[Bobbcatt]

All of this is extremely wrong.

First of all, there's no guarantee that you will be able to use BVR. A stealth fighter using its radar is the same as a man in a camouflage at night turning on his search light. Everybody will know where you are. There might also be rule of engagement restriction, as has been many times that forced within-visual-range.

For WVR, the ability to supermaneuver is useful. It can give you that extra edge to get the angle on a target. You have to give up a lot of energy, sure. But you do have >1 TWR, and your buddies to cover you. It's not a magical tool but another one in a toolbox.

Also, in WVR, the advantage goes to the side with fewer planes. There was a study from the korean war to show this. The reason is because if you and your buddy is fighting 20 bandits, you can shoot at anybody that flies in front of you, while the enemies have to visually identify. And the speed of jet combat makes it impossible to verify before you lose your opportunity.

>So it might, might be useful if: both sides empty their long/medium-range radar-guided missiles at one-another, only two combatants remain, neither decides to bug out, the aggressor empties their IR missiles unsuccessfully, and the defensive craft is imminently going to be within the weapon employment zone for the bandit’s cannon

Yup. Just like in vietnam. We are gonna fly up there with our f4s afterburning to mach 2, then we will launch all our sparrows at the bandits, who would fly straight into our missiles because they are dumb, and then we will land just in time for lunch.

[scarier]

Oversimplified for sure, but I think "extremely wrong" is unfair. I think the jury is still out on whether or not a stealth-on-stealth fight (or a more conventional fight in an ECM-heavy environment) inevitably devolves into a WVR knife fight. There are a number of reasons why this doesn't have to be the case.

You're absolutely correct that ROE can force a VID, but it'd be pretty dumb to box yourself into a corner that would force you into a neutral-ish WVR fight, yeah?

I agree that supermaneuverability has the potential to be useful, but I think it's fair to say that it's very much an edge case, and even then more of an augment to missiles that already have HOBS capability than a replacement for them. It certainly isn't a game-changing capability the way HOBS was. Also, TWR only goes so far to help recover from an energy deficit, especially if you have to go into reheat to make it happen. Gas kills are a thing...

Yes and no. Against a well-coordinated, larger force it's really difficult to win, and I very much wouldn't recommend adopting it as a primary tactic. If you had a fight that magically began at the furball phase (admittedly, this is one potential outcome of stealth-on-stealth engagements, although I imagine we'd need to develop better and different technology to make it a reality), that would be more likely to favor the individual, at least until they run out of missiles (it's difficult to over-emphasize how difficult guns kills are against maneuvering targets, even for a hypothetical magic robot with near-perfect aim). Old-school fights like Korea were much closer to the "immediate, chaotic furball" side of the spectrum than current fights, and there was a much less well-developed set of intra-and inter-flight tactics. A modern 2v1 (even heaters-only) is far more lopsided against the 1 than it was during Korea. With good coordination, this scales. (Aside: a really good book about the air war in Korea is The Hunters by James Salter. Highly recommended--it's fiction, but based on the author's own experiences as a pilot there.)

For what it's worth, technology and tactics have improved in the last half decade (perhaps more than we can say about our judgement?)... The proliferation of certain technologies will force continual re-evaluation of tactics, but I think it's safe to say that BVR is reasonably mature and not going anywhere in the foreseeable future. (That said, reports of the death of the air-to-air gun will always be greatly exaggerated.)

[chipsa]

> A stealth fighter using its radar is the same as a man in a camouflage at night turning on his search light. Everybody will know where you are.

Every American stealth aircraft equipped with a radar is designed to be able to use it. There's various tricks involved, which all amount to driving the signal of radar below the noise floor for the adversary, while still being able to have the radar pick out the signal return (which is possible because the radar know what signal was sent out in the first place).

[jasonwatkinspdx]

> First of all, there's no guarantee that you will be able to use BVR. A stealth fighter using its radar is the same as a man in a camouflage at night turning on his search light. Everybody will know where you are. There might also be rule of engagement restriction, as has been many times that forced within-visual-range.

The F-22 has a low probability of intercept radar. They've been testing a window for adding IRST too in recent years. It also has extremely sophisticated passive EW sensors. It was designed from day one to win BVR fights without compromising stealth.

> For WVR, the ability to supermaneuver is useful. It can give you that extra edge to get the angle on a target. You have to give up a lot of energy, sure. But you do have >1 TWR, and your buddies to cover you. It's not a magical tool but another one in a toolbox.

It's a very poor tool and should be seen as a last resort.

As for F4's in vietnam and such, the visual engagement rules there were unique and are not going to repeat.

I'd suggest reading CBSA's Future of Air Combat report to understand the realities of this stuff. Supermaneuverability is very close to useless other than an advertising stunt at air shows.

Manned fighters themselves are very nearly obsolete.

[lenkite]

I agree. The Project Trigger Team studied this: https://media.defense.gov/2009/Aug/14/2001330300/-1/-1/0/AFD...

Then came the air war over Vietnam, and the fighter crews there soon realized that AIM-7 shots beyond visual range were often more dangerous to other Americans than to the enemy, because there was no (sure) way to identify the target as friend or foe.

For a more "modern" war: https://www.defense-aerospace.com/articles-view/feature/5/18...

During the Gulf War, the US Air Force launched AIM-7M and AIM-120 medium-range air-to-air missile for BVR attack under the condition of "one-way transparency", but the hitting rate was less than 30 percent.

[nradov]

A low observable fighter using its radar is hardly analogous to a man turning on a flashlight at night. This isn't the 1960's anymore where air search radars were turned on for extended periods on a set frequency.

Modern low probability of intercept are designed to emit only intermittently and hop between frequencies. An adversary might be able to detect the signal but probably won't be able to use it for tracking and targeting.

Furthermore data links allow for cooperative engagement. So the shooting platform can leave its radar off and rely on targeting data fed in from other sources.

[stouset]

You have lost your mind if you think any fight that’s 2v1 or worse odds is going to go well for the underdog. I mean, it’s not like 2v1 ACM doctrine isn’t a thing. It’s practiced regularly by fighter pilots. The side with 2 wins an overwhelming amount of time once practiced. It turns out we’ve learned new lessons and adopted new techniques in the 70 years since the Korean War.

First, once you have VID you do everything you can to keep the bandit in sight until you have a shot opportunity. This idea that “jets are so fast you lose the opportunity by the time you can tell what it is” is completely unfounded.

Second, those other 20 planes aren’t all wildly trying to shoot you. If you’re chasing one of them, that one is flying defensive and describing the fight to their wingmen (“one circle, bandit co-alt, nose high…”) as their supporting wingmen take turns with who’s engaged aggressive and getting clear missile shots at you (since you’re really focused on only one of them).

Third, even if none of this were true, doing this kind of thing in an N-vs-1 fight for N >= 2 invalidates your entire premise. The guy who’s hanging still in midair doing fancy air-show tricks is just generating free shots for all those other aircraft.

[Tuna-Fish]

> First of all, there's no guarantee that you will be able to use BVR. A stealth fighter using its radar is the same as a man in a camouflage at night turning on his search light. Everybody will know where you are.

This is simply not true for modern AESA radars. It's only true for radars built with an 80's technology level. Modern radars are capable of producing search beams so narrow that they cannot be reliably used for locating the source. When someone is using a LPI radar near you, you can tell that someone has a radar on, but you will only have a very vague idea of the direction they are in, and no idea at all of how far away they are. And since other planes near you (or even other detectors on your own plane) do not get to see the same beam, only the next one that comes after a random interval, you cannot use multiple detectors for deducing the origin of the beam.

The fact that this myth of radars telling everyone where your are is so persistent is annoying, but also somewhat useful. Simply because if someone repeats it, it tells everyone that they have not updated their ideas about how air combat works since the cold war ended and they should be ignored.