You'd have to be in very close range and in a very bad disadvantage, which honestly doesn't last long (you'd blow up very fast) and when you start decelerating you become a very easy target to hit.
And after your opponent overshoots--you just lost a ton of energy--and energy is everything in aerial combat. Energy is the currency you spend to maneuver, and you've just spent it on this hail mary.
Even worse: Advancing missile technology has mostly invalidated the need for aircraft in a major war since a long while, and drones will literally sweep what's left of it.
The Iranian drones' amazing performance in Ukraine shows that warfare has changed forever. The drones can travel 1700 km autonomously, very hard to jam, and they are cheaper than the missiles that are used to shoot them. So that at this point you could bankrupt an enemy by just sending drones. If they can destroy them, they go bankrupt due to missile costs. If they cant or dont, you hit all the targets.
The only way to deal with this will be miniaturization of warfare, ie creation of mini drones and mini missiles to hunt drones. Which is still difficult to do and yet to be done because miniaturization is difficult.
Aircraft are old news. If you can destroy a target by sending an autonomous drone that travels 1700km, which costs less than a fraction of one sortie of an aircraft, leave aside the cost of aircraft, its armament and pilot training, it means that drones rule warfare now.
A Javelin can take out a tank, but not replace it. A drone, or cruise missile, can take a ground target, a missile can take out aircraft, but they cannot replace their roles.
The reason tanks get destroyed left and right in Ukraine is a combination of bad docteine / tactics and deployment, the use of quasi obsolete models and the large scale use of last gen anti-tank weapons. The reason nobody has airial superiority is somewhat similar, near equal tech, decent air defence and comparable numbers.
As far as dogfights are concerned, they were declared dead prior to Vietnam. To the point fighter jets didn't get cannons anymore. Vietnam caused the creation of Top Gun, when the Navy realized their pilots were not up to par in airial combat. Stealth, and I am not a real proponent of that and still have to see the advantage it gives you, means one of the following scenarios will happen (assuming near peer adversaries):
- Gen 5 vs. Gen 4 (stealth vs. non-stealth, or rather low detectability): Gen 5 sees Gen 4 first, shoots multiple missiles, Gen 4 takes losses before they can counter attack -> Gen 4 retreats / is out of the fight (no dogfight) or Gen 4 is cought, numerically superior, closes in with Gen 5 and you have a dogfight
- Gen 4 vs. Gen 4: Everyone detects everyone at a large distance, missiles are fired, some losses occure (everyone can react so becasue they are not surprised), parties close in, you have a dog fight (assuming no onr retreats first)
- Gen 5 vs. Gen 5: Parties detect each other very late and close, you almost have a dogfight from the get go
So no, fighters aren't going away nor are dogfights.
I wouldnt go THAT far yet because there are still some uses for the aircraft. Especially very long range missions are economical by using aircraft. Ie, 2000 km and more ranges. Including interception and air defense. There are missiles that can travel such distances, but they are expensive still.
However true, very soon that kind of range will also be covered by drones, making aircraft totall obsolete.
> As far as dogfights are concerned, they were declared dead prior to Vietnam. To the point fighter jets didn't get cannons anymore. Vietnam caused the creation of Top Gun, when the Navy realized their pilots were not up to par in airial combat.
That was a time in which the missiles were still in their infancy. Hence the miss rate and the need to dogfight. Today its not like that.
> one of the following scenarios will happen
I propose that none of those scenarios will happen. Existing air defense systems now can reach distances up to 500 km and shoot down literally, actually anything. (S-500 and above). Suicide drones can travel 1700 km. Strike drones even more.
There is no need to have any aircraft take off and do mission at a long distance, in which they would get promptly shot down by advanced air defense systems. Just spam drones.
As long as someone needs something on the ground been blown up from up close, or protect infantry from being blown up frok up close, tanks are your weapon of choice. You want something on the ground blown up from a distance comparatively cheap? Artillery, idealy self propelled for mobility, is your friend. You want to blow up stuff on the ground far away, and fast, you go for fighter aircraft. Or if you don't want to your enemy to do just that, as those are fast, can cover a lot of groind and controlled locally, so no jaming of any kind. If you want to do the same thing from really far away, use a cruise missile. Or in contested airspace where your piloted aircraft are too valuable? Use a drone, same for long endurance surveillance of uncontested airspace.
Same goes for aircraft.
Do you have more information on that?
Such stuff wouldnt be in mass media ever because first, it reduces the competition chances of US armament makers, and second, its something that Iran did, who is obviously evil according to such corporate Angloamerican media like the Politico.
I have to add, following anything from such mainstream corporate Anglosaxon sources is as foolish as it was back in 2003. Back in 2003, there was more effort on the part of the establishment and the corporate media to keep a degree of reliability and trustworthiness. Today, its just emotional manipulation.
Mass media with global reach exists that is headquartered in, and has as much relationship to local arms makers as exists in the US media in countries whose armament makers are the competition to US armament makers, so that explanation seems inadequate and parochial.
> Anglosaxon
Pro tip: you’ll look less like a propaganda shill if you don’t start using contextually unusual and inaccurate labels that contribute nothing to the substance of your message right after the same regime whose propaganda substance you are echoing does so prominently with the exact same terms the same way in its propaganda.
The basic tenet of the US military-industry has been destroying local arms makers in any way they can to replace them. What was done to German and British air defense industries during the Cold War are examples of them. Moreover, the majority of mass media have networked shareholders which include US entities. The immense pushing of US foreign policy in all mass media even in Europe is an indicator of how extensive the control is.
> Pro tip: you’ll look less like a propaganda shill if you don’t start using contextually unusual and inaccurate labels
Pro tip: Anglosaxon is a long-standing history and political science term. And those who are students of either won't stop using it because a certain segment of the Angloamerican public now has an aversion to the term because a certain enemy of their establishment used them. It describes a certain social, political and economic construct, and the term still remains valid today.
If you are offended by such a widely used term in history and political science, heaven knows how much you would be offended by some other terms that are used in those sciences. Here is a 300-year old example.
So just like you wouldn't expect RT to cover Russian losses except perhaps in the most general terms, you shouldn't expect our own countries' losses to be covered by our own media other than in passing (even if it's obviously not as directly controlled as RT is).
Social media video footage is a very good way to receive whatever emotional message the person who shot, edited, and published the video wants to convey.
Its much less useful as a basis for strategic analysis of the value of weapon systems.
BTW, people in Ukraine call those Shaheds "mopeds" because of their engine sound.
If we go by Ukraine's claims, they should have been at the gates of Moscow at this point. So, just forget that.
> 12 hit their targets
You don't seem to be aware that even if we trusted that number from Ukraine itself, it would still qualify as a majestic performance since the drones are dirt cheap.
> They had a benefit of surprise when they started being used, but not any longer.
The actual videos from the front tell a different story.
Ukraine has never claimed an intent to enter Russian territory, so that is clearly false.
> You don’t seem to be aware that even if we trusted that number from Ukraine itself, it would still qualify as a majestic performance since the drones are dirt cheap.
It is a demonstration that Ukraine’s air defenses have focused on what Russia had and was using previously, and not this particular threat. Israel’s performance against this and more advanced Iranian drones (and the fact that Israel keeps jets even though it is the world leader in this class of munitions) are pretty good signals that while these kind of munitions have a role in modern combat, they aren’t magic trump cards that replace manned jets in general, or even just for ground strike roles.
This thread is a pretty good breakdown: https://twitter.com/Justin_Br0nk/status/1574414714469335046
> So that at this point you could bankrupt an enemy by just sending drones
Edit: apparently Russians have advanced but uneconomical drones, Iran strikes a better balance!
From there comes the advantage of the Iranian drones - they make a lot of noise and you can hear them from miles away. But they are WAY cheaper. So you can just swarm the air defences using them. And if the enemy actually uses missiles to hit them, it evaluates to a result like the Iranian drone having shot down the more expensive defense missile because the drone is way cheaper.
...
Iran defense industry just proved that in the current environment there is no need for drones to be that advanced like Russians' drones: The existing defense setups are SO unprepared and so behind in countering drone technology that you can just use simple, cheap drones to hit targets. And even more when you use swarms.
Then again, that's good engineering. It means that Iranians well-engineered their drones according to the existing circumstances.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flakpanzer_Gepard
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2022/07/26/ukraines-ge... Or build new, similar systems. Should cover it pretty well. Or use down graded versions of the various ship-mounted anti-missile systems.
Drone vs. drone dog fights sound like fun. Thinking of it, didn't the Yakuza and Tokyo police have some of those?
“Loitering munitions”, which sensationalist media refers to as “suicide drones”. Basically, slow, long-range, very-small-warhead prop-driven GPS-guided missiles.
Not “drones” in the “reusable unmanned aerial vehicle” sense.
> Also funny that Russians are so behind the times that they need to buy advanced military tech from Iran.
These aren’t particularly advanced. They are pretty old tech with commercial GPS added for guidance. They have a pretty narrow niche, but its one that is particularly relevant to Russia’s current situation, especially given political constraints relating to Ukraine’s operations and the equipment they are being supplied with.
The delta v between the attacker, and the cobra’s aircraft is typically doesn’t allow enough time to get a missile off or guns. bin mind that dog fights happen in a one or two circle high g turn as each fighter attempts to out turn the other, cobra maneuvers require that the (losing fighter) exit the circle.
That's what the HMD and R-73 are made for: (ignore the shit music) https://youtu.be/-D9ZhmFxz3M?t=194
The only time fighters are in direct contact in this situation is a dog fight. Which the above video is not. Checkout the YouTube category for “DCS BVR” as well as “DCS dogfight”. There are a few videos analyzing cobra in both as well as the use of terrain. TL;DR there are some interesting uses of terrain at the end of both engagements, however in a realistic setting the pilots would head home rather than risk dying to a “maneuver kill” where they accidentally crash into the ground while trying to “out rate” or “out turn” the other fighter.
We can't really call the resulting maneuver a clean airshow version of the "Cobra" anymore; but that's OK: it's a bit more deadly!
The airshow version merely demonstrates the aircraft's abilities. An actual pilot practicing combat maneuvers creatively applies those abilities to an actual situation at hand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM-120_AMRAAM
Otherwise it’s just a pretty display at air shows.
Gotta wait for the AIM-260.
Continuing wikipedia spelunking, AIM-120D has a range of >160km (and has apparently already entered service), AIM-260 200km, and R-37M 300-400km. However, as everyone who has played flight sims (or seen youtube videos of them) knows, the actual usable range is much lower than the quoted max ranges. And given stealth technology, one wonders whether the actual capability of the missile is more related to the radars, both of the launching platform and the radar in the missile seeker, than to how long burning rocket motors it has.
Since that threat never occurred, it is difficult to say whether it worked out. The discontinuation of the platform has more to say about the change in the threat than it does in the merit of BVR missiles.
The idea is, to be able to make the kill, after you are now behind. Then it does not matter, if you are too slow.
But wikipedia indeed says, this manoever has never been confirmed in real air combat, so yes, its usefullness is quite limited.
I would also point out both aircraft are in straight and level flight, basically in formation, with the pilot composed and prepared. This is not how a dogfight looks like.
That's what HMD's are for: (ignore the shit music) https://youtu.be/-D9ZhmFxz3M?t=194
Air combat is rarely 1vs1 so being slow means you get killed by someone else.
Even beyond that, the general impression I get w.r.t stuff like supermaneuverability is that it's a much better use of money to ensure that most fights never even make it to the point where the stuff like the cobra seems like a good idea. Given the choice between 1) "marginally improving survivability in comparatively low-energy corner-case states" and 2) "increasing the odds that the fight never makes it to the merge," #2 seems like a much better choice in terms of money spent and pilots kept alive. (Though a counterpoint, I guess, based my my casual understanding, would be that making the judgment too heavily in favor of #2 was part of what hampered the USAF and Navy's air-to-air combat capabilities in Vietnam)
I get that it would be hard to aim - but can't computers do that?
An AIM-9X can do this, but the kill probability drops rapidly as you move off boresight.
but in a dogfight (where this move is presumably useful) the target is not stationary, it's moving towards the missile. if all the missile does is accelerate to stay still, it will still hit the target at 700mph
If you fire it forwards, the missile has to accelerate through whatever air resistance you're both already experiencing through even more air resistance to get to the target. That's hard.
If you fire backwards, the missile uses air resistance to accelerate towards (i.e. slow down) towards the target. Even when it goes through 0mph relative to the air and continues to accelerate, the resistance will be much less as it approaches an even higher closing velocity in a shorter period of time.
So the optimizations and tradeoffs are in sensing and targeting further away or being able to rotate a sensor to target an enemy off bore.
[1] They should use rear-facing lasers!
But in the plane's frame, where both planes are roughly stationary and the wind is moving 100s of mph backwards, bullets fired backwards move faster.
And for aerial combat I would argue the plane's frame is the important one.
If the target is moving at (or nearly at) the same speed as you then those velocities effectively cancel out
We do it with helicopters (complete with automated aiming), and we used do it with bombers in WW2, after all.
I’m sure the answer has to do with aerodynamics, and the general rarity of close-range dogfighting in the first place, that make such a design impractical.
It's both aerodynamics and mass. The main guns on most western fighters is the M61 Vulcan which is a 20mm rotary gun. The F-35 mounts a 25mm GAU-12 rotary gun. These are both pretty big guns and are typically mounted internally on the jet. Trying to fit one in a turret would not be practical, it would have tons of drag. In order to be able to rotate and elevate the gun it would need a lot of heavy duty motors to be able to actuate at fighter jet speeds.
Even if such a thing nominally worked, that space and mass could go to missiles. Missiles are far more likely to be used than some gun turret. A bore sight mounted canon is far more useful since the pilot is already going to be pointing the whole plane.
The need for the fighters to have a good aerodynamic. Non-fighters and multi-role fighters have the gun pods.
https://www.weaponsystems.net/system/1049-HH13%20-%20SPPU-22
The 20mm cannon on an F-16 is the entire assembly labeled as items 63, 72, 73 and the ammunition is 78.
How do you envisage this as other than a fixed installation?
It's the square-cube law in action (twice over). Going from a 12.7mm to a 20-25mm bullet... twice the diameter, four times the crosssection, eight times the mass.
I am guessing mostly space and weight are at a premium in an airplane.
https://theaviationgeekclub.com/exclusive-former-buff-gunner...
Losing your speed and showing your belly / back to the enemy, when you cannot shoot, never looked like a reasonable thing to do.
Combined with some sort of chaff/decoy release, I could see this causing the seeker's kalman filter or whatnot choosing to go after the return which stayed on the same trajectory with the same signature.
Without a decoy, or with smart enough seekers (eg combined mm wave with IR), I think you are probably still going to be hit.
But that doesn't require any vectored thrust, 'supermanouverability' or such. In fact, you should make the turn smooth to conserve energy.