Why the US still needs the F-15 [video] | Hacker News Reader

Why the US still needs the F-15 [video]

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19 pointsmariuz12 comments

Mostly a history lesson. The reality is fighters are missile trucks these days and the F-15 is a great missile truck with a dozen amraam. Drones and missiles are the future of conventional war with much of the battle happening in the electromagnetic spectrum.

A missile truck can be a drone truck too.

Shame about the F-14, now that was a missile truck par excellence.

F-14 was a nightmare to maintain though, especially compared to the F/A-18. Sometimes reliability is the most important ability.

This is the YouTube channel for The Imperial War Museum - a multi-site museum in the UK https://www.iwm.org.uk/home-page. The presenter, Dr Hattie Hearn, is Curator of the American Air Museum at IWM Duxford. https://www.hattiehearn.co.uk/

So, yes, it's mostly a history lesson

Nowadays a dogfight between powerful nations is going to be driven by stealth, sophistication of ECM and counter measures. Take a 2 F15s and 2 F35s and they are straight into merge dogfight then the F15s will likely win. Put those same planes 150 miles apart and the F35s will shoot twice before the F15s even see them due to their stealth.

There remains a place for this type of aircraft purely because nations don't have sophisticated stealth counterparts or the same level of sophistication of anti air but its a dated design however many upgrades you throw into its avionics, engines and radar.

What if stealthy designs and coatings get replaced by active RF stealth (where the plane being targeted by the radar emits RF that makes it look like it is not there?)

Would an F15 EX with such a system be the ideal fighter for 2030?

Is that even physically possible? Usually you want to minimize your emissions because if you’re emitting anything, it’s a massive beacon to everyone.

But sometimes you want to be a massive beacon! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADM-160_MALD

It blows my mind that the USA is still developing a new manned aircraft that will cost "hundreds of millions" a piece:

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

Is this stuff necessary? What we're seeing in Ukraine is that you can buy a drone from AliExpress, put a few grams of C4 on it and tear an important piece off a half-billion dollar aircraft on the runway before it even takes off...

It'd just be a lot cheaper to pay these guys a basic income, and take the management savings from a UBI and buy absolutely a gajillion hardened drones.

No, not really. Like the A-10, USAF wants to retire its legacy platform for years now and congress has been blocking it. Its budget wants to stop buying any F-15 after 2025. And F-15EX is assigned to national guard bases first before active duty. My guess is that F-15EX will serve as home defense fighter first.

USAF wants NGAD badly, they have a gap in their weapon platform right now. They don't want to invest more into F-22s or F15s, which congress wants them to. They need the next gen capability to maintain air superiority in combat, especially against China and future drone warfare.

I skimmed through the video and it seems 90% of it has nothing to do with the question at hand. So:

* Stealth is expensive and requires a lot of maintenance, also certain weather conditions can make those maintenance challenges even worse

* Stealth requires a lot of design tradeoffs (lower payload capacity, reduced top speed)

* There are plenty of scenarios where stealth is unnecessary or even undesirable, like intercepts over domestic airspace. Hence, all of those tradeoffs are also unnecessary or undesirable.

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