Adm McMullen makes F-22 gaffe or revelation?

Mullen definitely knows something we do not obviously since he's privy to those internal discussions. However, the 50 extra jets is not not new- there has been talk inside at SAF and DOD level about that number. Its just current people aren't going for it- Obama's people might.

Don't get me wrong- I love the Raptor and would like to see more of them built- the Gordon England and Young are riht about one thing. The Raptors' avionics are for all practical purposes obsolete without a major upgrade. Right now the computers do about 10.5 billion calculations per second compared to the baseline F-35 which will do ~2 trillion a second at IOC. The F-35 also has a more impressive sensor suite- which can eventually be retrofitted to the F-22, but it does cost money.

Frankly- I do think 1700+ F-35 is more valuable than a fleet of 250 Raptors overall.

It strikes as the kind of comment that would be made in a discussion on 'How many more is the absolute minimum F-22's you need?'

Frankly, if it were me, I'd stop spending US tax dollars defending Europeans and Japanese with naval groups, air wings and missile assets and buy more F-22's.

Why do US taxpayers fund a Med fleet or an Indian Ocean fleet or a far Pacific fleet? Aren't those areas perfectly capable of patrolling their own waters? What a waste of tax money.

I remember seeing something in public about a compromise fleet target of around 250 aircraft. Maybe that's what he had in mind and got momentarily confused.

The number of F-22s should depend on a global air superiority ("AS") strategy, of which the F-22 would be only a part, devised based on the following principles:

1. Creation of a single AS Command assetted as needed from all relevant sources, including the Navy, Marines and Army (UCAV), and our allies, not just the AF.

2. Creation of a global AS strategy, which the new Command would execute, based upon reasonable not fanciful estimates of the strategic places where we are likely to need AS, now and in the medium term, and assets we will need to attain it.

3. Recognition that in much of the world we have AS right now, or can easily attain it, with the resources (including allies) we now have or are acquiring because there is no effective competition. These places include most of world's oceans, Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa, the Med, Central and South America ,Central and South America, Cuba and the Carribean, Alaska, the poles, and Europe west of Russia, including the Baltic Sea and states and the Black Sea. I mention the last because the Russian air force's AS ability is weak in comparison to the West's and likely to remain so. For example, they intend to acquire only 181 (same as F-22s) of the latest Sukuoi Flanker, starting in 2015 at the earliest, and face not only US AS power but the well-equiped Europeans as well.

5. Recognition that we can mainly rely on our current legacy fighters, kept up to date, to acquire AS in most of these places. Where higher performance is needed, we can use the Navy's new AESA-equiped F-18Fs and AF's newly AESA-equiped F-15Cs and Es, altho along the NATO/Russia line and in Alaska F-22s may also be needed.

6. Recognition that the only exceptions to our current near global AS are places where China can compete, primarlly in oceans and locales near its east coast, including the Korean Peninsula, Japan, Taiwan, the South China Sea, the Malay Peninsula and the Malacca Straits. There, we are likely to need F-22s, but the main strategy is to avoid getting into a situation with the Chinese where there must be an AS fight in the first place.

7. Finally, recognition that the financial mess we are in mans that we must reduce defense expenditiures and buy what we only acutally need for as little as possible. This means with respect to high performance aircraft buying and improving what we have, not buying hugely expensive items that are not proven or are not necessary.

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Mr. Dye:

Allow me to respectfully disagree with much of your argument, based principally upon the fact that the fight for air superiority in the future will not be so much about defeating an opponent's aircraft, as it will be about avoiding, suppressing and destroying their surface-to-air missile systems. The most recent news regarding that come out of Iran, with the U.S. stating that they have purchased the Soviet, I mean Russian SA-20. The U.S. maintains, and I believe it's true, that legacy aircraft are pretty much powerless to effectively deal with such a system without incurring unacceptably heavy losses. The only aircraft, I believe, that is equipped to avoid and defeat such a system is the F-22 in a SEAD/DEAD configuration. I don't think the F-35 is adequate simply because it lacks the F-22's kinematics and the latter's all-aspect stealth. F/A-18E/Fs and Growlers would be sitting ducts versus such a system. As would, of course, F-16s and F-15s, to say nothing of B-1s and B-52s. I believe even the B-2 would be vulnerable to such a system, and the lethality of subsonic missiles such as TLAMs and ALCMs would be severely degraded.

Thus, your most potentially contentious proposal, number 5 (which argues that legacy fighters are likely to be sufficient for the foreseeable future), I think is largely negated in light of the above. Remember that the advent of widespread VLO capability throughout the USAF is principally a political development, believe it or not. If Vietnam-scale aerial losses were still acceptable to civilians today, then we may be able to get away with fielding a principally legacy fighter force with a few VLO platforms. However, the loss of even a handful of aircraft has become politically prohibitive as civilian support for any prospective conflict is absolutely necessary in a democracy (as has been amply proven by the Iraq fiasco and the attendant losses the Republicans have suffered in the polls), and civilians would simply have no stomach for reports coming out of, say, an Iran conflict where, say, 80 or so fighters and bombers were shot down in a single day, which is what would happen if we were to throw legacy fighters against an SA-20 equipped foe.

Finally, your argument in number 7 betrays a complete ignorance of economic realities vis-a-vis the alive and well military-industrial complex. Paradoxically, due to the economic mess we're in, defense expenditures are likely to INCREASE, not decrease. Remember that what finally got the U.S. out of the great depression was WW II. I am not suggesting Obama is about to start WW III, but the last thing he'll do is, say, cut the F-22 prematurely and watch another 10,000 highly skilled and high-paying jobs go down the drain. The F-35 program, for its part, including all subcontractors, is likely to generate close to 100,000 jobs at its apogee. It, too, is safe, safer, even, than before we realized the magnitude of the terrible mess we've gotten ourselves into.

Do it like the Russians,
Build a number large enough to establish and maintain local air dominance in 2 theatres and let the obsolete aircraft come in and do their jobs. I doubt we will ever fight a global scale war again.

Get 600 Raptors, cut the JSF for the AF to say 800.
Doesnt anybody find it strange that this is about the Af helping the Army on the ground, against what?
People with next to no weapons, all they have is Ak-47s and a couple of RPGs.
And what does the Army do? Call in for Bombs.
Let the AF do what they have to do with is air superiority, a mission ervery AF has since World War 1 and give the Atmy some RPOs, newer bigger MGs, bigger grande launcher, new light Mortars and why after 30 years there is still no "intelligent" ammo fpr the 155 canon?
And get withthing with a 90mm canon as Infrantry-support.
The Army is the problem not the AF.

Obamanite,

Firslty, I agree with your identification of advanced SAM systems as a serious threat, and likewise find it odd that the USAF isn't developing a dedicated SEAD platform.
However, surface based systems can sensibly be equipped with HF radar systems, which are unable to resolve, and are thus unaffected by, the stealth shaping of the F-22 (or F-35, or indeed DDG-1000).
To such a system, the F-22 is not stealthy.
Additionally, state of the art infrared (IRST) systems can (apparently) detect and track a subsonic aircraft head on at 50 miles, from the heat from the friction of the air flowing over its wings.
Likewise, an F-22 is not stealthy to this.

The only saving grace of all this, is that by having "some" stealth aircraft, we force a would-be adversary to adopt systems that are shorter range than the higher frequency radar based systems they would otherwise have. Also, HF propagates through the atmosphere better, which allows it to be jammed from further away. (This may be the reason for the USAF's interest in a B-52 jammer with HF pods?)

In summary, for the SEAD mission, I would recommend:
- A jammer for HF radar systems, based on ships and/or the B-52.
- EA-18G's equipped with a fast, loitering, stand-off anti-radiation missile, with multi-band seekers.
- Decoys, sufficient to provoke enemy SAMs into revealing themselves.

Sorry for the delay in replying. I've been away.

In response to Stepen Trimble's questions, my concept is that the AS command would be a seperate combatant one, which would continuously assess AS needs at stategic places world wide. It would have have some dedicated assets, but would also have the authority to take assets from the services as needed to perform any AS plan it developes, including ground-to-air weapons. The key point is that with this authority it could override inter service disputes to get the job done.

I appreciate Obamanite's comments because I am not well versed in electronic warfare details. Nevertheless, I did not mean to say that surface-to-air threats did not exist or were not important, altho I doubt that the Navy would agree that is Growler/F-18F could not deal with current land baased defenase.o. These threats obviously exist. That is why I say that any AS command must be able to access all assets needed for any AS plan.

My point about legacy fighters was obviously not to suggest that they be used against opponents who can defeat them, whether with land-based weapons or aircraft. My point was that in many of the places I listed, the legacy aircraft will work, so we should be careful not to spend money for more capable aircraft for those places.

As for Obamanite's views of the defense budget, obviously there will be economic and political pressures to keep spending. But there also will be pressures to reduce that spending, or make it more related to our identifiable near- and medium- terms needs. Secretary Gates has made it clear that he intends to puruse this goal not only in recent news conferences but in his piece the the current issue of Foreign Affairs.