6/11/2023 0 Comments Air combat maneuvers airplaneDuring the 2015 Sea–Air–Space Exposition Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus spoke of the F-35 fighter jet as “the last manned strike fighter aircraft the Department of the Navy will ever buy or fly.” But Gen. The armed services seem split about this idea: The U.S. “It's a pretty revolutionary idea about airpower,” says Paul Scharre, project director for the 20YY Warfare Initiative at the Center for a New American Security who did not participate in the report. Air Force and Navy could save “tens of billions of dollars” by merging the aircraft designs of future fighter development programs with those of long-range strike bombers. If his hypothesis is correct, the ideal shape of such future aircraft could resemble large modern bombers rather than new fighter jets such as the F-22 Raptor or the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter. military may need a different, longer-range “air superiority” aircraft as the country pivots its activity toward the wide expanse of the Pacific, Stillion says. Those limitations loom as the traditional advantages of speed and agility have become less important. As a result, modern fighter aircraft have gotten heavier and can't fly as far as their predecessors. But speed and agility come at the cost of requiring more powerful, fuel-hungry engines and stronger airframes to handle the stress of high-speed maneuvers. Today's fighter jet designs still reflect the idea of a fast, agile plane with a modern emphasis on stealth to avoid radar detection. Out of 33 aerial victories, coalition aircraft only performed significant “air combat maneuvering” four times in order to get into firing position. By 1991, during the Persian Gulf War, anti-Iraq coalition aircraft were detecting enemy planes on radar at an average range of 77 kilometers and destroying them with missiles fired from an average of more than 17.5 kilometers away. Stillion's analysis shows how modern aerial combat has moved in this direction since the 1960s and 1970s when aircraft gained the ability to detect opponents at longer ranges and destroy them with missiles rather than guns. “It may be possible that speed and agility are becoming less valuable in air combat.” “The heart of the analysis is the idea that, over time, the performance of sensors, networks and weapons have come to increasingly dominate air combat outcomes,” Stillion says. If such technological trends continue, the ideal combat plane of the future might be a bigger, slower aircraft capable of carrying an armada of sophisticated smaller vehicles. The lethal combination of sensors and missiles makes it largely unnecessary to use a fighter jet's agility to get in position for a perfect kill shot. His report shows that modern fighter pilots have increasingly relied on long-range sensors and missiles to destroy enemy aircraft from kilometers away. Air Force officer who compiled statistics on “air-to-air kills” between aircraft from 1965 until 2002. The analysis comes from John Stillion, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and former U.S. The report, titled “ Trends in Air-to-Air Combat: Implications for Future Air Superiority,” suggests future aerial combat may not look much like Tom Cruise’s dogfighting stunts from the Hollywood film Top Gun. But a recent report hints at a very different near future, where military pilots fly large, bomber-size aircraft loaded with missiles and command networked swarms of robotic drones. Such intimate encounters helped create a perception of pilots as skilled “knights of the air” who climbed into the cockpits of nimble aircraft to duel their opponents. At the dawn of aerial combat 100 years ago, World War I flying aces frequently closed to within 15 meters before firing at enemy aircraft with their machine guns.
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