"Scott Ferrin" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 4 Mar 2004 18:03:52 -0500, "Kevin Brooks"
wrote:


"Scott Ferrin" wrote in message
.. .

,snip agreeable type stuff


As to the F-22 (Roche's belated addition of "A" being little more
than a sop to congress), yeah, we should produce enough of them to be
our
silver bullet, but unless it is developed to be a better striker as
well,
the 200 number look quite sufficient. Are you really worried about
Chinese
Flankers? With no effective AWACS support for them, and precious
little
tanking support? Not to mention the questionable quality of pilot
training?


If all I had was F-35s? Yep. In a China / Taiwan scenario the
Flankers wouldn't NEED tanking.

Begging the question of how much value *any* of the landbased tactical
fighters would be in such a scenario--I don't see us likely to base
fighters
on Taiwan proper. That places under the the gun of the complete threat
envelope, including TBM's, cruise missiles, SOF attack, etc.


My point is that regradless of where we strike from those Flankers
will be able to be on station without tanking at enough distance that
we'd still have to run the gauntlet to deploy our weapons. Air
delivered that is. I wasn't implying US fighters would be stationed
on Taiwan but then the further away you station the fighters from
where they are needed the more useful supercruise becomes.




IMO the China
scenario, as *unlikely* as it is to actually materialize, is a place
where
the truly long range strike assets, in cooperation with the air wings
from
the USN CVBG's and Tactical Tomahawks launched from CG's and SSN's, would
be
the primary players. Plus, your Flankers are still without good C4ISR
support from AWACS.

Today that is the case. Nothing stays the same forever and China has
already tried to get real AWACS capability from Israel. True they
didn't get it this time but even 80's technology AWACS is nothing to
dismiss.

They have one heck of a learning curve to master.



As far a pilot quality goes all it
would take is for someone over there to determine that they NEED top
of the line pilots and in a few years they could have them.

I believe you are minimizing the requirements to solve that problem. They
would have to finally completely do away with their "mass is the answer"
approach (they have admittedly made progress in that direction, but they
are
not there yet, and won't be in the immediate future), and they have a
problem with their basic foundation (i.e., tactics/techniques/procedures,
qualified instructors and doctrinal developers, and last but not least,
the
PLA's historical mistrust of individual initiative). That is a lot to
have
to contend with before they even *start* developing a world class fighter
force.

Again, hoping China doesn't figure it out isn't the best way to go
IMO.

But neither does committing a larger chunk of resources than is justified by
that particular threat scenario. Firstly, as much as I believe in honoring a
threat (we have to address both the most likely and most dangerous threats,
but not to the *same* degree in terms of resource allocation), China is in
reality a decreasing threat for us, and the more their populace gets plugged
into capitalism and the information age, coupled with their ever increasing
economic ties to Taiwan, the likelihood of this scenario ever playing out
grows ever more dim. Even *if* it were to happen as you are positing here
(China overcomes all of its training and doctrinal shortcomings, buys a
bunch of AWACS and learns how to integrate them into the battle in record
time, etc.), then IMO there is still no real justification for buying more
than 200 or so F-22's. That would be what, maybe seven squadrons worth plus
attrition spares and training birds? Worst case it and you surge up to four
squadrons of F-22's into the AO--maybe they are going to fly long range
operations out of Okinawa and the PI. The F-22 is supposedly so much better
than all comers (including your PLAAF Su-30's) that we don't have to plan to
acheive anything close to a 1:1 parity in terms of raw numbers; plus you
have to toss in the USN contribution (figure a couple of CAW's minimum, with
their Super Bugs and later F-35C's), and you can't forget the Taiwanese
contribution of both F-16's and Mirage 2000's. Those combined forces alone
are enough to swat the PLAAF a rather nasty blow--coupled with the *fact*
that the PLAN/PLA are just not capable of executing and supporting the
required assault operation into Taiwan, I don't see this a very concrete
example of why we need to buy umpteen *more* F-22's for the air dominance
role.

Every conflict that occurs drives home that mass isn't the
answer and that good pilots willing to use initiative and having the
skills to use it is the way to go. Eventually China will figure it
out, it's just a matter of time.

During which time the PRC as an offensive military threat will continue to
diminish (while the PRC as an economic competitor continues to grow).


Look what
the USN did with Top Gun during the Vietnam war. I don't doubt that
in the end we'd still win, but at what cost? We want it to stay as
close to zero loses as possible.

The USN had one heck of a foundation to start out with--the PLAAF does
not.

Not on hand. How hard would it be to invite in some Israeli pilots to
get advice on how China ought to train it's airforce? Or from
somewhere else. The talent is out there and if China ever does put
the pieces together they will be a force to rekon with. Just because
they don't today doesn't mean they never will.

It takes more than just a few trainers. It will take the PLAAF developing an
entirely new paradigm regarding how they operate, from the individual pilot
level all the way up through their air division's and beyond. And that is
going to take some serious time to come together.


Or, is it worth buying *more* F-22's than we really need to ensure
against a
rather remote threat set, while other critical needs go unfilled?

No. That's not what I'm saying. They've got the cap in place and
whatever they can buy with it would likely be sufficient to deal with
the China scenario. I only mention China, not so much because I think
that it's going to happen, but that it's the biggest threat on the
horizon from an air to air perspective. As I pointed out in another
thread, in Desert Storm there were suprisingly few F-15Cs tasked for
patroling air to air in comparison to how many the USAF has. Even the
180 number that has been kicked around would likely be enough. The
fact is though it's apparently been decided that the cost cap that has
been given to the F-22 program is affordable. They should just let
the USAF do with it what they can rather than cancelling the program.
To sum up I don't think MORE is what we need but we do need SOME.

You must have misunderstood my earlier comments--I have not advocated
cancellation of the F-22. Indeed, I believe in the "silver bullet" approach
to their inclusion in the force structure; that 180-200 figure sounds plenty
sufficient to me.



the budget
is not completely elastic--and it appears that it is not going to have
the
largesse we have seen the last couople of years for all that much longer.
How many ground troopies are likely to die in *other*, more likely
scenarios, because we still lack a decent mounted breaching system for
minefields? How many more convoy participants lost to off-route mines
because we don't commit enough money to developing countermeasures
against
that threat? Or, how many strike missions get cancelled because the
tanker
force continues to decline? Ya gotta rob from Peter to pay Paul, and
anything more than the absolute minimal F-22 buy makes a pretty goof
Peter
IMO.

I agree. I'm saying that we shouldn't cancel the F-22. I'm not
saying we need 500 of them :-) Troops are getting wounded and killed
almost every day and they definitely need to solve that problem. The
talk of "let's be transformation and kill heavy armor" scares me
though.

I don't think transformation is directed at merely killing heavy armor. In
fact, a lot of the Army's initial transformational effort has been directed
at the light and medium fighters (i.e., improving personal communications,
battlespace awareness, and individual weapons for the light guys, and of
course the new Stryker BCT's in the medium weight arena). In fact, IMO we
have (rightfully) moved further away from the Cold War focus on armor
killing, as witnessed by the deaths of so many anti-armor systems over the
past few years (SADARM, MLRS with scatterable AT mines, etc.).

Brooks