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Comment by cameldrv | Hacker News Reader

Is this really realistic though? I'm curious about your professional perspective.

My impression of the present/near future of air combat is a stealthy fighter with AMRAAMs in front, radar off, and a quarterback aircraft in back out of missile range, with the radar on. The front fighter fires and turns around, and the missile gets mid-course updates from the quarterback aircraft. When the AMRAAMs are depleted, you leave. It seems like if you get into Sidewinder range and you're outnumbered, you're going to have a torrent of medium range missiles coming at you from all sides.

It's not clear to me how well newer radars can track the B-2, but it's hard for me to see how fighters could really protect it. I'd expect that in a conflict with China, if they can track the B-2, that the B-2 would be withheld until the fighter threat was neutralized.

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So if you buy into the concept of maneuver warfare you want to hit the enemy's center of gravity and reduce their will to fight. If you're trying to do that to China, you need to hit them hard and fast deep in their country's borders (I mean, Russia too to an extent). If you play this tit for tat fighter threat game, that doesn't happen and you're essentially in a war of attrition. That means you don't hold B-2s until a fighter threat is neutralized, you send them in to hit the CoG early so the war lasts days instead of years.

F-35s are really going to be doing counter IADS so their loadout reflects that. Maybe you get a couple A2A missiles loaded in, but primarily for self defense. If you want offensive counter air, you're bringing the F-22s (or probably the NGAD) loaded out appropriately.

Anyway all this just affirms the original idea, which is that you can't prosecute a war against peer adversaries with 4th gen fighters. Our 4th gens can still take down the enemy air threat, but the IADS means those 4th gens are not even getting into the air space.

Makes sense. It seems to me that the key question is whether or not the B-2 is trackable. I've never had a clearance, so I don't know, but I suspect that over China's own territory, it probably is. Maybe not "weapons quality", but good enough to get a fighter within IR missile/cannon range. It seems difficult to get the B-2 through reliably under those circumstances, and I'm not sure a fighter escort is of much help, because they will allocate a lot of fighters to a B-2.

The unknown then is how much can be done with decoys and EW, or even things like cyberattacks on radars and control nodes.

That's essentially loyal wingman.

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