For those of you using CA Harvest Software Change Manager, it has it's origins with Hughes Aircraft and the software written for the F-15.
It was sold commercially as CCC/Harvest by Softool Corp starting in the late 1970's. Looks like Broadcom is the newest owner. It's still being used - the last time I encountered it was in 2009 at a large bank.
Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time. A long time.
(Was working at McDonnell Douglas at the time (mid 1990s), ISS related, had no idea about the F-15 connection. I do remember thinking CCC/Harvest seemed like a really strange choice at the time, but this F-15 connection... alright, so that's probably why.)
The "Dissent and Decision" section is fun. Reads very much as a battle over egos and personalities rather than the technical merits of a particular aircraft.
That tends to happen because military procurement is always a set of compromises, so there lies a tremendous amount of room for basically arguing about how to weigh the different requirements/criteria/mission sets.
Also while the article vindicates Sprey's want of having a lightweight fighter, the reality is that while lightweight fighters did come, they quickly became exactly what Sprey would not have wanted (once the F-16 entered service, it quickly gained BVR capability for example) because the mission that Sprey envisioned (pure within visual range air combat) wasn't nearly as significant in the 90s and onwards.
The Boyd biography by Robert Coram tells the story of the battle between the Fighter Mafia and the Bomber Generals. It also talks about, what I'd at best call regulatory capture. There was an outrageous series of events around procurement of the Bradley fighting vehicle. An excerpt from the craziness that ensued:
"The Bradley was a tragedy waiting to happen. It was packed with ammunition, fuel, and people. The thinnest of aluminum armor surrounded it. So Burton sent the Army’s ballistic research laboratory $500,000 to test the Bradley, and he insisted the testing use real Soviet weapons. The Army agreed. But the first of the “realistic” tests consisted of firing Rumanian-made rockets at the Bradley rather than Soviet-made ones. The Army buried the fact that the Rumanian weapons had warheads far smaller than those used by the Soviets. To further insure that the Bradley appeared impregnable, the Army filled the internal fuel tanks with water rather than with diesel fuel. This guaranteed that even if the underpowered Rumanian warheads penetrated the Bradley’s protective armor, no explosion would result. “What are you going to do about this, Jim?” Boyd asked. “If you let them get away with this, they will try something else.” Burton still believed his job gave him the authority to force the Army to live up to its word. He tried to use persuasion and logic with Army officials, but to no avail. When early tests detected large amounts of toxic gases inside the Bradley, the Army simply stopped measuring the gas. They jammed pigs and sheep inside the Bradley to test the effects of fumes after a direct hit. But the fumes had hardly dissipated before the Army slaughtered the animals without examining them"
Really makes you wonder what procurement is actually about.
I believe this was the basis for the movie The Pentagon Wars which I haven't seen.
I had some hope that this biographer wouldn't take Burton's claims at face value, but alas.
The Bradley was designed to survive 14.5mm HMG fire. This is in line with IFV doctrine. The three most important layers of the survivability onion come before "don't get penetrated" and Bradley has proven to be very good at those.
The army did not plan to perform live fire testing with an RPG designed to destroy tanks weighing twice as much as the Bradley because it would be a waste of a vehicle. The outcome was already known, the vehicle would be catastrophically destroyed. When Burton asked, they agreed to do it anyway. The army Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL) wanted to modify the test so that they might actually learn something they didn't already know. Burton interpreted (Ed: or portrayed) this as a conspiracy against him to hide a fact that was a matter of public record before the first vehicle was built.
In that test, the fuel tanks were filled with water so that vehicle damage assessment could be performed after the test. It's much easier to look at the spalling pattern of a projectile, or see what internal systems got damaged, when you're not trying to look at a burned out husk.
I could go on but I'm on my phone.
I'm not sure if Burton was a Luddite who didn't believe in statistics or the scientific method, or if he didn't care about learning from his tests and just wanted to blow up as many Bradleys as possible in order to create a hoopla to get the program cancelled.
Source: The Bradley and how it got that way, Howarth.
> I'm not sure if Burton was a Luddite who didn't believe in statistics or the scientific method, or if he didn't care about learning from his tests.
It's possible. It's also possible that he had a good sense of how test results are presented by program managers to Congress, and was trying to accurately convey the situation. Congress typically doesn't have time to delve into the details of the test, they get top-line results like "the Bradley did not catch fire when shot by an RPG" even though the footnotes would talk about the water in the tanks.
More generally, there is a tendency even today to make test results look good through judicious selection of test conditions. Program managers will refuse to do tests where "we already know the answer" - but only when we think the system won't work. We do plenty of tests when we have high confidence the system will work. So you get headlines like "86 of 105 hit-to-kill intercept attempts have been successful" [1], without the context that we never attempted the shots that we think we would miss, even if those scenarios are tactically important.
I'll grant that there are several motivations for testing like this, but let's not pretend that they are all purely technical.
In the case of hit-to-kill intercepts, terminal guidance was proven and reliable 30-40 years ago (at least), it is a mature capability. That is no need to test that it can hit the target per se if the rocket can precisely respond to the guidance commands.
What changed is that they later attached that terminal guidance to new high-performance rocket motors that pushed the materials science requirements to a point where it was difficult to get the rocket to respond precisely to guidance commands and the terminal guidance package itself suffered ablative damage due to extreme acceleration. As such, all of the tests for the last 20+ years have been tests to determine if the missile components materially degrade or fail in-flight, regardless of what they are aimed at. The nature of the target and test environment are almost irrelevant to this question -- hitting the target is pretty strong evidence that the materials didn't fail.
> I'm not sure if Burton was a Luddite who didn't believe in statistics or the scientific method, or if he didn't care about learning from his tests and just wanted to blow up as many Bradleys as possible in order to create a hoopla to get the program cancelled.
Burton and the rest of the "Reformers" all had pet projects they were pushing. IIRC Burton's was an armored airplane that acted as an unguided rocket truck. Burton didn't want radar, EO, or FLIR systems. Just iron sights and shitloads of unguided rockets.
All the "Reformers" were hucksters advertising themselves as fighting "the man" and systemic corruption. The Pentagon has many problems with its procurement processes but none of the crap Burton actually addressed those problems.
The story about the Bradley procurement as written by John Boyd, and made popular by the Pentagon Wars is misleading at best, and entirely wrong in many regards.
The movie's most famous scene ( the Bradley design montage) is entire fictional. The Bradley was designed intentionally from the ground up as an Infantry Fighting Vehicle NOT, as the movie states, an APC whose design was fiddled by meddling generals. While this may seem pendantic, this completely invalidates the critiques leveled against the vehicle by the movie characters during the design montage. The design characteristics that would be silly for a vehicle operating in an APC role are perfectly reasonable given the role of an IFV. Also worth noting that the program also came in under budget, contrary to movie's portrayal of ridiculous cost overruns. The program was expensive. Much more expensive than a program for a slightly more modern APC should be. But completely reasonable for what was then a completely new class of vehicle.
The supposed meddling with the live fire testing was John Boyd failing to understand what the purpose of a live fire test was for. The Bradley cannot take an RPG round. It was not designed to. John Boyd's insistence that the Pentagon was covering up a flaw in the Bradley's design by not shooting a Bradley with an RPG is just wrong. The Pentagon didn't want to do this test because they already knew what would happen and would learn nothing from doing so. A similar thing occured with the supposed "scandal" of replacing the fuel with water for the small arms fire testing. The objective of the test was not to hit the Bradley until it broke under realistic combat situations, but instead to learn about specific locations where the amour is vulnerable. If the Bradley catches fire and is destroyed, you lose the information you tried to gain. By placing water in the fuel tanks, you can identify where the bullets penetrated, while also ensuring the bullet pass through a fluid (important for a realistic sense of the bullet dynamics after penetration. John Boyd did not understand the objective of the tests, and cried conspiracy.
This narrative is nonsense. To point out one example
>> To further insure that the Bradley appeared impregnable, the Army filled the internal fuel tanks with water rather than with diesel fuel.
No, the reason is so that you can see what got hit by shrapnel and where afterwards, and not have a burned out wreck of metal. The goal of testing is to make improvements to the design, not produce very expensive fireworks displays.
Likewise it was obvious that no amount (or composition) of armor was going to make it survive direct hits from a tank or ATGM, so heavily compromising the design in a futile attempt to do so would be wasteful, as would blowing up several dozen of them with such tests as Boyd and co. wanted to do.
We now have decades of experience with the Bradley and while it's not a perfect vehicle, it is pretty good.
We have data. Several Bradleys were hit during the Iraq wars by weapons similar to what near-peer adversaries use. Some shots penetrated, others did not. Overall, it held up about as well as can reasonably be expected. It's simply not physically possible to build an IFV that can stand up to modern guided weapons, and so the Army accepts that risk in order to accomplish their mission.
I've read that book - it was my introduction to Boyd. I read it as a teenager, and it really spoke to me. I believe that Boyd is incredibly important and has made very very valuable contributions.
I think it is slightly suspect that basically everyone either becomes a whole-hearted follower of Boyd, or is some bullshitter out to protect their backsides and finding how to backstab Boyd and their followers. I also think it's suspect that the book never really engages with the "what-if" scenarios had the reformers gotten everything they wanted.
What would have happened if the F-16 shipped with an airframe too small to practically retrofit a BVR capable radar?
What would have happened if the Bradley tests went exactly the way Burton wanted? What were the alternatives? Would any alternatives provide meaningfully better outcomes than the Bradley in the same tests that Burton wanted? Would they provide meaningfully better outcomes in actual battlefield use?
Maneuver warfare and mission command can generate tremendous outcomes (but they do not guarantee them... see Battle of France vs Barbarossa) . But what if there were meaningful reasons to want to hedge against going all in? What if synchronization of forces and actions cause a temporary reduction in velocity, to generate a surge in velocity at a later timepoint - what if this approach could also be beneficial to collapsing the opponent's decision loop? What if synchronization of forces is helpful with logistics?
I am not saying that procurement or the military is perfect. I am certain there are shit shows everywhere. I think Boyd and the reformers did a valuable job in trying to keep the services publicly accountable. I think it's important (in fact vital) for a democracy to be able to explain to their citizens why they are spending money on specific programs, and why these tradeoffs are being made, and ultimately what missions/requirements these programs are for - and ultimately what is the purpose of the military.
I just think also think that the reformers were not right about all of their technical thrusts, and certainly don't think we should take their recollections of events at face value.
"Maneuver warfare and mission command can generate tremendous outcomes (but they do not guarantee them... see Battle of France vs Barbarossa)"
This is a nitpick, but really maneuver warfare is proven effective by both of those battles. And in the same way. The biggest difference is just that the Soviets had much, much more land to retreat through to prevent collapsing after one month, and also had way more men. But that doesn't really change the conclusion about maneuver warfare.
My recollection is that Burton didn't understand the purpose of the tests nor the system he was raging against. If the Bradley was totally annihilated in the test, there'd be nothing to analyze and nothing would be learned (other than a Bradley is obviously not a tank, which is also why it was not called a tank). His objections were misplaced and so failed to have much influence outside of an entertaining film starring Cary Elwes.
>Really makes you wonder what procurement is actually about.
He seems clever on the surface level until you consider that not only did the existing M113 which the Bradley was to replace was worse by every single criteria that Boyd had selected, but so were the BMP-2's which the US Army was facing. If there wasn't a contemporary vehicle which could meet the specifications Boyd had set, and the Bradley was a improvement over the existing vehicles, one would think that it's pretty clear the requirements Boyd had set were wildly incorrect.
The Bradley's capability was later combat proven in the Gulf War as an incredibly effective vehicle.
The 16 wouldnt exist if not for the 15. It, and the 18, were a direct reaction to the size and complexity of the 15. The 16 even shared the same engine, making it very much the little brother of the 15.
Wikipedia is wrong. Conflicts between two powers where both have fighter jets are
infrequent so of course BVR engagements are infrequent, so saying "it hasn't happened in 30 years" would be misleading even if it wasn't incorrect.
But it is incorrect, because most engagements in Ukraine ever since the first month of the war have been at beyond visual range. And should a conflict ever break out between China and the US, pretty much if not literally every air engagement would happen at beyond visual range. Just because it hasn't happened much doesn't mean it's an outdated idea, it just means that powers with significant air forces haven't shot at each other lately.
BVR engangements are happeneniing when the shooting side discovers the targeted side first. If they don't, it is visual range again. Obviously low observability aircraft, e.g. a F-35 or 22, have an advantage here. But then the other side can have AWACS to guide their attackers. And let's not forget, jets like a Rafale of Eurofighter, or even a F/A-18, have smaller radar signatures than a F-15. An once the stealth aircraft fired their BVR shots, everybody knows where they are. And, given that BVR kills are not instantly, the other side has a window to close in enough to shoot back.
The Phantom (?) initially didn't have a cannon. Why? Becaise before Vietnam everybody thought dog fighting to be obsolete. Then the US Navy created Top Gun, becaise it turned out dog fighting very much did happen. Same for BVR, and as soon as the other side is stealthy enough to be only discovered up close, well, all engagements are going to happen at visiual range again anyway.
Not to forget, a F-22 or F-35 carrying serious load outs, tanks l, missiles, bombs, is pretty mich non-stealthy any way.
The F4 didn't have a cannon, but the real problem in Vietnam was bad missiles, not lack of a gun, and the massive improvements in missile technology were what made the Phantom effective.
A gun is almost utterly useless in modern fighter aircraft, especially for air to air engagements, especially in a world where the AIM-9X and its opposing side equivalents exist. You will never, even WVR, even if you graduated TOPGUN, get into a position where you can use a gun against an opponent with an AIM-9X on the rail.
Note that although the F-4 did not initially have an internal gun, the F-4E variant did acquire an internal M61 20mm gattling cannon and a few kills were made with this gun during the Vietnam War. Also, earlier Phantoms could be equipped with an M61 in a gun pod slung under the jet, and some kills were made with those as well.
From what I understand, these guns were desired by pilots but the results in practice were mixed. And apparently ground crews hated dealing with the gun pods.
We just spent 20 years using guns for close air support, wouldn't call that useless.
The problem with BVR is there's zero room for risk and zero room for error and BVR missiles are pretty random/shotgun weapons. If BVR missiles are only effective 1/3 of the time you're better off going non-BVR and using your logistical might to put 3x the number of planes in the air...
> We just spent 20 years using guns for close air support
In one of the most permissive airspaces possible.
Contrast that to Ukraine where we see CAS aircraft opting to lob unguided rockets from distance and bug out, lest some layer of the IADS knock them out of the sky. As near as I can tell, helicopters have more or less vanished.
We have to be careful taking too many lessons from a decades long counter insurgency effort forward and applying them to peer conflicts.
> If BVR missiles are only effective 1/3 of the time you're better off going non-BVR and using your logistical might to put 3x the number of planes in the air...
Or would you be better of launching 4 missiles from standoff than risking a much more expensive airframe and pilot in close range knife fighting?
20mm is basically useless for CAS. I'm not talking about the A10 and its far more capable and designed for ground attack gun. The A-10 is not a fighter and not relevant in this discussion.
The AIM-9X is a WVR missile, I'm not talking about BVR at all.
And training. There was almost no tactics developed on how to use missiles properly, and no training. Which compounded with the technical limitations of those early missiles.
Both F-22 and F-35 have internal bays for weapons. Sure, they can also carry external loads that blow up their small RCS, but in a hypothetical scenario where that low RCS is still valuable (i.e. contested airspace), they wouldn’t be carrying external stores that make them vulnerable.
> BVR engangements are happeneniing when the shooting side discovers the targeted side first.
Well, yes, also, most within-visual-range engagements probably also happen that way. Targeting the enemy first is kind of a big deal in air-to-air combat, and he who does it is probably going to be by virtue of doing so the shooting side.
> Not to forget, a F-22 or F-35 carrying serious load outs, tanks l, missiles, bombs, is pretty mich non-stealthy any way.
While both can carry external stores, the reason that they have internal weapons bays with significant capacity is specifically so that they can conduct combat operations while maintaining stealth. The tactical environment will determine how they are configured for any given mission.
Russia has been nibbling at and slowly attriting the Ukrainian air force with R-37's.
BVR is a tricky technology. If your rules of engagement let you indiscriminately kill something without being sure of its identity, it's capable. But you need to not have normal air traffic in the area or not give a shit about the consequences or both.
I get to see them flying at low level pretty much daily, as I live on the Mach Loop in Wales where they practice. The howl as they go over never gets old, though I guess I’d feel very differently if they weren’t just training.
You are right the sound never gets annoying. But...
In the early 90s I was a crew chief on the F15. I worked nights (what we called swing shift) and so slept during the day. Depending on which runway they were using the landing pattern would go right over the dorms. Some airmen in the dorms had car alarms with the sensitivity set so low that when the jets flew over the car alarms would go off. THAT got annoying!
I've worked at Wings Over the Rockies a bit, and they have an old F4. It's not good looking/elegant. It just looks like a bunch of giant metal cylinders welded onto each other that holds a lot of very explosive liquid with mounting points to put smaller cylinders on with more explosives. I get that the status quo has marketed fighter jets as sexy, but they just are there to do a job and that job is to kill.
I agree regarding the older jets like F-4. But e.g. F-15, F-22, MiG-29 or B-2/21 look great. Interestingly, the newer F-35 less so (it's a bit "chunky").
I don’t think I’ve ever seen the competing designs to the McDonnell Douglas design before. Were these public at the time like with later aircraft competitions? I’m thinking of the YF-17, YF-23 and X-32.
They make an inexplicable Top Gun/Tom Cruise reference which suggests they don’t seem to know the difference between the F-15, F-14, or F-18. Or perhaps even between the US Navy and USAF.
I’m not aware of any plans to send F-15s to Ukraine. I have only heard of F-16 and maybe F-35.
The video thumbnail shows F-15s with a single (offset?) rudder.
There’s a reference to the F-11 which seems to actually mean the F-111.
There is a reference to an F-22 Megaprojects video that doesn’t seem to exist. They may mean F-35 here.
They claim the F-15 was active in Vietnam when it didn’t enter combat service until 1976. This may be another mistaken F-14 reference.
The video claims the F-15 C and D are no longer in service with the US military but they are.
The gun is not in the nose, it is in the wing root.
The AIM7 and AIM9 were not new for the F-15C. Both are from the late 1950s.
F-15E weighs more than the F-15C/D.
The video suggests that the F-15EX and F-15 II are different planes but the F-15EX is the “Eagle II”, the same plane.
The F-15EX is not claiming to go mach 3+. It is mach 2.4 capable, similar to the F-15C/D.
Jordan didn’t have Mig-25s, the Syrians did.
It’s so egregious I unsubscribed from the channel before my Gell-Mann amnesia could subject me to further incorrect information. It’s a shame because I enjoyed these channels but now can’t trust them.
> It’s so egregious I unsubscribed from the channel before my Gell-Mann amnesia could subject me to further incorrect information. It’s a shame because I enjoyed these channels but now can’t trust them.
Kinda curious that a lot of people complain about "videos replacing text" yet these "inaccurately paraphrase Wikipedia out loud while playing a Powerpoint made from Wikipedia/Commons and other images" channels like the one you linked, Asianometry and so on are huge and popular. And those at least write a (highly derivative or essentially plagiarized) script and read it, there's channels that do the same thing but with GPT for the script and TTS for the voice, and even those are pretty big.
edit: Funnily enough both kinds of channels have the "GPT issue" in that they always want to sound confident and authoritative, so they never point out if they are unsure about something. Compare this to channels like Applied Science or Breaking Taps where they very clearly point out when they don't understand something or are unsure of their understanding.
I'm one of those people who complain about "videos replacing text". The difference here is context.
I don't want to watch a video about how to configure my shell, or Kubernetes. I want hypertext for that, so I can quickly seek through the information and find what I need. I want it to be searchable. I want to be able to reference it. I don't want to wait for YouTube to buffer just to see the config file path for a setting that would be one paragraph up in text.
Megaprojects, Asianometry, and friends are entertainment. They curate some content that is generally relevant to some topic and then present it in a simple way. I can basically switch off and learn about something new that is relevant to my interests. I don't expect them to be the authorotative source on the topic but I also don't expect them to lie to my face. Wikipedia has a random page but it doesn't have a "random pages visited by people like you". That's all these channels are.
Nothing in life is absolute. There is no one true media format. I like to read technical documentation in text, watch high fantasy on a dedicated screen, and consume popsci brain candy with my phone's screen. Similarly I listen to music on vinyl and Spotify. None of this is contradictory.
Certain aspects were better, yes. That's because the Soviets made different trade-offs in the design -- variously because of doctrine, time constraints, availability of exotic materials (and the ability to use them in manufacturing), and "helpful" direction from Moscow.
The MiG-25 "Foxbat" is a famous example. To succeed in it's role as an high-speed interceptor it should have been made from titanium. But it's a very expensive and difficult metal to work with, so temperature critical parts were instead made from stainless steel. In the west there were lots of jokes about it rusting in the rain and the use of vacuum tubes, but tubes allowed it to have a very powerful radar. Plus that's what they had to work with (the Soviets having great difficulties making high-current semiconductors).
I don’t know if that is true or not, but if so, I guess it is a stirring endorsement of the idea of being a nice liberal democracy that people want to move to.
There was single significant defection before the introduction of the "teen" fighters, codenamed HAVE DOUGHNUT, and even it was not actually Soviet (an Iraqi pilot defected to Israel). All the other defections (which there were several) happened using old/non-fighter aircraft (iirc there were several MiG-15/17/19 which were essentially Korean War era designs), or happened after the teens were designed.
He might be talking about Belenko's defection with a MIG-25 to Hokkaido in the early 1970s. Though neither aircraft is really related to the other except in very basic visual sensibilities (twin engine, twin tail).
And F-15 had its first flight four years before the MiG-25 defection. So unless they had time machine at hand its unlikely that it had major influence on F-15 design
My impression is the Westerners’ best guess about the Mig-25 contributed significantly to the design of the F-15 and helped to make it what it is. Getting their hands on it was a relief, or even a let down.
The alternative scenario, where the Mig-25 really was generations ahead, plays out in the movie Firefox from 1982 where the US is so far behind they have to steal a Soviet Mig-31 superplane. Good for laugh today, but once upon a time…
The rumor I heard is Soviet intelligence infiltrated American industry and stole what they thought were plans for America’s next generation air superiority fighter. What they’d obtained were the plans for Plymouth’s Roadrunner Superbird, thus the Mig-25’s uncanny resemblance. Proof: https://robbreport.com/motors/cars/1970-plymouth-superbird-a...
The, probably slightly played up, version I heard is that the US saw the propaganda version of the Mig-25, and so built the F-15 to counter that imaginary beast.
I'd be curious to know which aircraft were actually better than their US contemporaries and by which criteria they'd be judged better.
The Mig-25 seems like a good example of a Soviet aircraft considered better than its US contemporaries, at the time. Misunderstanding and misinformation let the US to think they were far, far behind the Soviet Union. Viktor Belenko cleared that up! It was a plane good at just one thing, with downsides that would never let it through a (non-CIA-directed) US procurement process. On the plus side, competition, fear, and rivalry, drove the US to some amazing research, engineering, and innovation.
As a child at a local military airshow, the F-15 was awesome, dangerously beautiful. Shamed even the X-wings and Tie fighters I'd just seen on the big screen. Many years later, I had a similar feeling watching an Su-27 at Farnborough; Sukhoi captured some aesthetic that Mikoyan-Gurevich never seemed to get right, and did it better than any western contemporary.
I don't think it's controversial to say that MiG-21 compared favorably to its contemporaries when introduced. Afaik it successfully fought off newer, much more expensive, American F-4s in Vietnam war.
> OSD, however, refused to tolerate this kind of intransigence and in May 1966 McNamara ordered a joint review of the commonality issue. Conducted over the next 18 months,
the review confirmed that the needs of the Air Force and Navy could not be met by a single airframe. The two services argued that attempts to merge their requirements would produce, at exorbitant cost, a grotesque mutation with increased weight, and reduced performance.
The truth of this is again illustrated by the Joint Strike Fighter F-35 with its massive cost overruns and its reduced performance.
This whole "multi-service aircraft can't work" meme has been going for essentially a century, and has been wrong just as long.
The F-4 Phantom, probably deserving the title of greatest Western multi-role aircraft of the cold war, had long successful service with both USAF and USN (and USMC), with fewer inter-service airframe differences than between the F-35A and F-35C. Multi-service aircraft are totally workable, the services just don't like having to play nice with each other.
The F-35 is better thought of as a family of tightly-related aircraft which share as many major systems as possible (avionics, sensors, engine, cockpit) while having differing airframes. Doing exactly the kind of reusable engineering a major project should be doing. You can claim that different project management might have been cheaper, but the idea that three separate airplanes, one for each service, could have been engineered and produced for less is just wishful thinking.
> This whole "multi-service aircraft can't work" meme has been going for essentially a century, and has been wrong just as long.
I'm not sure that's really the case. When we see successful cross-service adoption, it's because the aircraft simply was that so good the other branch saw a lot of value in buying it. So far the only program that has worked from inception is the F-35. The others failed to get traction in the other service (F-111, F-16). What all other aircraft that have crossed services have in common is iterative design resulting in a superior aircraft:
Air Force to Navy
- F-86 Sabre designed for Air Force, Navy adopted it as FJ2 Fury (straight wing) and FJ3 Fury (swept wing version of FJ2). The FJ3 was a counter to the MIG-15 and was a navalized F-86. It's performance was superior at the time.
Navy to Air Force
- F-4 Phantom II. Naval multi-role fighter was just that good... better than most mission-specialized Air Force fighters at their own missions. Iterative design from the McDonnel F3H Demon that borrowed some ideas from the Douglass F5D Skyray.
- A-7 Corsair II. Naval attack aircraft. It's primary value was that it was inexpensive to operate and hit a sweet spot for payload and range. Iterative design from F-8 Crusader (which was probably the best air superiority fighter of it's era).
My point is that multi-service aircraft are entirely possible, and have been all along. That several notable aircraft emerged as multi-service aircraft is all the more evidence that a multi-service aircraft (really, a family of tightly related aircraft) can be designed as such. The reason there are more USN->USAF success stories is that it is much easier to design an aircraft with the stresses of carrier operation in mind than it is to navalize a entirely ground-based design, and it is much easier for the USN to make the case politically that a USAF aircraft "can't possibly meet their requirements" than the reverse.
The USAF and USN are just incredibly unwilling to have to compromise to work with each other, and for most of the cold war had the budgets and supplier diversity to acquire entirely separately.
> The USAF and USN are just incredibly unwilling to have to compromise
I don't think that is the case. The issue is that most of the joint programs fail because they start with such a broad difference in requirements the program can't work. Here are two examples:
F-111/TFX - Navy wanted a fleet interceptor / air superiority fighter built around the Phoenix Missile. Air Force wanted a heavy attack aircraft. The F-111 led to the Navy having to do a crash development to get the F-14 Tomcat.
F-16 LWF - Navy wanted a twin engine. AF wanted single engine. Joint program died immediately... so we the taxpayers ended up with the USAF buying F-16 (great aircraft) and the Navy ordering an update on the YF-17 which became the F/A-18 Hornet (another great aircraft). Incidentally, the YF-17 was a twin engine iteration of the F-5 (which is an iteration of the T-38 Talon), and the F/A-18 is an iteration of the YF-17.
> for most of the cold war had the budgets and supplier diversity to acquire entirely separately.
I think you are on to something: lack of supplier diversity will be a forcing function in the future...
> The issue is that most of the joint programs fail because they start with such a broad difference in requirements the program can't work.
Agreeing on requirements is the most important compromise. You can always come up with different requirements that make collaboration impossible. Sometimes these differing requirements are fundamental - e.g. the E-2 and E-3 (E-7 in the future), while performing similar roles, are necessarily very different platforms - that a joint program would never be considered. Sometimes these requirements are not so fundamental - e.g. the many years of single-engine versus twin-engine disagreement - that a joint program is possible, albeit challenging.
While the JSF program has had plenty of issues, the fact that it has been successful in delivering the envisioned aircraft is a testament to (a) technology improving to the point that many once-dealbreaker requirements (e.g. single-engine) could be swept aside, (b) the rise in costs making it clear that completely separate development programs were impractical, and (c) explicitly providing requirements flexibility via the "family-of-aircraft" approach (no way the F-35C would have been acceptable financially to anyone other than the USN, no way the F-35A would have been suitable for carrier use).
> ...lack of supplier diversity will be a forcing function in the future...
The consolidation of the 90s and 2000s is directly the consequence of lower budgets. Consider the fighter/strike fleets of the 1980s:
there's just not enough business to support much more than the Boeing/LM duopoly keeping both production/support running and enough capability to be competitive for the NGAD programs.
The F-4 was built for the Navy and the other services saw what a great plane it was and bought in.
The F-35 is intended as a lightweight multi role aircraft, so it’s full of compromises already.
The F-111A/B as a shared USAF/USN aircraft is much harder as there’s not as much margin for compromise in something that is supposed to be the pinnacle of current performance.
I'd say the F-111 is a particularly odd case, given the vastly different initial requirements involved. To be clear, everything that made the F-111 a great long-range interdictor for the USAF would have have also made for a great long-range interceptor and strike platform for the USN. It wouldn't have made a good air superiority fighter, and the experience over Vietnam made it clear that this capability was still very much necessary, and there was nowhere near enough budget (or, more critically, carrier deck and hangar space) for the USN to operate both an air superiority fighter and a dedicated long-range interceptor.
There is a very long list of could-have-been multi-service aircraft, though. If you look at the number of ground-based operators of the F-18, clearly the USAF could have been satisfied with it as well. The USN probably could have been satisfied by a navalized F-22 derivative (the story of 1990s/early 2000s procurement is complicated), the USMC definitely could have been satisfied by a navalized AH-64 rather than developing the AH-1Z, etc.
The services are just very resistant to ever needing to compromise on procurement issues unless Congress and the DoD make it clear that they have to. The USN feels their needs are special, and that the USAF would dominate any shared procurement and force them to compromise too much, while the USAF feels like every pound added for carrier operation is a direct affront. Neither view is entirely wrong - the development delays and compromises of a navalized platform like the Dassault Rafale are another good example of the costs of shared development - but the simple reality of modern aircraft development costs and defense budgets means joint platforms are here to stay.
The USN didn't need an air-superiority fighter when they were working on the F-111B, they needed a fleet defense fighter capable of lifting a huge radar and missile set. When the terrible engines in the B model gave them an out, they took it and moved forward with the Tomcat (which used the same engines and weapons set). Little did they realize the TF-30 would remain a terrible engine for so long, and replacing it with F110s would take almost two decades.
I'm not sure that the F-22 would have ever worked for the USN either. I think that its stealth coating are just too fragile for a marine environment. And the USMC could never afford the AH-64.
The engines certainly gave the USN the out it wanted, but the thing that truly killed the F-111B was the need for a dogfight-capable fleet fighter. There was no way they could have afforded two separate fighter development programs at the time, and Grumman had just the design they wanted ready to jump to.
The NATF program probably would have worked out fine, albeit expensively. There has always been speculation that part of the selection of the F-22 over the F-23 was because the F-22 was considered more suitable for a navalized version - and the comparatively small design differences between the F-35A and F-35C designed later by the same group suggest that a similar amount of work would have been involved in navalizing the F-22. Coatings would have been an issue in the 90s, but would largely have been solved by an realistic service entry date in the late 2000s. What killed the NATF was post-cold war budget reductions and shortsighted policymakers, not technical challenges.
The story of a navalized AH-64 is an equally strange saga. To hear the USN and USMC tell it, you would think it impossible to operate the AH-64 from a ship, yet the RN has done so extensively with relatively minimal modifications to the airframe. Given the small production run of the AH-1Z/UH-1Y program, it's questionable if much was saved. Certainly if you look at foreign customers, the capability/price of the AH-64 has been much more appealing than the AH-1Z.
Regarding the Sea Apache, it really would have been a huge redesign. Deleting the 30mm Chain Gun, moving the landing gear to the wing stubs, adding a nose mounted radar, and Harpoon/Sidewinder capability. Now some of these requirements were Navy specific, but some would have been required had it been selected just for the USMC.
I think that even an unmodified Apache would have been just too expensive for the always cash-strapped Corps. Plus the airframe and engine commonality with the UH1s they flew simplified their logistics tremendously. It's always a gamble comparing unit costs since so much is either hidden or excluded, but the latest info I found showed a new build AH-1Z was around $30M in 2018, while a new build AH-64 is currently around $52M. And I'm pretty sure the Corp has simply been rebuilding older airframes to the new "Viper" standard. (Turns out most were rebuilds, but some were new construction.)
Regarding the RN flying Apaches, is this from large decked ships, or from anything with a pad? I know the Merlin had a neat winch type thing to help it land in bad weather, and I just wonder how much more likely a rollover would be on a small decked ship versus something like HMS Ocean etc.
I think the Sea Apache design was doomed to failure, potentially deliberately, by including so many modifications to the base design. A reasonably scoped modification for the USMC would have been the standard increased corrosion resistance, folding main rotor, tail wheel moved forwards, and folding tail fin+rotor (i.e. all the same modifications made to the base S-70 design for shipboard use).
The cost question is a very tricky one, hence why I used the comparison of foreign orders between the two types as an assessment of overall value. My understanding is that more AH-1Z/UH-1Y airframes were new builds than was originally planned (hardly a surprise), which strongly suggests that airframe reuse did not save as much in production as hoped. The strongest argument for the AH-1Z cost-wise was the commonality with UH-1Y, but had the USMC considered switching entirely to AH-64 + SH-60 derivatives instead I don't think that argument would have been as strong (after all, the whole rest of the USN operates SH-60 variants, including the ships that operate USMC AH-1/UH-1s).
The RN has flown WAH-64s from their large deck ships, so roughly equivalent size-wise to anything that routinely operates AH-1Zs. The only important modification in the WAH-64 design is a folding rotor to reduce storage size, but that doesn't affect takeoff/landing abilities. With some minor changes like pulling the tail gear forwards (e.g. as on the {S,M}H-60{B,F,R}), you could fit an Apache on anything that can handle a Seahawk (i.e. basically everything with a pad). Notably, the AH-64 wheelbase is not that different from the spacing of the skids on an AH-1, so it's not going to be hugely different in terms of stability on a large deck ship. There's also been a fair number of training exercises between US army AH-64 units and USN ships, so shipboard Apache operations aren't exactly foreign to the US either.
". The first time the opponents
showed up [in the training area] they
had wing tanks along with a bunch of
missiles. I guess they figured that being
in a dirty configuration wouldn’t really
matter and that they would still easily
outmaneuver us. By the end of the week,
though, they had dropped their wing
tanks, transitioned to a single centerline
fuel tank and were still doing everything
they could not to get gunned by us. A
week later they stripped the jets clean of
all external stores, which made the BFM
fights interesting, to say the least"
F35 can hold their own quite well. Disregard the 2015 report with the limiting software, this is where they are at, and things will only improve with the new engine
It's more like the F35 over promises and under delivers compared to what it is expected to replace. The F15 comes with a 20,000 hour airframe, while the F35 comes with a 8000 hour airframe. The F15 can get to target much faster, much farther, and still have fuel to do something when it gets there. The F15 can carry 12 AIM-120s (or 24 depending), while the F35 can carry 4. The F15's a great interceptor. The F35 is a great aircraft, but too expensive and limited to operate in that role.
The following article analyzes the F15EX buy that is being debated as compared to the F35.
This is why both platforms exist. There seems to be this strange idea that the F35 must be compared against the abilities of fighter in a direct 1v1 dogfight scenario, despite that this situation would almost never happen. Modern air-to-air engagements are not squads of fighters dueling one another, but instead entire fleets of aircraft with differing roles and responsibilities working together in a coordinated fashion. AWACs, electronic warfare planes, missile trucks (like the F15EX), and fighters that can get in close all working together. This is environment the F35 was designed for. The fleet level data-link and sensor fusion capabilities of the F-35 are it's main feature, as they augment the capabilities of the entire fleet. Then fact that F15EX can act as a better standalone interceptor is not really relevant, since it would almost never perform this role unsupported. An F35 and F15EX operating in tandem would be much more effective than either operating alone, since the F35 could enter areas covered by opposing fighters / ground fire, and feed sensor information to the F15EX to take out threats outside of its own sensors range.
This is why both platforms were designed to be used together as a team. F-35 provides sensor fusion and the F-15 is the missile truck. That also allows the F-35 to continue to evade detection, since launching attacks tends to get you noticed by the enemy.
Modern air combat can't be measured in direct comparison like this, or even thought of in terms of "we should be using X instead of Y"
The F-35 costs are also going down relative to it's peer group as the export market has grown significantly. The F-35s issue is that it's misunderstood, not that it doesn't meet expectations.
It always seemed to me that F-35 is an advanced replacement to F-16, which excelled in networked and multi-role operations.
Of course, by now the networked operations are in use by other aircraft too, just F-16 and F/A-18 operate at the very tip of the multi-role.
Whether the networked use could remain operational in a conflict against technologically advanced enemy (with saturated ECM and comparably aggressive AA systems) is not yet proven. Also with addition of drones, the whole air-dominance becomes a tough objective to attain.
The F-16 never really "excelled" at multirole operations. It was pressed into that because there were no other options available. But it has always had an insufficient fuel fraction and is forced to depend on constant tanker support to accomplish anything. The tankers are becoming more vulnerable.
It was but production was scaled back so much, and the peer enemy aircraft it was needed to defeat still largely don't exist yet. As a result the production lines were shut down and equipment moved to permanent storage and other multirole fighters that are usually less expensive end up doing the F22's job.
In the horrifying event of a US-China war or similar they'd be front line units along with F-35s and other modern fighters, but as is they'll probably end up on service life extension and retired without ever being used much in combat.
The F-15 was sold to other nations and IIRC the majority of its air superiority engagements were with the Israeli air force.
Sure, 100% agree w/ all of that. Just pointing out that F15 vs F35 as a fighter isn't the right comparison, as they're not intended to fill the same roles. I think of the F22 as the ultimate expression of the old style of fighters, whereas the F35 is the start of a new style of military aircraft.
The F-15E and F-15EX (specifically these 'E' variants, aka "Strike Eagles") are multirole strike fighters. They're derived from an air superiority fighter and remain capable of filling that role, but being strike fighters they have a new emphasis on attacking ground targets with precision bombs. It is very similar to the way the F-14, the Navy's old air superiority fighter, was later turned into a strike fighter with the addition of LANTIRN (which the F-15E also got.) In addition to LANTIRN, the F-15E also gained a second seat for a weapon systems officer. Two seat F-15s had previously existed as trainers, but F-15s configured for air superiority normally have a single seat.
The F-22 is foremost an air superiority fighter and was intended to replace all the air superiority F-15s (but not the F-15E Strike Eagles.) However the USAF didn't get enough F-22s so they still have air superiority F-15s and will for some years to come.
It was, but since 22 production has stopped and there are plenty of 15s around, the 35 is often paird up with the 15 for wargaming. Doctrine and training is always dictated by practicalities like which aircraft you have to play with.
The f15 is going to be shoot down 60km from target by s400s, the f35 can get close enough to drop an harm on them at a speed they cannot intercept, so there's that.
Also the f15 has speed or range, and if you need one it reduces the other.
You try flying an F-15 with 12 to 24 Slammers (and bags since you'll have so much drag. That's going to fly like a pig. Just because Boeing does some demo of it to sell more airframes doesn't mean it's going to be used that way.
The F-35 has been proven in simulations with aggressor squadrons. The Air Force does that all the time: real aircraft in the air, real pilots, real weapons, they just don't actually shoot them for obvious reasons. But they have other ways of simulating kills.
Here's what a F-22 pilot (!) had to say about the F-35.
"It is challenging, even flying the Raptor, to have good [situational awareness] on where the F-35s are," he said.
Bowlds said that inserting F-35 aggressors into Red Flag made things "more challenging because there is a little bit of an unknown in terms of what they are going to be able to do."
Additionally, "red air detects are happening at further ranges," Bowlds explained. "It inherently poses more of a threat to allied blue-air forces than older aggressors," such as the fourth-generation F-16s.
The F-35s "have better detection capabilities kind of against everybody just because of their new radar and the avionics they have," he said. "It definitely adds a level of complexity."
The Israelis have released footage of shooting down two drones, so they have the first kills with the F-35. Obviously this was not against a maneuvering human pilot, but still important.
They also have multiple (unproven but everyone knows who did it) strikes against iranian positions in syria and even in iran itself, it is rumoured. The ability to be invisible to radar is an absolute gamechanger.
That just make it difficult to lock on with weapons. They are not invisible and any radar operator would tell you that if they would be allowed...
"...Stealth designs minimize an aircraft's radar signature, delaying and sometimes even preventing detection, but because of the physical requirements for tactical jets, stealth fighters can be easily spotted by certain low-frequency radar bands.
In fact, it's not even uncommon for air traffic control radar to be able to spot stealth fighters on their scopes. And we're not just talking about when these aircraft are carrying external munitions or fuel tanks, rather, even in full-on "stealth mode," F-22s and F-35s aren't as sneaky as you might think."
While you're not wrong that stealthy ≠ invisible, a proper mission design will render the aircraft effectively invisible to air defenses.
If you've got an active radar system you'll bounce signals off anything in the sky. Your ability to actually detect those things is based on the strength of the return and sensitivity/signal processing of the system. Big things can be detected hundreds of miles away, small things only tens of miles away. To protect some high value target you string together multiple radar systems to provide overlapping coverage. With enough systems you can have an unbroken wall of radar directing defending aircraft and SAMs.
Stealth lets a big thing (a jet) pretend to be a small thing in the view of an air defense system, essentially cutting the detection range of radar. This means your unbroken radar coverage that would work for an F-15 now has a bunch of holes because each radar can only detect an F-22 twenty miles out instead of two hundred. Your radar is also further compromised because the stand-off range of anti-radiation missiles is outside the range you can detect and intercept the jets carrying them.
Being able to see a stealth aircraft after it's fired a weapon to kill you isn't super helpful. A stealth aircraft can also fly through the artificial holes it made in your radar coverage and blow up the thing you're protecting and you only find out about it after the fact.
That isn't really how it works. Low observable aircraft flying in friendly civilian airspace generally have radar transponders turned on specifically to make themselves visible to air traffic control and prevent collisions. Those transponders are turned off for combat missions. And ATC mostly doesn't use primary radar any more so they don't even get skin paints on regular aircraft.
> The truth of this is again illustrated by the Joint Strike Fighter F-35 with its massive cost overruns and its reduced performance.
For such a poor performer, the F-35 is sought after by almost every country that can afford it and that the US will sell it to. Sales increased even more after Russia invaded Ukraine, when European countries perceiving a new threat switched their plans to the F-35.
It was sold commercially as CCC/Harvest by Softool Corp starting in the late 1970's. Looks like Broadcom is the newest owner. It's still being used - the last time I encountered it was in 2009 at a large bank.