http://www.ausairpower.net/APA-2008-09.html#mozTocId155813 Excellent read. All but 200 US planes are obsolete, of course those 200 planes aren't sage from Russian weapons merely competitive with them. But the rest might as well just be used for colonial 3rd world oppression.
Hmmm, only if you use the term obsolete loosely and relatively. Just because an aircraft isn't as fresh as the newest one of its type, does not mean that it is obsolete. Heck, we could still make great use of F-14s, the primary issue that we'd have is personnel. We (the U.S.) have pretty competitive piloting programs, so those who fly our aircraft are pretty top notch. Flying older craft would put our pilots at greater risk, but if the need arose we could make good use of F-14s. Old aircraft can still be useful. The Russians made good use of old wood and canvas bombers in WW2. Have you ever heard of the Night Witches? On a side note, welcome to the forum. I'd encourage you to check the rules tab at the top of the page, and to post an introduction in the new members area.
TheF14 is a good example of how it is obsolete, the plane is no longer used and can't compete against say the J15 or Su27. In today's world of targeted electronic warfare with such accurate precision you can't have night witches. If you are visible to radar, if you can't jam the guidance, if you have poor ground support integration, you're dead from 200 miles away. It's not a matter of skill anymore which is why drones are finally taking a place on the battlefield. Capability has finally replaced skill. To support and keep a plane flying requires a number of ground and air suppport, to provide eyes, computation, jamming, and refueling. Russia and the US has updated all of those. The point isn't Russia is surpassing the US, but that it has leveled the field. Russia has many out dated useless planes as well. The biggest concern are tankers. Area denial. How does the US project force without refueling capabilities? Russia's first priority is to roll back US Global Strike Initiative.
I think you're overplaying the significance of tech here. Warfare isn't static, it must be flexible. Haven't you ever heard of, probably in some Hollywood movie, warplanes flying low to avoid radar detection? It's not just a Hollywood myth, that actually works. Now obviously we're not talking about flying Po2's to war, but F-14s can still serve some use. Obviously we don't use them because we have more advanced planes. The point wasn't "we should use F14s", the point was that "F14s could still serve some legitimate use in war." http://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/2952/can-you-actually-fly-under-the-radar
Under the radar works for radar that is ground based and is specific to a type of radar tech. LIDAR and airborn radar systems can detect ground based objects or low flying aircraft. Historically expensive because radar aircraft was limited to AWacs now we have inexpensive drones to do this work.
so what? when they can stop missles launched from a sub that's just 30 miles off of their shore, I'll worry about them. Until such time, they are nothing.
They can. Russia is the only country in the world with a functioning ballistic missile shield. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_defense_systems_by_country#Ballistic_missile_defence If you don't know. SLBMs are considered SRBMs or at most IRBMs. The Russians hypothetically can intercept MIRVed ICBMs using nuclear tipped S-400s. The US comparably has absolutely nothing.
I'm sorry but a lot of what you are typing isnt accurate. Besides, sheer numbers alone would overwhelm any other country on Earth. Over 1000 hornets 1000 Falcons 500 Eagles 200 Raptors And hundreds of Lightning's which will be up soon. I do find it funny however that a Russian is trying to say numbers don't mean anything and technology is everything. Not too up to date on how you have won the majority of your wars are ya?
Everything I've typed is accurate and all the planes you mentioned except the F22 are easily shot down by ground based relatively cheap Russian weapon systems. The Russians know numbers mean nothing and technology is everything they have watched and learned from the US over the last 20 years.
I find it highly amusing that a Russian is telling me that numbers mean nothing. Not to mention what happens when our planes start carrying versions of the new direct energy weapons? Still confident in your supposed tech? Come on man... You should study up on how you guys won the European theatre of WW2, I'll give you a hint, it had to do with over 13 million of your soldiers getting killed. Truly a testament to your countries staying power. I mean that, not quite sure how many countries would. Def not France.... And no, I am not an American who thinks we did it all. Throughout both theaters it's much closer, but the Euro front was probably 75% you guys. Maybe Russia - 35% America - 30%, GB - 15% France - 10% rest of the world - 10% for the world. Again, I believe that is the percentage of responsibility for ending the war.
Lol, your planes are not going to carry any kind of energy weapons up until cold fusion will be discovered. Perhaps never. Unless by "our planes" your meant Boeing-747 sized birds. So stop with these wet dreams. At least get you numbers right. I'll give you a hint, it is half of your number and you are not making yourself any favour by posting wrong information, making wrong conclusion and generally showing your ignorance. Also, that comming from those, who throwed thousands of corpses onto the beaches of Pacific and Normandy in stupid frontal attacks. Your luck Japaneese were even more incompetent.
I can agree that the F-14 is a great machine. However, the USA's specialised machines used to make replacement parts for F-14s were destroyed.
A major assumption in your thesis is that all the technology will work as planned. It will not, it never does. For example, the US extensively tests anti-air missile systems and wants a probability of kill in the 95% and up range, but in real life that performance is never met, not even close. Drones are an emerging technology. There is a world of difference between a drone strike on a third world terrorist in an SUV and a drone strike on a first world military. Capability has greatly improved but it has not replaced skill, it just seems that way because all the engagements over the past 20 years have been so lopsided. The US has been essentially unopposed. The last real opponent the US faced was in Kosovo, and in that a skilled opponent commander used old technology in a crafty way to shoot down a F-117 - he did what was considered nearly impossible. When the flag goes up, few things will go as planned. You have to have skilled people who can adapt to the unexpected. Great tools are only useful in the right hands.
There has only been one, truly invincible aircraft in the World and that is the SR-71. During the years it was in operation it could out run anything fired at it. Stealth does not mean "invisible," it means low observable. Regarding the downed F-117, the Serbs basically used the SAM-3 as a point and shoot missile. They had spies watching them take-off and timed them over the Adriatic sea, while larger radar installations were able to catch fleeting glimpses of them tracking to targets. Out of over 1,200 sorties in the first Gulf war there were no losses to the F-117; it took a lucky shot to finally bring one down...as I say, no plane is invincible. There's always the risk of a golden bb bringing one down.
You look better than what Russia is doing with its neighbor Ukraine, it just kills it! Even build a wall between the two through the efforts of Germany in the 20th century ...http://jurinform.com.ua/blog/350-stena-mezhdu-ukrainoy-i-rossiey-vremya-na-postroyku-mezhdunarodnyy-opyt.html
Just about all piloted fighter aircraft will be obsolete 5 years from now. The US hasn't built 3 or 4 drone types because it likes variety. Hypersonic ultra high-g drones will be all the rage in 5 years if they aren't already.
It doesn't matter what Russia has, really, since they'll never get the chance to shoot down even one. The Russian 'economy' is tanking rapidly, thanks to OPEC and sanctions, and Putin will soon either be assassinated or be spending all his time dealing with domestic crackdowns and a possible civil war. He and his fanbois can bloviate all they want, but Russia isn't much a threat to anybody in western Europe or anywhere else; it's a failed state on the verge of collapse. I wouldn't give the Soviets that much, maybe 10% to 15%, since they wouldn't have been able to do much without Allied aid, and certainly not at any speed faster than walking. A lot of noise gets made out of their 'production cycle', but the facts are that they couldn't produce much without shipments of alloys, fuel boosters for their av gas, and thousands of trucks and locomotives from the West, the latter particularly key to their 'success' at both production and the drives into Germany. It's a matter of opinion, of course, but that's the conclusion I draw from the lists of shipments year by year throughout the war. The Kursk pocket was filled and held with American and British armor, for instance, and though not a lot of tanks by WW II standards, more than enough to hold defensively as well as support the Soviet offensives and breakouts. Also, the T-34 was not that great a tank in 1943; it took input and criticisms from American tests that summer to make the Soviet staff assent to upgrading its shortcomings and start rolling the best versions off the assembly lines by early '44.
Yes; I think most sane people here accept that to be the case. Of course, there are those who don't like it and won't admit it openly, for nostalgia reasons.
It was not luck, not at all. That commander watched the pattern of sorties in his area and used old radar in a bistatic configuration which allowed the system to see and track the F-117. Part of the radar energy hitting the plane is reflected away from the transmitting radar, making the plane low observable to the transmitter but not to a bistatic pair located in the right positions - that's where the commander used his brain to apply "obsolete" technology in a new way to defeat otherwise superior technology. There were no further shoot downs because the NATO forces very quickly started targeting these types of radars. This was all reported in great detail in Aviation Week.
..I know for a fact the SA-3 is 1950's technology and the Serbs had spies in Italy noting when the F-117 took off and there were enough brief glimpses of it as it turned and opened it's bomb bay doors to make it vulnerable to point and shoot tactics. It was 50% luck that it was shot down. Besides the F-117 was 70's technology, in the 20 years it was in operation only one was lost to ground fire...no B-2s have ever been lost and this was used extensively in Kosovo as well. No aircraft is invisible and the Serbs exploited the weaknesses of the F-117, finally getting off a hail mary missile shot that brought one down. Air Force assessors ruled it was lucky combination of low technology tactics, rapid learning and astute improvisation. The F-117 dropped one last LGB near Belgrade offering the now alerted air defenders another clue. There were also procedural errors which led to the downing F-16CJs carrying HARMs could have deterred the SA-3 battery from emitting; but those aircraft were recalled. An EA-6B was operating too far away to offer much protection. Finally the F-117s operating out of Aviano were flying more or less the same transit route for four nights in a row because of SACEURs ban on overflight of Bosnia. I've read the Air Force report, you're going by some aviation magazine.
Basically you have corroborated my post - it was not a lucky golden BB, but the result of intelligence, improvisation, and exploitation of weaknesses in the US tactics. On sources, unless you can put the USAF report on this forum, its pointless to even mention it. Only sources publicly available are worth any value on an anonymous open forum.
Any military aircraft that still has a human pilot is effectively obsolete. Modern fighter aircraft can pull far more Gs theoretically than the pilot can survive. Meaning a fighter jet without a pilot will be capable of far more dynamic maneuvers. There's also the fact that a drone pilot on the ground can gain experience from his mistakes far more easily than someone who has to take his chances with the ejection seat. Sure, you can jam drones, but the same kind of jamming would also render a human piloted aircraft useless as well.
...Except that remote piloting an airplane induce a factor of latency in the piloting responsiveness. The command signal has to travel from the ground to the satelite, then maybe bounce of a couple more satelite to reach one over the theater of operation, then down from the satelite to the plane. Which mean that any human piloted fighter plane will totally own the remotelly piloted one until the day that we are able to develop real autonomous, AI driven planes. And that day is far off in the future... There is a reason why drones are limited to reconnaissance and pinpoint ground attack. They aren't maneuvrable enough, due to latency, to do air to air combat or straffing run.
The latency issue is a very good point. I don't know what the actual latency would be, but I can't imagine it would more than a few milliseconds. Also, the majority of modern air combat takes place beyond visual range anyway, so snap maneuvers are not as crucial. Dogfighting really isn't a thing anymore. Though if both sides were stealth aircraft... that would be a different story. We already have fully autonomous low radar visibility drones that can attack targets, take off and land (on a carrier no less) on their own. So it's not too long before we have AI air to air combat capable drones. I would expect within a decade or less, depending on the voracity of the Sino-American drone arms race. I forgot where I read this, but a number of defense experts have already agreed that the F-35 is the last generation of piloted military fighter jets. Given the development cycle for a new generation, I can see how this would be prescient.
Errr... No, latency is quite an issue. And snap maneuvering is kinda essential to evade the missiles coming at you. As for the f-35 being the last human piloted fighter, those same expert can't even build them correctly... Do you trust them to build something way more complex?