission Capable (FMC), I can use a broomstick and aluminum from soda cans?

The scientists gave their inputs as to the properties of wood and the aluminum. Maintenance gave their inputs on how to fabricate the replacement part. And Logistics supplies the broomsticks and aluminum sheets.

Do you what is a push-pull rod? Am willing to guess -- Not.

http://aviation_dictionary.enacademic.com/5412/push-pull_rod

Jet fighters that are NOT fly-by-wire have computer controlled mechanical-hydraulics flight controls system. The push-pull rods are common components and usually, they are located on the backbone of the jet.

Do you even care if you did not know what is a push-pull rod?

You guys are making absolute pronouncements on subjects that you have experience in.

LMFS wrote:>Agree, distractions are not allowed in such circumstances. But do not think that fighting for the very existence of your land, your people and your life is not a superior state of mind. That is where you would be seriously wrong.

It maybe a superior motivation, but not of mind.

It does not matter if you are wielding a rifle or a jet fighter. Each item requires absolute focus on the MECHANICS of their operations. This is where you are confused. As a CO, I do not want you to think about the invaders on home soil. I want you to focus on how to cycle the rifle's bolt at your best speed or how to monitor your fuel state to the next waypoint where you will refuel.

LMFS wrote:This is gold:
> F-22 is an experiment. Yes it is. That is the reason why I and many others think that Su-57 has an "unfair" advantage on it. The B-2  is a "beta" version as well.  Now "stable" versions are needed (F-22 & 35 hybrid, B-21) that can actually be operated, hopefully without bankrupting the air force.
> F-35 is kinetically not capable of doing what F-22 can (air superiority compromised). It does not have the range and payload your F-111 had (bomber role sub-optimal). The fact that there is an increasing amount of talk about reactivating the F-22 lines is a proof that the airframe is not a safe bet for air superiority roles (and even for deep penetrating strike). Let's see how this saga ends.
> PCA is far in the future, you know it. Too far even to talk about it. Budgets increase but capacity of the services to keep their aircraft maintained and operating (without crashing left and right) is degrading. This is not the scenario for thinking in new Wunderwaffen don't you think?
> B-21 is as said a 1.0 version of the B-2, so this is expected to actually work fine.
> Still don't understand why the rest are expected to be DOA. I mean, technically. How can you be so sure if you don't have access to those aircraft? This is mind blowing, really.
> China and Russia build up their military at high speed mainly because they have US at their doorstep, literally. This is the elephant in the room, so frequently ignored by Americans. "Intimidation of Asia" is a projection on them of your own behaviour, sorry to say. If you don't spend one second in the rest of my answer it is ok for me, as much as you sincerely try to understand this, because this is important.

It ain't Au, buddy. It is better -- Pt.

Russia and China are struggling with their 'stealth' while we have been flying ours for DECADES. You think I care if you mock what I said?

LMFS wrote:Of course, technology is critical in war. Period.

But: you keep seeing the potential conflicts with other powers as completely symmetrical, which they are not. There is one aggressor and one defender. One side is on their home turf and the other is not. Which side do you think US is likely to take? Where do you think the fight would take place? Not in continental US, that is for sure. This biases your analysis, since lets say a China or a Russia fighting at their doorstep have more assets than US could ever mobilize. And they have a comprehensive anti-stealth strategy being deployed, in the whole range of technologies and approaches you can imagine. They have a clear advantage in that scenario, which is the one they are preparing for. Some hypothetical conflict where US has an overwhelming advantage will not happen and thinking about it is a loss of time.

I read the same thing before we deployed for Desert Storm. Asymmetrical. Home turf. Etc...

As for that 'anti-stealth' claim, everyone scrambled to print their glossy sales brochures. VERA and using cell phone towers. Nothing ever came out of those claims. The Iranians made their own 'anti-stealth' claim until their fighters were surprised by a pair of F-22s who told them to go home.

After the USAF, I worked for a company that shall remain unnamed. I designed radar field tests for 'autonomous low altitude unmanned air vehicles', aka 'drones'. Basically, I try to detect them. Based upon my F-111 experience, I designed the penetration course, from mountainous to water surface. In other words, I knew where the drone is going to be. Still, it was extremely difficult to get the aircraft on radar long enough to create a predictive path, even when we put radar enhancers on the aircraft. Now we are talking about trying to detect the F-22 or 35?

Being low radar observable is already being asymmetrical -- in our favor.

LMFS wrote:No, what I mean is very easy: if you insist in having military supremacy you are going to end up paving the way the others are going to go through. If you want to avoid this, easiest way is renounce to supremacy and embrace deterrence as military strategy. This would be ten times cheaper of US and better for the world.

And why is this argument not applied to the Soviets?

But the real flaw in your argument is that you presume that having a technologically superior military equals to having urges of conquests. In many ways, that is more applicable to the Soviets than to US. Stalin said that quantity is a quality on its own. You remember that? NATO was consistently outnumbered. And you are admonishing us not to exploit technology as a counter? Give me a break...

Desert Storm was a war? Really? It was a Show. The supposed casualtie numbers before were pure BS to make the show more exciting.

Without the Gorbachev/Jelzin effect Russia would have fielded an "stealth" fighter at the end of the 90`s.

havok wrote:

When you read that the F-22 required X man-hrs for maintenance, did you ever wondered if YOUR non-experience in aviation maintenance could have influence your understanding of that article? You took it on faith that the article's reporter knew what he/she was talking about. You knew NOTHING about how the USAF maintains its hardware. I gave you an example of how much work could take for one scenario and ALL of you effectively shrugged it off. If you take what I said seriously it would mean an admittance that your perception maybe wrong and that is unacceptable in light of being critical of US. Your minds are already made up. I debate this subject not because I believe there is a chance of changing your minds, but because for every active participant, there are plenty of silent observers out there. It is their minds that matters to me.

Affordability?

Ring a bell?

havok wrote:
Russia and China are struggling with their 'stealth' while we have been flying ours for DECADES. You think I care if you mock what I said?

CCCP fielded stealth cruise missiles.

havok wrote:
I was in DS. Were you in the Eastern Front back in WW II?

The desert storm wasn't comparable to the eastern front.
Nothing was comparable to the eastern front.
And, as an American, you don't know anything about the war.

The desert storm was a tourist trip.For the Iraqis .

havok wrote:
I read the same thing before we deployed for Desert Storm. Asymmetrical. Home turf. Etc...

As for that 'anti-stealth' claim, everyone scrambled to print their glossy sales brochures. VERA and using cell phone towers. Nothing ever came out of those claims. The Iranians made their own 'anti-stealth' claim until their fighters were surprised by a pair of F-22s who told them to go home.

So, you think that Russia / China / India wasting they money for the S400 systems?
Each radar cost as much as a fighter jet. So, they should buy fighters instead of those radars?

havok wrote:
After the USAF, I worked for a company that shall remain unnamed. I designed radar field tests for 'autonomous low altitude unmanned air vehicles', aka 'drones'. Basically, I try to detect them. Based upon my F-111 experience, I designed the penetration course, from mountainous to water surface. In other words, I knew where the drone is going to be. Still, it was extremely difficult to get the aircraft on radar long enough to create a predictive path, even when we put radar enhancers on the aircraft. Now we are talking about trying to detect the F-22 or 35?

Being low radar observable is already being asymmetrical -- in our favor.

So, how the US wants to detect the Chinese/ Russian / Indian low observable anti ship/ cruise missiles?

I think the US guys discussion is very funny.


You can win any war with infinite resources.

All that it needs is to send the soldiers and equipment endlessly to the front-line.


For the average guy on the frontline it seems like his personal capability that is win the war, but he is like the edge of the sword, as strong as the rest of the weapon.

The Americans have a saying: "If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck. It is a duck."

Or it could be a man in a duck suit...

I don't know so much about Soviet history as you, but take a look at PAK-FA program and it is again the same thing: wait for the US to develop their proposal and then improve on it in the aspects that make sense, limit features that do not compensate their cost.

Well first of all it puts the western narrative that the Soviets and Russians were the aggressors...

All you need to know about Soviet history is that they used available knowledge and technology to try to counter the technology and aggression of the western world... the US included.

The US spent a fortune on bombers and carriers, while the Soviets spend a fortune on missiles.

The Soviets didn't wait for the US to build ICBMs so they could perfect the designs and build them themselves.

For a long time it was not certain if ICBMs were even possible and plenty of work went into what were basically big unmanned aircraft based cruise missiles.

The reason the Soviets didn't embrace stealth was because it is all about a first strike... it is sending fighters unseen into enemy airspace to destroy them... the Soviets have missiles that can do that, though they are easy to see they are too fast to be shot down. Stealth bombers are a first strike tool intended to sneak in and take down an enemies ability to strike back and therefore be a decapitation tool... before Desert Storm the B-2 was supposed to fly with impunity over Russia hitting truck mounted ICBMs using guided bombs... of course after DS when they didn't even get one in a tiny country like Iraq with pretty much complete air control and no interference in their satellite coverage that capability quickly disappeared off the slide show slides....

Russian bombers don't need to be stealthy... in the 6-8 hours it would take them to fly to their launch positions the ICBMs and SLBMs would already have taken down the US air defence network... such as it is...

Today the only actual stealth aircraft they have in the works are bombers intended for conventional conflicts as well as strategic roles (PAK DA) and a hunter of stealth fighters (SU-57).

Widespread use of stealth technology for Russia is pointless... it would not make existing forces more effective but it would make them much more expensive to buy and to operate.

The same reasons that the Russians would not benefit from having 10+ supercarriers like the US... they would have no purpose and would cost too much anyway.

For the US cost keeps the machine going... it is good because it is good for the MIC and the bottom lines of some of the richest men in the US.

Of course now we have the Russians developing new technologies and new capabilities are offering interesting new scenarios...

Unmanned underwater vehicles are not new... in fact they are actually ancient... but giving them intercontinental range and a large nuclear warhead... is interesting.... just like taking a WWI technology... the unmanned drone... and using nuclear power to give it unlimited range... ground based lasers are not new either, but hypersonic anti ship missiles are... especially ones that fly 2,000km at mach 10... 3.2 km/s... that is two miles per second...

@Singular... what America does not realise is that in a war against Russia or China they might actually be fighting alone... I know it might come as a shock but not everyone follows the US like a robot... a UK, French, or Australian politician... especially when it is only in 1%Americas interests.

WWIII will be WWII again... America is largely untouched and Europe and Russia do most of the fighting... and dying.

Havok, I do not want to further derail this thread about PAK-FA with wide ranging amount of subjects so I will limit the discussion from my side. I highly respect you hands-on experience, so do not think for a second that I would lose my time discussing with you if I was not ready to change my mind, learning is the reason to be in the forum in the first place. I take the point that sensationalist claims about maintenance difficulties of 5th gen fighters are to be taken with a big pinch of salt, fair enough. But if you take all discussions from the general topics to the very smallest details to exclude other opinions, well then you simply disqualify planers who take decisions without knowing every detail, and disqualify yourself to talk about any HW you have not worked with or directly developed, PAK-FA to begin with. I am an engineer, with long hands-on experience on my field and agree that nothing substitutes REAL, first hand knowledge about what you talk. I gladly accept my opinions on fields I do not directly master to be corrected, but general considerations exist, beyond the fact that I know or not every single piece in a plane or process in an air force manual. If you want to engage in that kind of abstract discussions ok, if not we do not have much common ground to begin with.

havok wrote:
Right...And Soviet/Russian journalism are pure in hearts and actions.

No they aren't, not implying that.

havok wrote:
What exactly is 'high enough'?

You are the service man so I would ask you, what the sortie generation rate relation is between 4th gen fighters (F-16 and F-15 to be more concrete) and that of a F-22. Put it this way: F-22 got axed at 187 units. From them, it seems no more than 120 are ready for operation at any given time (again, not sure by what exact metrics this is calculated). F-15s that were to be replaced are still in service for many years to come it seems. Many voices are heard requesting reactivation of the F-22 production because the existing units can not cope with the level of perceived threat. Do these claims hold merit in your opinion or is just politicians wanting more money?

havok wrote:
So what make you think that your criticisms of the F-22 has any validity?

Right now, many of those silent readers are rethinking that article. Unlike you guys, they are objective.

Well, fact is you are talking to me so a modicum of respect is due. Those silent observers you say are your target will have their own opinions. Maybe some of them don't even bother answering you, who knows.

I am not making a point of faith my limited criticism of F-22 and I am asking you in order to learn what I may not know, but you do not provide much information about it specifically, rather about other topics. Sad.

havok wrote:
I was in DS. Were you in the Eastern Front back in WW II?

DS was not a 'real war'? Care to tell that to the Iraqis?

Why should I need being in the eastern front to understand the difference in scale and balance of forces to desert storm?

Well for them it was rather a massacre. Especially for guys like the ones killed in columns withdrawing from Kuwait.

havok wrote:
Desert Storm changed warfare irrevocably...

It makes me sad that you take pride in something like that operation.
BTW, thinking that US would face Vietnam style losses in Irak is the same cheap sensationalism you are complaining of. I remember all the PR efforts at that time glorifying the killing machine organized for the occasion. Did not notice at the time, but in retrospective it was obscene and sinister.
Of course all other armies took note of how the empire fights, would be plainly suicidal not to do it.
Again, Irak stood no chance against US, not one. They didn't even try to avoid your build-up in the region, imagine how scared they were.

havok wrote:
When you have no experience, oversimplification is what you MUST do. You have no choice. People made the same 'analyses' about US in DS as you said just now. They were wrong then.

I once taught Aircraft Battle Damage Repair (ABDR)...

Again, I love to learn from everything and have no big ego problems to admit when I am wrong, it is impossible to always be right. I do not know everything, but neither you or anyone else knows all (even when some seem incapable of admitting it). We live with it and try to improve. Look at yourself, throwing your opinions in the PAK-FA thread a Russian Defence forum. How long did you serve with the Russians? How many research institutes have you worked in there? But you have no doubt that Russia in the European theater would be defeated the same as Irak in DS. Fine.

havok wrote:
It maybe a superior motivation, but not of mind.

It does not matter if you are wielding a rifle or a jet fighter...

Ok, it is about being a robot, I know. Only issue is humans are not robots. Tell your fellow veterans having massive psychological problems and committing suicide by the thousands (is this again being exaggerated?). It is only convenient to have people capable of killing irrespective of the reason, but green berets fed up of training jihadists and USAF pilots having to close their eyes to tanker columns kilometres long smuggling ISIS oil in Syria beg to differ. They cannot work like robots anymore.

havok wrote:

Russia and China are struggling with their 'stealth' while we have been flying ours for DECADES. You think I care if you mock what I said?

And you still continue struggling. Not mocking what you say but I see you have no interest in discussing any of my points, fine.

havok wrote:
I read the same thing before we deployed for Desert Storm. Asymmetrical. Home turf. Etc...

After the USAF, I worked for a company...

Again, not everything will be always like DS. Not even close, do your research.
Regarding your experience with RADAR detection of UAVs: what do you think US will do to counter enemy stealth then? Low RCS cruise missiles and UAV already exist in Chinese and Russian inventories. I am sure you have something in mind to counter them, right? Or do you simply trust they will produce useless crap?

havok wrote:
And why is this argument not applied to the Soviets?

But the real flaw in your argument is that you presume that having a technologically superior military equals to having urges of conquests. In many ways, that is more applicable to the Soviets than to US. Stalin said that quantity is a quality on its own. You remember that? NATO was consistently outnumbered. And you are admonishing us not to exploit technology as a counter? Give me a break...

Yes, if you outspend the rest of the world in military is because you make use of it. Geopolitics is all about access to resources and a global scale military is there to grant access to resources on a global scale. If you don't see this then I sincerely give up man

LMFS wrote:Havok, I do not want to further derail this thread about PAK-FA with wide ranging amount of subjects...

Then keep the discussion technical. That goes to ALL of you. If you touch on another subject, I will respond to that redirection. Your choice.

LMFS wrote:I take the point that sensationalist claims about maintenance difficulties of 5th gen fighters are to be taken with a big pinch of salt, fair enough.

I am an engineer,...

It is surprising that you have not posted your objection, or at least precaution, to the forum on taking these articles without that pinch of salt.

An engineer is a bridge between the theoretical and the practical. What the theory said vs what the real world allows. The scientists says A, B, or C. Engineers takes in real world limitations and applies those factors into A, B, or C. The result is a car, a bridge, or an airplane, each product is a working example of competing and conflicting demands.

I left aviation because of family related issues. A relocation removed me from any employment prospects in aviation. I am now in semiconductor manufacturing, specifically Process Engineering, even more specific, Probe Functionality and Parametric testing of silicon wafers. I am directly involved in Intel's new non-volatile memory technology called 3DXP. It is a version of phase change memory (PCM). You can look up those keywords.

An engineer should draw upon his own investigative skills and instincts to have initial doubts about any claim, especially if he has no experience in the fields of said claim. But I do not expect that type of objectivity in this forum. Data is the lifeblood of engineers. I look at data all day long, from JMP to SPACE to even handwritten text. The test data of every single wafer crosses my desk and my dept says 'Yea' or 'Nay' on each wafer.

Without data, engineers are nothing. And by logical extension, any opinion made or accepted from another party in the absence of data also means -- nothing. Your profession do not allow you the latitude of taking in figures without supporting data. A janitor have that freedom. An engineer do not. When you chose to become an 'engineer', you take on certain moral and ethical responsibilities. Some of them have legal consequences, but most resides in your conscience and supposedly guide your thoughts. The absence of data in that article should have been a red flag. YOU should have known that.

LMFS wrote:You are the service man so I would ask you, what the sortie generation rate relation is between 4th gen fighters (F-16 and F-15 to be more concrete) and that of a F-22. Put it this way: F-22 got axed at 187 units. From them, it seems no more than 120 are ready for operation at any given time (again, not sure by what exact metrics this is calculated). F-15s that were to be replaced are still in service for many years to come it seems. Many voices are heard requesting reactivation of the F-22 production because the existing units can not cope with the level of perceived threat. Do these claims hold merit in your opinion or is just politicians wanting more money?

The sortie generation rate is per unit per location per deployment. It is theater limited. Not for policy makers. If a unit in CONUS has a %90 generation rate, it has no bearing on policies in Asia, unless or until that unit is deployed to Asia or speculatively deployed to Asia, then policy makers can begin to use this piece of statistic.

Now...Ideally, every theater should have at least a couple of dedicated air supremacy units. But even US have limitations and one of those is financial. So the F-22 production was capped at 187 jets. There are calls for the resurrection of the F-22 production line because of the lack of immediately available F-22 units to meet perceived threats. I do NOT dispute that argument. But that has nothing to do with an F-22 unit's FMC rate. If there are more F-15 units that have comparable FMC rate that can be deployed to more theaters at the same time, that still have nothing to do the fewer F-22 units that have the same FMC rate. The F-22's desirability is because of its perceived higher threat value to any in-theater air forces.

So just because there are calls for the resurrection of the F-22's production line, somehow that is a 'sign' of the F-22's inferiority in the area of air supremacy? That is not a leap of logic but a leap of faith made by many.

Merit...What kind are we talking about here?

Strategically speaking, meaning at the policy makers or theoretical level, resurrecting the F-22's production line make near-ideal sense.

But pragmatically speaking, meaning at the process engineering level, it does not. Remember, engineers have to take in real world limitations.

One of those limitations is that of workers availability. No matter what you see in the news, an aircraft, even an established front line version, is very much a hand built product in the same level as that of Rolls Royce autos. The experienced F-22 production workers are mostly retired.

Another limitation is technology. The F-22 is much more a modular aircraft than the F-15/16. So if we are going to resurrect the production line, we cannot produce the same jet. It would not make sense given at least 10 yrs have passed. Yes, I understand the last F-22 was delivered in 2012, but essentially, the jet's technology was locked in before that last model. If we are going to resurrect the line, in good conscience to national defense and to the men/women who must fly and maintain the jet, we must install newer, if not the latest, technologies into the new jets. This will raise the per jet cost. Can we afford it?

So just on these two items, the merits against the resurrection argument are already valid.

I will use semiconductor as example...

My former employer is Micron Tech. Micron have a history of keeping obsolete memory technologies in its knowledge repositories when its competitors purged theirs. Many of those obsolete memory designs have large die dimensions, which on a wafer real estate, affects cost and profits. Ergo, smaller dies means more dies per wafer which means lower cost and higher profits per die. But larger dies offers ruggedness and increased robustness of data retention. Further, the larger die provides excess space for other protective measures, like the kind NASA want to protect the memory core from radiation. So when NASA or any country's space agencies want some obsolete memory type because it suits their needs, Micron will be their only source. Micron will resurrect the production line, trains existing workers on the old technologies, and pass on appropriate costs to the customers.

Personally speaking, I do not agree with the merits for the resurrection of the F-22 production line. I support the merits AGAINST the argument.

LMFS wrote:Why should I need being in the eastern front to understand the difference in scale and balance of forces to desert storm?

Well for them it was rather a massacre. Especially for guys like the ones killed in columns withdrawing from Kuwait.

This revealed a very shallow understanding of war in general. It is a video game type of understanding. It is irrelevant if the war is only between two countries or the sizes involved. As long as certain political objectives can be met only by fighting, there is a war. A 'conflict' is only a smaller scale of fighting, which is essentially a war anyway. A 'conflict' is usually when no territories are involved. Minor temporary border crossings are not counted.

Who says a war has to be of commensurate forces? What general would match one-to-one? If anyone does prefers, he should not have been a general in the first place.

In Iraq, the coalition took over the entire country. So what if we brought superior technologies and tactics? Do we not have responsibilities to our own sides to bring swift victories?

As for the Iraq forces that were on the run and were attacked by us, what did I said to you about asking questions of events?

FYI...The Geneva Convention ALLOWS that attack. According to the GC, withdrawing forces are still legal combatants. The only time you get protected status is when you literally laid down your arms AND make clear your intention of surrender. The phrase is "hors de combat". Out of combat. A 'massacre' is an inflammatory word, not considered by the GC regarding who is a legal combatant and who is protected from killing.

If you are in a tank, that make you a legal combatant, therefore qualified to be killed. In order for you to be in protected status, you must:

1- Abandon your weapon
2- Make clear intention of surrender
3- Stay away from other instruments of war such as a tank, aircraft, or gun emplacements.

Item 3 actually falls under Item 1, but I separated for clarity. The reason is that I cannot tell if the tank or gun emplacement is loaded or not. So for me to NOT shoot you, stay away from such devices. The only exception is for ships as we cannot reasonably expect sailors to abandon ship to surrender. The ship is their lifeboat, in a manner of speaking.

The fact that you brought this event up is perfectly in line with the mentality of this forum, which is to minimize everything the US does. Iraq was not a 'real' war like WW II. Therefore, the new tactics and technologies are nothing special compares to what Russia can do, right? Laughable.

You do not want the deviate from the main point of this discussion? Then do not bring shit like this up, especially when it is clear that you have done not even basic research on it.

LMFS wrote:Again, Irak stood no chance against US, not one. They didn't even try to avoid your build-up in the region, imagine how scared they were.

Saddam Hussein certainly thought he could. Again, if you want to deviate, I can accommodate.

[quote="LMFS"]Look at yourself, throwing your opinions in the PAK-FA thread a Russian Defence forum. How long did you serve with the Russians? How many research institutes have you worked in there?
[quote]
Wait a sec...

Am not the one who made opinions about things based upon no data. I RESPONDED to you guys. Not only that, I responded based upon experience.

The PAK is a DIRECT competitor to the F-22, therefore, I recognized that it is inevitable that you guys will make certain claims in favor of the PAK in comparing against the F-22. In the same vein, you guys should recognize that if you make claims that either defies the laws of physics or approaches so, expect challenges to your claims.

Back in the 1950s when the laser was under development, Theodore Maiman and Irnee D'Haenens were working on their own project and won the race. Maiman published and all he provided was the ruby crystal, a photo of the completed device, and general ideas of how they made the laser. That was all the other scientists needed to create their own ruby laser and verified Maiman's accomplishment.

I do not need to have direct connections to the PAK to recognize when you guys are in theoretical errors. Not just on the PAK but to many peripheral issues, such as aviation maintenance.

In creating a low radar observable platform, there are three rules to consider:

1- Control of QUANTITY of radiators
2- Control of ARRAY of radiators
3- Control of MODES of radiation

They maybe be called 'rules', but they are more like guidelines. You cannot violate these rules, only on how OBEDIENT you are to them. Degrees of application.

So when you compare the F-15 to these rules, you can say the F-15 is less obedient to the rules while the F-22 is more obedient. The B-2 have a higher degree of obedience. The sphere has the highest degree of obedience to them and that is why the sphere is a radar calibration shape.

Am not making this up. Keywords search for you: 'radar calibration sphere'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Calibration_Sphere_1

Did you know this fact from this forum before this discussion? If not, why not? I thought this forum is filled with people smarter than Americans.

The PAK is no different. These are real physics and not even Russia can defy them. So when you guys make claims that defies the laws of physics and common sense, have the honor of admitting when you are wrong.

LMFS wrote:Ok, it is about being a robot, I know. Only issue is humans are not robots. Tell your fellow veterans having massive psychological problems and committing suicide by the thousands (is this again being exaggerated?). It is only convenient to have people capable of killing irrespective of the reason, but green berets fed up of training jihadists and USAF pilots having to close their eyes to tanker columns kilometres long smuggling ISIS oil in Syria beg to differ. They cannot work like robots anymore.

We can deviate further from the technical discussions of the PAK, since you like to do so...

The effects of combat on the mind is usually after the battle. What you failed to grasp is that motivation for a war and technical skills of combat are EQUALLY important. The only difference is WHEN each is applied.

Before any campaign, the troops must be properly motivated. Call it propaganda or indoctrination or brainwashing if you like. But understand that you are no different than US. But once you are in battle, the technical skills of combat must take over your mind and body, whether you are an infantryman or a pilot. The actions you execute must be robotic in nature, like it or not. You cannot afford to think about magazine replacement. That should have been covered in Basic Training.

Bringing up PTSD is nothing but a cheap ploy in your part to cover up that fact that you are wrong about war and combat in general principles. It is a distraction.

LMFS wrote:And you still continue struggling. Not mocking what you say but I see you have no interest in discussing any of my points, fine.

Sure we struggles, but we do it with more data and experience. That is the difference and it will keep US ahead.

As far as your points goes, you guys are more interested in points about the F-22, as in how to make it look bad or even inferior, than to illuminate the technical aspects of the discussion. I may not have posted much, but I observed enough to patterned out the behaviors.

LMFS wrote:Again, not everything will be always like DS. Not even close, do your research.

Again...I never said that it is.

Your error is that you think we rests on the successes of DS. We do not and have not. Much -- not all -- of DS we laid aside as no longer appropriate for our next concept of warfare. A lot came from new technologies. A lot came from the fact that others will create countermeasures to what we did.

For example...

Before DS, the world never really saw how GPS guided weaponry will perform at large scale. But now we moved to non-GPS assisted tactics because we know that some future adversaries may employ GPS countermeasures.

LMFS wrote:Regarding your experience with RADAR detection of UAVs: what do you think US will do to counter enemy stealth then? Low RCS cruise missiles and UAV already exist in Chinese and Russian inventories. I am sure you have something in mind to counter them, right? Or do you simply trust they will produce useless crap?

The highlighted is why I do not take you guys seriously. Simply because you do not take US seriously.

Even though I am no longer in aviation, I still have active duty friends, particularly at Nellis AFB, home of an F-22 wing. Am not going to reveal on the Internet the technical tactics of how we have effectively defeated 'stealth' from anyone. I will NOT say silly statements like 'Believe me' or 'Trust me'. Am NOT asking anyone to take my words for it. You can call me a liar all you want and it would not bother me one atom's worth.

I am an 'Old Crow'...

http://www.crows.org/

Wait...You did not know that an organization dedicated to Elect. Warfare exists?

So put your engineering mind to work. The US created the first 'stealth' platform. Since the F-117, there have been three more advancements while of the rest of the world, only two countries have the resources to try, and both of them are struggling. The US continues to be the leader in radar technology. Now you just found out there is an organization dedicated to Elect. Warfare and one of its members is talking to you.

Absolutely you guys should be confident that the US do not know how to defeat 'stealth'.

LMFS wrote:Yes, if you outspend the rest of the world in military is because you make use of it. Geopolitics is all about access to resources and a global scale military is there to grant access to resources on a global scale. If you don't see this then I sincerely give up man

I can also argue that granting such access is a good for the rest of the world. Something certainly Russia cannot say.

Ok Havok, thanks for your time, sources of info and valid points, appreciate them. But I am not interested in discussing if you are so close minded, try to school me on trivial topics or reduce me to some kind of minion with motives and agendas made up by yourself. Obviously you are not going to move an inch. You are 200% certain of what you say so be it, I had my share of trying to discuss constructively with you but it seems beyond my capabilities. All the best to you.