SAF don't be fooled by US!!!
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GLOBAL REPORT / FINANCIAL TIMES
I feel Eurofighter is the best choice for next generation. F15 so old designed.
Air Force's Top Fighter Is Brought Down to Earth
By Peter Spiegel, Financial Times
It started as one of the dozens of military exercises the Pentagon conducts with friendly governments each year, operations that are as much about bilateral diplomacy as about testing military capabilities.
But the exercise carried out in February, involving mock combat between the U.S. and Indian jet fighters over the skies of Madhya Pradesh in central India, has taken on a life of its own. The reason? The U.S. lost.
Not only did the U.S. aircraft lose, but they lost repeatedly. According to one member of Congress who was briefed on the exercise, the U.S. Air Force's top-of-the-line fighter, the F-15 Eagle, was defeated more than 90% of the time in simulated dogfights with Indian pilots.
As a result, reports on the exercise have not only reached the highest levels of the Pentagon and Capitol Hill but have traveled around the world to military procurement agencies in Singapore and South Korea.
As details have gradually leaked out, the exercise has become one of the prime topics of gossip at air shows and arms fairs around the world. It also has opened a rare window into the overlapping loyalties and increasingly cut-throat competition that mark military procurement in an age of shrinking defense budgets.
The exercise, known as Cope India, was conceived almost two years ago as part of thawing relations between New Delhi and Washington.
Some Pentagon officials saw improved diplomatic ties with democratic India as a way to balance the growing strength of communist China. It was the first combat training exercise between the two air forces in more than 40 years.
But U.S. planners also had an important goal: Air Force pilots had never had the chance to go up against the Su-30 Flanker, the latest Russian-built fighter designed by Sukhoi. India began acquiring Su-30s in 1997.
Many of the details of Cope India remain classified. Accounts conflict: Some say the F-15s lacked the Air Force's most sophisticated radar, others that the Indians used special helmet-mounted targeting systems unavailable to U.S. pilots and still others that the Americans were outnumbered at least 2 to 1.
Whatever the reasons, the Air Force, which took delivery of its first F-15 in 1974, might normally be expected to keep such a defeat under wraps. But in recent weeks, senior officers have begun leaking information about the exercise, freely admitting their technical inferiority.
"We may not be as far ahead of the rest of the world as we once thought we were," said Gen. Hal M. Hornburg, head of the Air Combat Command.
The reason for the sudden candor has little to do with the F-15 and much more to do with another aircraft: the F/A-22 Raptor, a new stealthy combat jet that the Air Force is desperate to save from congressional and Pentagon budget-cutters.
The $72-billion program has come under fire from those who say the U.S. no longer needs a fighter originally designed to fight the next generation of Soviet MiGs. So senior officers have decided that the risks of revealing the inadequacies of the F-15 are outweighed by the opportunity to convince the government to keep buying the higher-priced fighter.
"Something like Cope India, when we find that some of our advantages aren't as great as we thought they might be, leads me to remind people that we need to modernize our air-to-air capability," Hornburg said.
Lockheed-Martin, the prime contractor on the F/A-22, has been more than happy to play along. In recent briefings, senior executives have made thinly veiled references to Cope India.
"The bottom line is, the U.S. no longer has a technological combat advantage, based on aircraft versus aircraft," said Ralph Heath, the Lockheed executive who oversees the F/A-22 program.
It would seem only natural that the F/A-22's largest subcontractor, Boeing, would play along too, except for one problem: Boeing makes the F-15. The company recently won a competition to produce F-15s for South Korea and is engaged in a heated contest to build 20 for the Singapore air force. "We were concerned," said George Muellner, head of Boeing's programs for the Air Force.
In an effort to save the F-15 from the Pentagon's self-inflicted wounds, Gen. John Jumper, the Air Force chief of staff, briefed Singapore officials on the Indian exercise. Singapore, which also is looking at the Eurofighter and the French Rafale, has reason to be worried: China has bought the Su-30, as have Malaysia and Indonesia.
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F 15 is damn zai wtf.
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Damn zai in sorties with minimum chance of contact rate.Originally posted by the.raven:F 15 is damn zai wtf.
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what u mean?Originally posted by ditzy:Damn zai in sorties with minimum chance of contact rate. -
Hi, I would also like to point out that the USAF , in actual warfare, fights using a network centric principle. Meaning to say, there are other combat elements deployed and linked up together with its fighter aircraft to enable its fighters to gain advantage over the enemy.
An example is the E-3 Awacs (Airborne Early Warning aircraft). The E3 is teamed with a pair or more of F-15s. The E3 radar looks out more than 2x further than the F15 on-board radar. In actual warfare, the F15 can launch its AIM 120 long range missile in a "fire and forget" mode, hand over control of the AIM 120 to the E3, who then directs the missile onto the enemy figther from a large standoff distance. Note that the F15 in theory can fire salvoes of up to 8 such missiles, and each of these can be individually controlled by the E3. The enemy aircraft (SU or MIG) would never see who fired !
Another combat element that the USAF will deploy are the EW aircraft. Electronic Warfare aircraft. EW aircraft use high power transmission devices to broadcast signals to disrupt or blind the enemy's radar and radio reception. Enemy is blind or in some cases deceived by false targets that are transmitted by the EW aircraft. The SU or MIG will not see the F 15 or sees the F15 in a false direction. Missile launches and the SU/ MIG goes down without knowing what hit them.
The thing that the F15 and even the F 16 will avoid is a one on one dog fight. The new generation SUs are aerodynamically superior to the F15... one is developed some 20 years later than the other. Also, the risk averseness of the pilots in the dog fight will come into play. Who is the more daring to push his aircraft to the limits to get an edge on the opponent??? Western trained pilots are taught safety as a prime consideration, agrressiveness is secondary.