A Cold War Legacy: The Decline of Stealth
warontherocks.com
warontherocks.com
Except at the lower-end, where Super Tucanos, AH-64s and A-10s dominate. That environment is a numbers game, not a platform-capability game.
Notice how Comanche was cancelled in favour of continued Kiowa / Apache teams; stealth undermined by cost. The US Army saw the future ahead of most others and stealth wasn't it.
> Stealth isn't going anywhere.
For Tier 1 platforms I agree. For everything else, and everyone else outside the top 10 spenders, it's a nice-to-have afterthought.
my guess is that stealth now includes keeping it out of public's knowledge, to minimize risk.
with helos sound comes into play as well, as detection comes down to human ears if used in rescue or raid situations.
From my very casual outsider view, it looks like manned platforms are indeed becoming more expensive, but unmanned platforms are much cheaper and taking over much of the work.
"In addition, a new generation of low cost, reusable, and ultimately disposable UNMANNED [emphasis added] systems can help invert the cost imposition of A2/AD networks by overwhelming an enemy’s ability to engage at favorable cost exchanges."
I'm curious as to whether you can conceivably build effective aerial platforms for cheaper than you can build missiles to knock them down, but I'd imagine you could do so with decoy drones.
I believe the unmanned part is key for enabling this -- hopefully no one would have ever suggested fielding survivability-inferior but numerically-superior manned force as a viable strategic aim...
Every wartime opponent of the USA for the last half century that we've lost to, has eventually won using that exact strategy. Its kind of expensive, but everyone who tries it, beats us eventually.
Everyone always thinks about the consequences of the above as 5 Shermans (or T-34s) vs. 1 Tiger. But the more important distinction was likely 2 Shermans + infantry vs. 0 Panthers + infantry.
When we were doing our pre-war certification for desert combat, we had a chance to train right next to an anti-aircraft battery. We wanted to know the detectability of the Shadow at mission altitude so we could adjust things to keep from getting shot down. For those that don't know, the Shadow 200 (RQ-7A, now superseded by a bigger model), is built out of a carbon fiber composite with radar absorbing paint. The engine vents exhaust to the top backwards directly into the propellor, which does a wonderful job of breaking up the heat signature. It is approximately 11'x13'. Anyways the shadow is small and was meant to have a very low detectability factor. After the AV is a few thousand feet above the ground, you can either see nor hear it. Our own patriot anti aircraft battery was unable to detect it at mission altitude without setting their gear's sensitivity up night enough to detect large birds, which is totally impractical.
So was the Shadow built to be stealth like a B2 or F117? Nope. Is it effectively stealth when flying missions at several thousand feet above the ground? Yup! Go the the Wikipedia page for "Ground Control Station" which has a picture of me in the back of a Shadow GCS sometime around 2001.
Now the bigger stuff such as the predator / reaper / global hawk? They have much larger cross signatures, but they are more capable platforms. The shadow only had an approximately 6-7 hour in-air endurance.
Your argument that stealth is just the way things are now implies that stealth, as a feature, is more valuable than the features you have to give up to get it. The article is arguing the opposite -- that stealth is less and less valuable as radar technology improves to counter it, so maybe it's not worth giving up that other stuff to have it. You disagree, that's fine, but that in and of itself doesn't make their reasoning "flawed" and thus able to be ruled out with a wave of the hand and a jaunty "stealth isn't going anywhere."
Sure it is not an all or nothing. What the article is claiming is that investing hundreds of billions into it at this point then hundreds of millions per unit is stupid because even older Russian UHF, VHF radar can detect those. Now they can't be used for targeting as much but that has improved, even the Chinese caught on and developed their own UHF/VHF radar.
First is to quickly crush a nations standing military. This is where the stealth tradeoffs are less useful. Basically, just blow up anything that uses radar and you win.
The second is to patrol territory. Here stealth can be very useful as you tend to deal with far less capable radar and missile systems. But, they tend to be vary mobile so while there minimal threat at a military level they are a serious ‘let’s not show up on CNN’ issue.
Considering the actual missions flown over the last 50 years I think the Air force’s priorities are much more reasonable.
That is a very, very difficult point to defend. The vast majority of USAF missions over the past 50 years have been CAS missions against ground forces, not jet-against-jet duels against other air superiority fighters. Yet, if you look at the design priorities of not just the current state-of-the-art fighters, but even previous-gen fighters like the the F-15, F-16 and the F-18, you'll see that they privilege air-to-air combat capability over air-to-ground.
IMHO, the only plane in the USAF's inventory that's actually suited for the missions the USAF is actually flying is the A-10. And if you look at the A-10's history, you'll see that the USAF leadership fought tooth and nail against the program (it was essentially forced on the USAF by the Army), and at every feasible opportunity they've tried to retire the airframe.
Stealth isn't magic. Stealth doesn't make you invisible. Stealth is, at best, a very sophisticated camouflage that makes your plane harder to see with radar at a distance, and its advantages end the moment your plane starts shooting. Contra your point, stealth is actually most suited for the "blitzkrieg" style missions which are designed to crush enemy air forces in the opening days of an engagement. That's actually what it was designed for. The F-22 (and other stealth aircraft) were designed to wipe out Soviet aircraft and air-defense systems in the opening days of WW3, at which point more conventional fighters (like F-4s, F-15s and A-10s) would do the majority of the "grunt work" of wiping out Soviet ground armor.
Stealth is far less suited for the kinds of "patrol" missions where your planes are going to be flying the same airspace day and day out, supporting ground troops or enforcing a no-fly zone. As the evidence from the F-117 shootdown in Yugoslavia demonstrates, all the camouflage in the world won't help you if your enemy is able to deduce where you will be based on your past activity. Stealth is poorly suited for close-air support missions, where you're flying close to enemy troops, for long periods of time, and shooting at them on a regular basis.
The Air Force's priorities have not been reasonable, by any rational measure, nor have they been reasonable for quite some time now. The Air Force should be investing in developing UAVs and the accompanying swarm tactics that allow for effective use of large numbers (e.g. 100+) aircraft in a combat theater. Instead, they're blowing billions of dollars on a "unified" combat aircraft that can't actually perform any of the roles it's supposed take over.
EDITS: Added points and restructured for clarity.
Cheap, high loiter time the cost is low speed so they have to already be in country. And the Air force has been buying a lot of drones. Manned fighters are currently much better for patrolling large areas of airspace and maintaining air superiority.
As to swarms picture the minimum drone that can hit a target that’s traveling at 2.5 times the speed of sound at 65,000 feet. Now how many of those do you need to patrol say the entire US border. Don't get me wrong the swarm concept is useful, the only problem is the minimum useful airframe vs modern fighers is not tiny.
Ps: This is of course highly simplified. Cruise missiles are great at dismantling vary high value targets, but there also vary pricey and can’t loiter.
They won’t have to be super stealthy, and will be tons cheaper than a manned platform, which gives the ability to throw them away at a problem.
I feel like the people crowing about unparalleled air-combat superiority of the USAF today are similar to the people who crowed about the impregnability of the Maginot Line in 1936. They're correct, but the point will be rendered moot by new technology and new tactics.
My guess is stealth astroturfing from the military industrial complex. Propose something with a higher overall system/platform cost, then sell it to the unknowing public as a cost cutting measure.
An optimized strategy for saving money while still enforcing imperial control over the colonies would be massive automation and economy of scale via drones for the front lines. Rather than making a survivable $500M bomber that will only maybe a hundred combat missions, ship 5000 $100K drones/cruise missiles that will net 5000 combat missions for the same price, even if 90% the drones are shot down you still come out ahead.
I'm pretty sure the US government is paying for a bunch of disparate R & D projects already.
You only need to hide completely if you expect to be shot at, if you are flying in airspace where unknowns will be immediately engaged. Such airspace is very rare these days. Stealth today is about hiding just well enough that they cannot prove who or what you are (the Osama raid over Pakistan). In non-war airspace, with civilians floating around, they aren't going to shoot at an unknown. You don't need a zero-profile, just enough of a cloak that they cannot readily identify you. Unknown is far easier a profile than unseen.
Unmanned also solves the cost problem, as about 70% of the cost is excessive engineering, maintenance, and manufacturing techniques to keep the pilot alive.