Notice Of Potential Charges Lo 400: Fill & Download for Free

After 1991's glowing reviews, largely based on bad after action BIA analysis, Congress fell deeply in lust with the idea of 'one bomber, one tanker, one target' that the F-117 seemingly represented as they pressed, urgently, to downsize the military, post DS. BUR and the base shut downs could only be forced down particularly the USAF's massive force structure with a spoonful of sugar to help the bile go down.Never mind that F-117s were consistently tracked by low band radar, often from hundreds of miles beyond the target area (RN Destroyers in the gulf).Never mind that U.S. rollback jammers were still necessary and increasingly (pre MALD-J) vulnerable as standforward assets for certain, aspect sensitive, radars.Never mind the sheer stupidity on the part of the Iraqis (overheating their gun tubes with skysweeper tactics rather than using simple search lights to catch the 12,000ft flying Cocroaches in their laydowns). Or the reality of IRSTs being something the Soviets actually did quite well.Never mind that the wobblin' gobblin only had about 250nm between tankings and against a sophisicated GBAD (A2AD) you might not be able to count on over-fence tanking support.Never mind that fully 20% of the F-117 LGBs employed in fact missed because of scintillance, pooling or fusing issues on the GBU-27.Never mind that the very idea of a level, laydown, attack with SAL munitions is mentally retarded in about 60% of the flying environments where RAIN AND OVERCAST makes targeting hard and can severely compromise the type's signature, if it's forced to come below the cloud base.Never mind that blasting an enemy's strategic C4ISR and Industrial Base targets had increasingly lost relevance as PGMs and high definition targeting systems proliferated and the threat simply refused to centralize it's control systems (after the Iraqi Air Force HQ building attack was publicized, this was almost a certainty...).Never mind that the '100 hours' of the actual Desert Saber portion of the effort could have come at the beginning as much as the end of the campaign, with very little difference in losses and that the ground war ONCE AGAIN showed the tactical engagement was easier, faster and more successful in terms of terrain roll up as we choked off operational logistics, isolated formations into kill boxes and then simply OBAS'd them to death, flowing in the ground forces behind a constant drip feed of 20 minute tacair off the tanker bottleneck.Daring the enemy to remain in place and be cut off, 150km from the Basra causeways.Never mind that advances in GPS and SFPA were, again, pointing the way to ALCM/SLCM with superior real time target acquisition and half the TERCOM programming delays while having perhaps 100% larger natural RCS in the critical X/Ka bands used for fire control (still tiny).And a whole LOT more flyout. Because it's a oneway trip as range, not radius.No, stealth was it and the People's Republic Of Congress, made it clear that we had to defeat the Texas Whitehouse and simply buy no more huge fleets of F-16C.50s to instead grab just a couple hundred, upgraded, F-117Cs and maybe the F-117X, for the Navy.And of course they lost that fight. Because they were not only bum rushing a defacto Bush run Administration but also the Ft. Worth PAC which was pretty desperate to meet bottom line as the A-12 sank beneath waves of red ink.And all the pilots who wanted that job security and knew a not-cool ride when they saw it.I mean, have you flown the Black Jet? It's like an F-106, without the burner: Turn rate measured with a day planner. 'Multirole' Cool Factor with a dipstick.So a deal was struck. The USAF would get their shiny new F-16s but only up until about 1997 rather than through 2012, when their own CALF program was supposed to kick off. While Congress would get another F-16 'deal of the century' aircraft. Whose subcontracts would be spread far and wide.The Raptor would get bought, but only in very small numbers. And the USN/USMC would jump on the USAF pulled bandwagon of JAST which integrated their own ASTOVL and MRF efforts. Even though their TAMP-2001 which nominally force structure planned the naval JSF was actually a shotgun divorce which halved effective inventory buys showing the Marines and particularly Navy had very little numeric commitment to going down the VLO road as a serious proposition to reenter the blue water deep strike game.On the operational side, with the aid of the ANG, major efforts would be put into programs like MMTD and ATP, to finally provide a tactical, through weather, IAM and a standardized targeting pod (AAQ-33 Sniper) to target it. Because they knew the key to winning air wars was sustainable DMPIs downrange, not sortie counts perse.A 2m CEP aimpoint hit could only be assured by a PGM which meant LGB or IAM, pointed by a targeting pod which had to be cheap enough to literally make any 1553B fighter into a smart bomber, as the F-4s and Pave Spikes/F-111s and Pave Drags all rapidly went away as specialist precision strike aircraft, halving the number of types in inventory, to pay for it all. This despite the fact that they had just spent all of the 1980s and a ton of dollars on the ETF and Blk.40 effort as dedicated LANTIRN replacements.Of course you still had to split off sorties for non bomb dropping efforts. And this is where the F-35 comes in as an F-117/F-16 hybrid with a Burner, more gas, F-16 radar, and AMRAAM equivalency as a kind of manticor of minimum up and away requirements which allowed the majority of funding to be directed at basing mode variation design drivers (<1% of the mission evolution, should NEVER dominate airframe design criterion) as a menas to effectively create three aircraft under one common program name. All for the purposes of bloating the inventory buy and supposedly achieving economies of scale which let the F-35 underbid Rafale/Typhoon/Gripen. Without the performance of the Raptor (the Raptor is a trigram of mission capability: speed/height/stealth, synergized together).JSF began in 1994, three years after Operation Desert Storm. But since, in 2012 when we admitted failure of the program and 'rebaselined' it's funding to take care of major design shortfalls, we were twenty years pas the hype and hysteria of that conflict against a second rate army and 10th rate airforce, there really is no excuse.For the Black Jet had long since been reevaluated as largely a failure in DS (the F-111/F-15E hit more targets, with less hassle, in more dangerous areas overall...) and 45 years after the initial efforts which led to Have Blue putting a SAL bomber into a NATO mission dominated by overcast 90% of the time, repeating a failed mission elements needs study as cost effectiveness analysis for the type was ridiculous.Conceptually, the F-35 was a jabberwocky from the get-go. But we were the ones who failed to pick up the vorpal sword and go snicker snack, snicker snack, cutting it down to size.Specifically in light of it's anachronistic obsolescence in the face of subsequent developments in GAINS in general and access denial missiles in particular.The F135 provides the Panther with a sub 1:1 T/Wr even though it has nearly twice the thrust of the F100 class engine in a single seat airframe which nominally only weighs about 8,000lbs more than an F-16C's 19.5K.The 19,000lbs of gas that is a large part of this is itself a deceptive modifier in that it has doesn't radically alter radius because the F135 has a huge fan which is sized to push a lot of mass flow at zero speed to support the STOVL hover as a CAP-the-Airfield-Beacon Marine CAS radius requirement of under 250nm.And that big fan requires a big core to keep it turning, which stochiometrically requires a large fuel flow, in up and away, even in cruise condition. Such that a .889pph TSFC makes the jet behave like an F-16 in terms of burner use and energy state vs. fuel profile over radius-X, even though it is nominally flying clean.And of course (also to support STOVL) the weight of all that gas is carried in the fuselage because the wings are tiny, resulting in a clean wingloading of 110-115psf. Which, to be fair, is similar to a loaded F-16, except the F-16 can ditch it's gas and it's hole digger weapons if it has to. And it carries twice as many BVR AAM and potentially, Blk,VI AARGM shoot back and suppress with.Thus, the F-35 is not a 40,000ft SC&M platform like an F-22 and cannot Hi/Lo with it.It is barely a 30,000ft class airframe but where the F-16 has the [power and munitions to play in this airspace. The F-35 is a truck with performance closer to an F/A-18 which PS's out at about Mach 1.25 and 25K. Forcing the jet to be much more reliant upon stealth as a primary penetration and combat driver.IMO, this is yet more decklanding influence on U&A performance profile.Did I mention that stuffing fuel around a very hot engine with minimal inerting and foam, like a bloody MiG-23, tends to have bad consequences for a battle damaged jet made from plastic?The APG-81 _is_ nice but so would APG-83 (SABR) or APG-84 (RACR) be on a CAPES/SLEP upgraded F-16. While the AAQ-37 EOTS is Sniper technology without the ten+ years of upgrades that have come since CDR hardening of the F-35 design and I'm _pretty sure_ that, had we not doubled down on the initial 190-220 billion R&D ticket for the F-35, we would have had JCM instead of JAGM and be looking at SPEAR 3 instead of waiting on SDB-2 by now.Both of which take the 'I know! Let's drop *A PAIR* of GBU-12s directly over a Pantsyr EOCG threat!' CAS/OBAS threat advantage out of the equation. Because it doesn't matter if the weapon fires forwards from a LAU-145 or drops from a BRU-61 on a pylon carriage jet. A 25km missile and 50km glide bomb, beats the 10km LGB, for threat range overmatch, every time.Even if it's coming off a conventional signature vs. stealth airframe.Not least because it's not dependent upon height for ballistic flyout which may not be possible in the presence of bigger M-SAM whereas a powered or at least glide weapon means you can also come in, sub-horizon. With no EWR warning.Either way, the enemy doesn't get a vote on the launch platform.And if he tries to shoot down the PGMs (admittedly, more a Tor thing) you can 'hey batta-batta!' him with a Mach 3 HARM fast ball to the teeth. Something the F-35 can never do, without going external carriage (AARGM-ER may change this but the internal station count will remain the same...).RCS flatly does not and never has matched Standoff in terms of aircraft survivability and MA surety on a per-sortie basis. Fewer support sorties. Shorter radials.Which is a good thing because Stealth PLUS Standoff means no requirement for Stealth to be needlessly, repeatedly, risked as an HDLD asset, doing figure 8 racetracks in radar defended airspace, looking for mobile ADV or an Iskander driving out of a carpark.That's what drones are for. And originally, the JAST effort acknowledged this with the high datarate, LPD, MADL requirement exclusively intended to feed the jet offboard picture and so keep avionics costs down.Laydown Stealth is an in and out asset for the absolute highest value targets where you are willing to pay the support mission penalty in lost other-sorties to punch it home.With standoff munitions, once you know where the threat is, you can lobshot weapons into a search box, using strapdown and GPS to point either an ATR seeker or a MITL datalink equivalent and, just like the Delilah vs. SA-22 , Syrian, condition, the bad guy doesn't see it coming because he's got his radar off, scuttling for the next set of cover.This is what saturation by missile has done to the overhyped A2AD. And we should have seen this trendline happening, way back in 1999, when OAF proved that while the Serbian mobile systems run like roaches from a flashlight, they couldn't hide /and defend airspace effectively/, at the same time.Now, let's talk about that RCS issue.First, it's all based on typical COINTELPRO doublespeak. The F-22 has the superior RCS. No, the F-35 does. But only in a narrow quarter of about 40` to either side of the nose. And only in the firecontrol bands. Yet the jet's job is that of interdiction.The U.S. standard VLO is to the same standard as the export model. Even though the LOCLOEXCOM spent a billion and change making sure that the 'D model' was not subject to loss of technology sensitive stuff in export to the back of beyond. Or Brussels.All of which may actually be true.Because the last 40-50 or so F-22s were built with early standard F-35 RAM technology and likely have far superior RCS levels than their early production blocks. Because the natural signature of the F-35 is higher than the 'go to war', switched-on version. And because, if the fourth generation VLO is in fact active with local surface cancellation, on the jet, then you can likely pull components or control software OFP/MDF load standard to enable the 'really super duper stealth mode' to be denied to local theater allies except when we are there, to carefully shepherd it's use.This is why Israel fought so hard to get total control over their avionics package as both source and object coded systems configuration.How do we know this?Well, OCA from a Raptor's nose to the threat jet putting wheels in well is a 60 mile, nose-on, experience by which one jet can unload from FL500 to 400, sprint forward, fire AIM-120D at Mach 1.3+ and return as the Mach 4.6 weapons are midcoursed by the guy who stayed in the racetrack.All without ever really being threatened, even by an S-300 class SAM.Pointing the APG-77 into the baselane, supplies midcourse for the other jet's super Pole boosted AMRAAMs. And completes the Shooter->Illuminator->burning pyre condition as the wingman rejoins.You never come closer than 20-25nm to the SA-20/21 defended target. Just as F-15s did not, vs. SA-2, in Desert Storm. Almost any degree of VLO can handle this mission.OTOH, Interdiction as direct laydown of JDAMs (which are pathetically slow, huge in signature and can easily be shot engaged by any VSHORADS, unless plunging fire dropped from almost right overhead) means you have to wend your way through the thicket of all the radars around the target site, some of them sectored to look backwards. Drop. And then head on out the other side of the ring.Why not break away? Because this-........./\..........Threat Radar.........|.....................|....................F-35.......Is less of a presented radar target than this-Threat Radar............../................../................../..................F-35.......Which is part of what makes the F-35 a gold plated turd. Because the actuality of a radar based air defense is actually this-................VHF EWR...................................................................................................|...................................................|.....................................Radar.....|......Radar.............Radar...Protected Target...Radar..........................Radar............................................Radar..............................................|..................................................F-35......................Which means an interdictor is SURROUNDED ON ALL SIDES, by high power battery engagement radars, during terminal weapons delivery. Due to the very 10-15km standoff limits of essentially a ballistic weapon with a JDAM kit that amounts to low-lift strapon bra of stabilizer strakes running along the sides of the bomb case and only a guidance pack built into a replacement tail fin kit (i.e. bodylift only, no glide).You MUST penetrate, through this radar thicket, to bring this weapon into release range. And thus you WILL BE '7-11' exposed from multiple quarters outside the ideal of the nose on.Even if you do a laydown, straight over the top of the target.Which means that VLO today, doesn't work like it did in 1991. Where you HARM'd the radars on the approaches. Jammed the far field surveillance system that allowed the terminal defense systems to avoid AGM-88 enemas by delayed emission.And used the F-117's isosceles triangle RCS lobe structure to narrow the return path down which it could be seen (and thus plot the safest flight path approach line).Providing air to air escorts for all of the above support missions.Plus CSAR, just in case.And tankers to feed them.Is the USAF so stupid as to think they could repeat that high support mission requirement without the EF-111 (retired) or EA-6B (retired) low band pods needed to do all this? No.But they are dumb enough to think we don't notice that a jet with a largely conventional shape: +Essentially doesn't generate RCS lobes on acute bearings off the inlets and highly swept wing lines like the F-117. But is, in fact, a perfect 'bowtie' which should be HIGHLY visible, from all quartering aspects and especially the flanks.Yet it is not.As the JASDF F-35A, which recently overflew all of Honshu, an 810nm long island absolutely plastered with low band ATC radars, and 'nary a ping' remained undetected, proves. Low band radars have long wavelengths which resonate from the front and trailing edges of important features on the JSF, like the inlets, wingtips and tails as well as assorted lumps and bumps under the fuselage (hook, weapons, EOTS, gear). When they charge up on those features, over multiple, sequential, impingent waves, they eventually burst and scattering-return on the mean illumination bearing, like a G-con, they cannot be absorbed with simple RAM/RAS because a fighter doesn't have the structural depth to layer the do so. So they have to be cancelled, by counterwave.Active Loading Stealth Exists. It is based on radio frequency circuits baked into the composites and reacting, inch by inch, to ASQ-239 reads of impingent radar surface waves along the skin, phase-cancelling them.Nothing else explains the conventional configuration of the Panther. The ill-placed confidence of it's pilots. And the displayed LER of the type at Red Flag.A standoff weapon (750,000 dollar Tomahawk, 2.2 million dollar AGM-158B etc.) can't do this. Because the stealthy-stack composites are likely costly, heavy and again, volumetrically deep while requiring a lot of power. None of which a small missile or drone can support.Furthermore, you don't want to hand over high end stealth to every no-wardet shootdown or crash which doesn't vaporize the gear.And because, if you ever remove the need for VLO (very high altitude, 200K+, aeroballistic midcourse would take 99.999% of air defense missiles out of the intercept picture while providing 20 minutes to 1,000nm interdiction campaign speed up) as a manned, recoverable, platform then the Core Aviator community of roughly 6,000 pilots (in the late 90s) would have to be let go or at least greatly reduced.As the THREE AIR FORCES which this nation's service branches stupidly maintain are nothing if not a rent-seeking RICO charge, that loss of Made Men cannot be allowed to happen. For there is power in numbers.Hence, we continue to fly directly over targets, despite threats like these-Houthi/Iranian AA-10, fired from Pickup, hit's Saudi F-15SMEHEL Kills Drones at 2kmSee how small that truck and ADADS type cuing sensor is? See how small that laser is? Power will go up. Size will continue to shrink. By the time you hit a turbine drone which can literally fly up (preemptively) to altitude at a manageable speed (half a SAM’s energy and thus motor is wasted in the transit, when it is doing…nothing) a 'SAM' will be half the length and weight of that Alamo. By the time you reach 250KW, the threat will not be able to simply out-height the ground based threat and you will have to fly, opaque cockpit, just to keep pilots from being casually blinded.These kinds of systems frankly don't care if you're 'radar invisible'. Only that you fly close enough to be in range of the optically tracked S2A kill effector cuing mechanism. Because your own weapon is a <12nm IAM and thus your ground track is predictably tangent to the target.There are other problems as well. An F-15X represents a a similar 80-85 million dollar investment to the block-buy F-35A. Yet despite having 'twice everything', it has a 27,000 dollar per flight hour, fixed MMH:FH, support guarantee.Compared to the F-35's 43,000 dollars per flight hour to keep it nice and tight as a sealed RF hole in the sky. This is the waxed-car stealth penalty that doesn't seem to want to go away with practice, from the F-22 (60,000 dollars per flight hour) to the JSF.Jets flying over BOB airspace are typically at extreme risk to unconventional attack (Camp Bastion, 10 AV-8Bs smashed in their revetments by Taliban raiders coming over the wire) while operating under primitive conditions that don't always support high tech systems (Iraqi base commanders sell their street sweeper gas for luxury goods and as a result, their AT-6 trainers get holes in their lower wing skins from kicking up all the gravel which the nightly breeze blows onto the runway).No matter how well secured, the reality of espionage is simply that of exposure. The inverse square rule applies to both people and airframes as opportunities to get the straight skinny on the technology by bribing someone to sell it.And of course the theater base-in itself is vulnerable because it can never be further out on the radial from simple missile attack than the pilot can safely fly and return at least once and preferrably 2-3 times, per day. Increasingly, with BASM like the 2,500km DF-26 and choked operating regions like the Black Sea and Persian Gulf, this is just not possible. Conversely, if we ever do have to go hammer and tongs 'in the depths of Asia', we are effectively beyond (subsonic) tacair's reach from the ocean, regardless.Compare this to even a period 1990s X-45 J-UCAS which was designed for 2.5hr loiter at 1,100nm and could do so on an F-18 engine which let it 'loyal wingman' keep up with the 500kt manned jets on Day 1. Or throttle back and hang over an infantry patrol, hunting a rocket man in the deep weeds of the Afghan wilds. At roughly 10,000 dollars an hour (the Predator was 900 dollars an hour, in the early 2000s).Whether you are looking to saturate with a big belly weapons bay as multiple ordnance options. VLO + 500 knot penetrate in a high threat air environment. Or simply do ISR and CAS stack support at huge sortie density in a COIN role.The UCAV wins because it frankly doesn't care if the mission is 20hrs long. Or 50. And thus you have to generate vastly fewer jets on the ramp, each day. Meaning less deployed and less spares costs.But it does so in an high cultural inertia environment where a college degree is pointless and thus not worth paying an O-2's (first Lieutenant) three grand a month or an O-3's five or six. A drone troop can be E-4/E-5, at all levels, no problem. For around 2-2.5 grand a month.And there is not a fastjet pilot alive who will agree that that is a 'good idea' because the military is essentially paid flight school for a later airline position.Where the air services are a rank hierarchy as pilot officer corps supporting generals who used to be pilots and now are loyal to their junior officers because a pilot can only be lead by a human commander who 'knows the code' of military culture.Whereas a UCAV with appropriate standoff munitions (can turn 270` to engage, works autonomously or with designation, at least Mach 1.25 speed, at least 25km standoff) is a ruggedized PDA downloadable ap away from any civilian or grunt with a couple weeks of JTAC/MCS training as callable fire support, no different than artillery.Bluntly, the USAF supports the escalatory nature of airpower, up to and including proliferation of a hypersensitive technology which NEVER should have left the United States control, for the simple reason that it is a commonly (mistakenly) held belief that complexity requires a college degree to responsibly handle, even when that complexity brings with it an unbearable burden of systems of systems overhead recapitalization (Jammers, SEAD, A2A Escorts, gas for everyone) and collective basing mode risk (subsonic/manned = <800nm radius) in a global precision strike environment where absolute minimum radius of action should be on the order of 2,500nm, flown entirely at supercruise.As the only way to protect theater entry while generating enough deep strike capacity to be worth having fires be separated from rather than organic to the ground combat element.A college degree supports an officer class and thus the Sky Knight club maintains their Order Of The Silken Scarf and all the Big Money privilege (1.6 trillion and counting for the full 2,450 F-35 buy on what should be a gold plated Weasel inventory of ~250 jets, if that...) that goes with.Something they could never do if it was acknowledged that the threat was so low-not-LO intensity driven that new model purchases of existing airframe types could handle the residual high-end threat with simple system updates (Ram-AAM and powered standoff) while lowering fleet ages, dramatically, as the number one ops/training account cost driver today, where half the spares are reconditioned canbird parts which were first made in the 20th century.The USAF chose to participate in the JSF program because it represented the perceived need of the most expensive possible upgrade for the largest manned force component to keep themselves at the front of the line every fall at the beggar's banquet that is Congressional Conference funding appropriations.Where big money, spent profligately in key states, buys political influence as votes it also ensures military, platform centric, system security. The more you spend, the more people will act on their own behalf as coaligned interests with yours to ensure their little chunk of that expenditure is not taken away.And pilots like that, because it's an entitlement right that comes with a coffee mug that says 'my other office chair is by Martin Baker'. But putting a 10,000lb commitment to a habitation bubble on the front end of the jet is one of the principle retrogrades to military mission performance there is. In drag as fuel burn. In persistence as function of transit mode (fast or slow). In vulnerability to laser weapons and the need to provide pilots ever more augment assistance to their natural visual acuity because the threat comes from afar. In the kinds of structural redunancies and maneuver modes (pitch not yaw, 9G, not 5G…) which add yet more structural weight and fuel weight to support bigger engines.The F-35 was purchased as part of a closed shop union contract labor dispute resolution process. Give us a brand new, not current-year make/model jet or we will leave in even greater numbers than the present PC environment is causing us to. What we are doing to our warrior confidence as readiness is a crime but it doesn't change the fact that you cannot be hostaged to the opinions of an Equestrian Elite Class or your military innovation will choke and fail, becoming hide bound in rutted tracks of expectation which those living-exponents of the doctrine espouse. They will continue justify the system of systems, as they are, to meet their level of understood expertise. And benefit. Rather than cutting trail on new pathway solutions.