Comment by stouset | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stouset | Hacker News Reader

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This 100%. While really cool demonstrations, the utility of these in a fight is virtually nonexistent. Any air-to-air engagements these days are inevitably BVR (beyond visual range) encounters, where aircraft fire missiles at one-another from extreme ranges. This type of maneuverability has no use whatsoever in such a scenario.

If all of the long-range missiles fail to neutralize one side of the other and both forces opt to continue the engagement, you get to WVR (within visual range) where infrared missiles and—once those are spent—guns are employed. There could be opportunities here where such a trick might be useful, but only in a 1v1 scenario. For any case where you might have two or more enemies to deal with, such an abrupt loss of energy is suicide. And if you’re on the side with superior numbers, the odds are overwhelmingly in your favor with little chance of you being defensive in the first place. And in the 1v1 scenario, modern infrared missiles like the AIM-9x (which are effective even when launched at frankly ridiculous off-boresight angles) make such a maneuver suicide as well.

So it might, might be useful if: both sides empty their long/medium-range radar-guided missiles at one-another, only two combatants remain, neither decides to bug out, the aggressor empties their IR missiles unsuccessfully, and the defensive craft is imminently going to be within the weapon employment zone for the bandit’s cannon… then this might be a Hail Mary to force the aggressor to overshoot so you can turn the tables. But having bled all your energy, you’re going to get at most one shot before you’re back to simply trying to survive.

Most fights will inevitably go from BVR to WVR-- ECM is continually in a war of escalation with munitions and ECM is almost always ahead.

This is a really interesting topic for debate. Possibly the most recent employment of modern air-to-air tactics we've seen in actual combat was in the early '80s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mole_Cricket_19). I hope we never have to see an actual large-scale air war between high-end, near-peer competitors, and can continue to armchair debate these kinds of scenarios.

Speaking about ECM and the Bekaa battle, a kind of similar situation has just happened in the recent months - Turkey found a way for their drones to effectively attack Russian "Pantsir-S1" anti-aircraft system (details aren't clear, seems that in addition to ECM the drone specific aspects like long loitering waiting for opportunity and simultaneous multiple drone attack from different directions played key role), and around 30 Pantsirs have just been lost in Syria and Libya. (Sidenote: Ukraine has recently got those drones from Turkey and successfully tested against Pantsir - Pantsirs are standard air defense of Russian tank battalions and was the main reason Ukraine, who has nor stealth nor high precision standoff, didn't use the air-to-ground attacks against the Russian tank forces when they ventured into Donbass back then in August 2014 and February 2015)

This is interesting! Do you have any more in-depth articles on it? The Pantsir can be a pretty beastly threat...

This article has some more information: https://t-intell.com/2020/05/22/lethal-stalkers-how-turkish-...

Turkey also lost a lot of their drones. https://lostarmour.info/libya/item.php?id=23673

Probably still cheap to replace, and an interesting proof of concept.

A video from one of the Isreali pilots https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PPpqzhaJIo

ECM fights happen every day. Every time a eurofighter flies near a boarder. Every time a russian bomber goes on an overseas trip. Radars are always looking and testing themselves. Jamming of things like GPS is so normal that it is expected on every flight in many areas. Jamming of military radars would be a classified event, but as with submarines, aggression does not require physical violence and so would not always make the news.

Yes, and in the WVR fight, doing a trick like that isn't helpful. You kill all your energy. While the nose is moving, your aircraft is still going in a similar plane of motion and has little capability to use the vertical.

Killing all your energy is worth it if you get even one missile off and on target.

I mean if you have no other choice but to die. Flying a good gameplan to put yourself in a position of advantage is the normal gameplan. But sure, having this trick after you've messed it up is nice to have.

Not necessarily. There are conceivable situations where supermaneuvrability can turn a situation where an enemy is on your tail and has a lock onto a situation where you fired a missile at them and you're safe. But yes, it's not the normal game plan. The normal gameplan is very likely to degenerate into such situations, though.

You only need that if your missiles are dumb enough to not be programmable for more complex than simple following paths.

It’s much safer to teach your missiles to do the manoeuvre instead of making the plane do it first.

> It’s much safer to teach your missiles to do the manoeuvre instead of making the plane do it first.

Indeed modern air-to-air missiles can do this and much more. They can be launched and lock on after the launch and have full-sphere attack capability (unlike earlier missiles, which even in a high off-boresight scenario would still require the launching aircraft to be behind the target).

Nobody is saying that it’s impossible for this to be useful. We’re saying the odds are incredibly stacked against it.

At best it is a Hail Mary in a 1v1 WVR knife-fight.

By modern air doctrine, this can pretty much only happen in the specific scenario where every other plane has been splashed, since nobody would willingly enter such a scenario if they could avoid it. Modern IR missiles are more maneuverable than planes, so the aggressor will have to have emptied their missile stores completely. And the defender will need to be in a position where they’ve exhausted every other possible defensive resource and be in imminent risk of being downed by the bandit’s cannon.

If all of that is true, it could be a last-ditch survival effort. If it doesn’t generate a shooting opportunity, you’re dead since you’ll never have a chance to gain the energy needed to stay on the offensive.

Nobody in this entire tire fire of a thread has come up with a single additional plausible scenario.

If an enemy fighter has you locked up, you're dead. The No Escape Zone of modern infrared missiles (AIM-9X, Python 5, Iris-T, Derby, and of course R-77) is almost always going to kill you unless the missile misfires/hangs.

Our last 9X shot in combat? https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/news/a270...

Here's a much better account:

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/14344/heres-the-defini...

To recap the article, missiles aren't perfect, especially when they've been flown on and off carrier decks. And this "miss" isn't even data; it's microscopic anectdata. In fact, I don't know of another combat launch of the 9x.

...and if your hail-mary shot misses? In a big furball, the only reason to do this is if you're willing to risk being shot down in exchange, and trading planes 1-for-1 is generally a poor way to win fights.

Even if your missile misses, the situation is much better because although you're in a worse position, the enemy has now lost the initiative and a lot of energy. Presumably you'd be able to, using your superior missile, have another shot, or create an opportunity for your wingmen.

The idea isn't that you get shot in the exchange, it's that you force your enemy to abandon their advantage. The enemy has the choice to evade and lose their advantage, or go for the exchange in which case neither has the advantage.

This means that in cases where you have the upper hand you can use better tactics that don't incur high cost to yourself, whereas where you don't you can turn a 0-1 exchange into a potential 1-1 or 1-0 exchange. This is a pure win.

I agree that there are conceivable circumstances where this kind of maneuvering is useful. One thing to consider: fights are rarely 1v1, and even if it works perfectly against the guy you're fighting at the moment, one of his buddies will almost certainly have at least one shot opportunity against you. Energy is easy to give up and hard to get back.

The multitude of fighters works both ways. While an enemy might gain a shot on you, your energy disadvantage is less significant in the short term and your buddies should have an easier time due to pragmatic numeric advantage.

Maybe. I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. That said, if I had to choose between fighting someone who employs this tactic as a part of their standard game plan or someone who doesn't, I'd choose to fight the former pretty much every time.

The real issue in a war with a well-equipped equal - as opposed to an incursion against an inferior state - is reliability and availability of parts and servicing. The F22 is neither cheap nor quick to service after flights.

A plane that does everything well, except be ready to fly when you need it, is not going to be a war winner in a serious conflict.

100% agreed, but we're firmly within the realms of operations and strategy now, rather than tactics.

That said, it's a good exercise to expand your scope of "kills" from weapons, rocks, and gas to include things like maintenance and admin.

this assume combat is 1v1

it almost never is. wwii ingrained the wing man concept into every air force and for a good reason, from the thatch wwave onward it allowed nation to rely on training, which can be as abundant as needed, instead of better airframes.

as such the whole pretend scenario is built on impossible foundations. you dodge one attack and the wingman scopes you up, while the attacker just accelerate away to safety.

"but what if the attacker is left alone" - then the attacker retreats. it'd be an exceedingly bad call to keep aggressing without a wingman.

What? Why would your enemy lose energy here? This makes no sense; you are the one losing energy with this type of maneuver.

In a 2v1, if you’re the 1, you’re essentially already dead. Either you’re chasing one while the either is getting free shots at you, or you’re simply being chased by one while the other is providing support. Realistically, you’re running for your life with one hand already on the ejection handles. If you’re the 2, there will never be a need for this since the bandit knows that even trying to down one of you is suicide.

In a 2v2+, this kind of maneuver is just going to generate free shots for someone within a few seconds. You’ll be a sitting duck, and anyone can pull off a missile shot on you without even leaving their turning circle, particularly with modern helmet cueing systems and high off-bore missiles (fighter pilots can nowadays literally just turn their head, look at something, and shoot at it with high success rates).

Yes, and in the WVR fight, doing a trick like that isn't helpful. You kill all your energy. While the nose is moving, your aircraft is still going in a similar plane of motion and has little capability to use the vertical.

The funny thing is, everyone already knew this. The venerable Harrier could perform a manoeuvre called "viffing", in which it rotated its engine nozzles back to vertical whilst in horizontal flight. But the ability wasn't used at all during the Falklands war in the early 80's. And here we are in 2020 and people are still debating it.

Heh, I guarantee you that Harriers in the Falklands used "viffing"... as an administrative maneuver. The Harrier family has a whole menagerie of weird and wonderful TVC party tricks that are notoriously difficult to pull off, need a bunch of excess altitude as a backstop for when things inevitably go wrong, and generally aren't applicable to air-to-air combat.

All that said, I agree with you that it's wild how the idea of "slamming on the brakes" in air-to-air combat continues to survive as a perennial meme. Supermaneuverability has certainly expanded the envelope of potential post-stall maneuvers (and, more importantly, dramatically reduced pilot workload in those regimes) far beyond what the Harrier is capable of, but outside of the airshow circuit it continues to remain a solution in search of a problem.

"Fighter pilots HATE him! Learn this one weird trick that the bandits don't want you to know about and win 100% of your BFM engagements!" If only it were that easy...

> it's wild how the idea of "slamming on the brakes" in air-to-air combat continues to survive as a perennial meme

I wouldn't be surprised if it was Top Gun and "hit the brakes, he'll fly right by".

"What is he gonna do, gun me?"

Yes but to win the fight first you have to get to the fight. These low-speed abilities mean russian aircraft can operate from much shorter/poorer strips than western jets. They are the product of a different mindset, a more defensive strategy. I doubt the f22 has ever touched grass.

To be fair, even non-supermaneuverable Russian jets have good unimproved-field performance--old-school tech like intake screens plays a much bigger role here than fancy thrust vectoring and fly-by-wire controls.

But they absolutely are a product of a different mindset, and have been wildly successful in certain aspects.

So you want maneuverability in your missiles, not your aircraft?

Yes, because the missile doesn't need to worry about what happens after it gets a positional advantage and goes boom. It wins, game over.

Precisely. Your missiles are far lighter, can turn on a dime before firing their rockets, and—most importantly—don’t need to worry about survival after a missed shot.

Obviously. A fighter jet has a trust-to-weight ratio of about 1. Even ultra-old air-to-air-missiles whose specs are declassified like the the AIM-9B from the 1950s have a T/W ratio of over 20, and they are much easier to make maneuverable compared to a 30 ton jet that shouldn't break apart or kill its pilot.

All of this is extremely wrong.

First of all, there's no guarantee that you will be able to use BVR. A stealth fighter using its radar is the same as a man in a camouflage at night turning on his search light. Everybody will know where you are. There might also be rule of engagement restriction, as has been many times that forced within-visual-range.

For WVR, the ability to supermaneuver is useful. It can give you that extra edge to get the angle on a target. You have to give up a lot of energy, sure. But you do have >1 TWR, and your buddies to cover you. It's not a magical tool but another one in a toolbox.

Also, in WVR, the advantage goes to the side with fewer planes. There was a study from the korean war to show this. The reason is because if you and your buddy is fighting 20 bandits, you can shoot at anybody that flies in front of you, while the enemies have to visually identify. And the speed of jet combat makes it impossible to verify before you lose your opportunity.

>So it might, might be useful if: both sides empty their long/medium-range radar-guided missiles at one-another, only two combatants remain, neither decides to bug out, the aggressor empties their IR missiles unsuccessfully, and the defensive craft is imminently going to be within the weapon employment zone for the bandit’s cannon

Yup. Just like in vietnam. We are gonna fly up there with our f4s afterburning to mach 2, then we will launch all our sparrows at the bandits, who would fly straight into our missiles because they are dumb, and then we will land just in time for lunch.

Oversimplified for sure, but I think "extremely wrong" is unfair. I think the jury is still out on whether or not a stealth-on-stealth fight (or a more conventional fight in an ECM-heavy environment) inevitably devolves into a WVR knife fight. There are a number of reasons why this doesn't have to be the case.

You're absolutely correct that ROE can force a VID, but it'd be pretty dumb to box yourself into a corner that would force you into a neutral-ish WVR fight, yeah?

I agree that supermaneuverability has the potential to be useful, but I think it's fair to say that it's very much an edge case, and even then more of an augment to missiles that already have HOBS capability than a replacement for them. It certainly isn't a game-changing capability the way HOBS was. Also, TWR only goes so far to help recover from an energy deficit, especially if you have to go into reheat to make it happen. Gas kills are a thing...

Yes and no. Against a well-coordinated, larger force it's really difficult to win, and I very much wouldn't recommend adopting it as a primary tactic. If you had a fight that magically began at the furball phase (admittedly, this is one potential outcome of stealth-on-stealth engagements, although I imagine we'd need to develop better and different technology to make it a reality), that would be more likely to favor the individual, at least until they run out of missiles (it's difficult to over-emphasize how difficult guns kills are against maneuvering targets, even for a hypothetical magic robot with near-perfect aim). Old-school fights like Korea were much closer to the "immediate, chaotic furball" side of the spectrum than current fights, and there was a much less well-developed set of intra-and inter-flight tactics. A modern 2v1 (even heaters-only) is far more lopsided against the 1 than it was during Korea. With good coordination, this scales. (Aside: a really good book about the air war in Korea is The Hunters by James Salter. Highly recommended--it's fiction, but based on the author's own experiences as a pilot there.)

For what it's worth, technology and tactics have improved in the last half decade (perhaps more than we can say about our judgement?)... The proliferation of certain technologies will force continual re-evaluation of tactics, but I think it's safe to say that BVR is reasonably mature and not going anywhere in the foreseeable future. (That said, reports of the death of the air-to-air gun will always be greatly exaggerated.)

You have lost your mind if you think any fight that’s 2v1 or worse odds is going to go well for the underdog. I mean, it’s not like 2v1 ACM doctrine isn’t a thing. It’s practiced regularly by fighter pilots. The side with 2 wins an overwhelming amount of time once practiced. It turns out we’ve learned new lessons and adopted new techniques in the 70 years since the Korean War.

First, once you have VID you do everything you can to keep the bandit in sight until you have a shot opportunity. This idea that “jets are so fast you lose the opportunity by the time you can tell what it is” is completely unfounded.

Second, those other 20 planes aren’t all wildly trying to shoot you. If you’re chasing one of them, that one is flying defensive and describing the fight to their wingmen (“one circle, bandit co-alt, nose high…”) as their supporting wingmen take turns with who’s engaged aggressive and getting clear missile shots at you (since you’re really focused on only one of them).

Third, even if none of this were true, doing this kind of thing in an N-vs-1 fight for N >= 2 invalidates your entire premise. The guy who’s hanging still in midair doing fancy air-show tricks is just generating free shots for all those other aircraft.

> A stealth fighter using its radar is the same as a man in a camouflage at night turning on his search light. Everybody will know where you are.

Every American stealth aircraft equipped with a radar is designed to be able to use it. There's various tricks involved, which all amount to driving the signal of radar below the noise floor for the adversary, while still being able to have the radar pick out the signal return (which is possible because the radar know what signal was sent out in the first place).

> First of all, there's no guarantee that you will be able to use BVR. A stealth fighter using its radar is the same as a man in a camouflage at night turning on his search light. Everybody will know where you are. There might also be rule of engagement restriction, as has been many times that forced within-visual-range.

The F-22 has a low probability of intercept radar. They've been testing a window for adding IRST too in recent years. It also has extremely sophisticated passive EW sensors. It was designed from day one to win BVR fights without compromising stealth.

> For WVR, the ability to supermaneuver is useful. It can give you that extra edge to get the angle on a target. You have to give up a lot of energy, sure. But you do have >1 TWR, and your buddies to cover you. It's not a magical tool but another one in a toolbox.

It's a very poor tool and should be seen as a last resort.

As for F4's in vietnam and such, the visual engagement rules there were unique and are not going to repeat.

I'd suggest reading CBSA's Future of Air Combat report to understand the realities of this stuff. Supermaneuverability is very close to useless other than an advertising stunt at air shows.

Manned fighters themselves are very nearly obsolete.

A low observable fighter using its radar is hardly analogous to a man turning on a flashlight at night. This isn't the 1960's anymore where air search radars were turned on for extended periods on a set frequency.

Modern low probability of intercept are designed to emit only intermittently and hop between frequencies. An adversary might be able to detect the signal but probably won't be able to use it for tracking and targeting.

Furthermore data links allow for cooperative engagement. So the shooting platform can leave its radar off and rely on targeting data fed in from other sources.

> First of all, there's no guarantee that you will be able to use BVR. A stealth fighter using its radar is the same as a man in a camouflage at night turning on his search light. Everybody will know where you are.

This is simply not true for modern AESA radars. It's only true for radars built with an 80's technology level. Modern radars are capable of producing search beams so narrow that they cannot be reliably used for locating the source. When someone is using a LPI radar near you, you can tell that someone has a radar on, but you will only have a very vague idea of the direction they are in, and no idea at all of how far away they are. And since other planes near you (or even other detectors on your own plane) do not get to see the same beam, only the next one that comes after a random interval, you cannot use multiple detectors for deducing the origin of the beam.

The fact that this myth of radars telling everyone where your are is so persistent is annoying, but also somewhat useful. Simply because if someone repeats it, it tells everyone that they have not updated their ideas about how air combat works since the cold war ended and they should be ignored.

I agree. The Project Trigger Team studied this: https://media.defense.gov/2009/Aug/14/2001330300/-1/-1/0/AFD...

Then came the air war over Vietnam, and the fighter crews there soon realized that AIM-7 shots beyond visual range were often more dangerous to other Americans than to the enemy, because there was no (sure) way to identify the target as friend or foe.

For a more "modern" war: https://www.defense-aerospace.com/articles-view/feature/5/18...

During the Gulf War, the US Air Force launched AIM-7M and AIM-120 medium-range air-to-air missile for BVR attack under the condition of "one-way transparency", but the hitting rate was less than 30 percent.

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