Date: Tue, 14 Oct 1997 01:32:55 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> Cc: jbryant@tfs.net, dkelly@HiWAAY.net, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: F1.17 (was Re: C2 Trusted FreeBSD?) Message-ID: <21910.876817975@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 14 Oct 1997 17:27:29 %2B0930." <199710140757.RAA01367@word.smith.net.au>
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> > Whatever shortcomings the F117 may have in the frailty of its skin > > coating are more than offset by its ability to go after radar sites > > and down SAM corridors after highly defended targets. > > *chuckle* It's still the only aircraft that's seriously threatened by > a Piper with a big box of dry ice. 8) You still need to find it in order to drop the ice on it, and that's the rub, aye? :-) I think the aircraft's performance in desert storm pretty much speaks for itself. No way in hell we'd have been able to waltz in and hit the air ministry building in Hanoi during the Vietnam war with such equanimity, and I know we lost a fair number of aircraft trying. All the totally screwed up ROE stipulations didn't help either, of course, but I think you have to give some of today's tech due credit in making a fairly straight-forward process out of things which would have been considered completely suicidal in earlier conflicts. > The notion that you need a pilot at the controls at all is the > obsolescent concept. With todays state-of-the-art in semi- and > fully-autonomous RPVs, piloted military aircraft are close to becoming > dinosaurs. "Sort of." This was the argument advanced by quite a few when the Tomahawk SLAM came into play, especially among the submarine contingent who, until now, have never been able to play a significant role in anything but the interdiction aspects of a conflict and are rather happy with the new land attack role which a brace of terrain following cruise missiles gives them. However, that argument also ignores several key facts, one of which is that a cruise missile may be "smart" but it's not particularly capable in a number of other very important areas, like post-strike assessment. An aircraft orbiting the strike can elect to make a 2nd pass as necessary, if it has the ordinance, or at the very least make radio contact with other aircraft which may be able to make a follow-up strike on what may be a critically important target. Warfare is highly dynamic, to say the least and, until our "smart weapons" go about one full generation further in sophistication, it's still going to be cheaper and more flexible to retain the human element. As Werner Von Braun was reputed to have said, it's also one of the few pieces of equipment which can be mass produced with unskilled labor. :) Also, when you're arguing your RPVs, I assume you're also not talking about replacing the gunship helicopters? Those are just too usefully agile to get rid of anytime soon, I think. If we had full video telemetry to each smart weapon, each also capable of making independant target assessment and extended "loitering" over the battlefield, that might start to shift the balance away from the manned aircraft, I think, but it all sort of depends on cost, too. If each hyperintelligent fire-and-forget weapon costs you, say, $5M apiece (assuming a modest 5X increase in the Tomahawk's current cost) then it's going to cost you something like $30 *billion* in completely expended dollars to mount even a modest air campaign of 6000 sorties - I believe we flew easily twice that many in desert storm. In contrast, an advanced strike aircraft costing even as much as $100M should be able to make thousands of sorties with a $50K bombload of smart bombs each time (and bolting a set of laser guided fins on a "dumb" iron bomb is not very expensive) if it's reasonably radar invisible and protected by a decent strike cap on each sortie. It also costs you something around $5B to manufacture enough aircraft to deliver the same 6000 sorties (and I'm including all the SAM suppression and fighter cap aircraft, not just the strike planes) and unless you lose all of those aircraft in combat, as you would the smart weapons, they're going to fly home afterwards and be usable in some future conflict. We're still using F4 Phantoms from the Vietnam war, fer chrissake, and we have to be careful that we don't wind up pricing ourselves right out of the market, eh? That wouldn't be very capitalist. :-) :-) Jordan
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