Has Australia been out-Flanked?

Status
Not open for further replies.

Gekko_1

New Member
Hi guys,

Am I correct in thinking that Australia is being beaten to death in the Fighter arms race?

What I mean is, most of our Asian neighbours either have or are about to acquire one form or another of the Su-27/30 Flanker, these include: China, Indonesian, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam.

The RAAF won’t be getting the JSF for at least another 9 years and our F/A-18’s and F-111’s will surely be operationally ‘worn out’ by then. In the mean time the Flanker could have been significantly upgraded by Russian/Chinese/French/Israeli technology to keep it effective against the F-22.

So are we going to see a time when the RAAF is way behind our Asian neighbours in terms of an effective Fighter?

Also, even if/when we get the JSF, is it effective enough to be able to fill the roles of the F/A-18 and F-111, plus be able to take on any future variants and versions of the Flanker in terms of weapons carriage capability and range?

Cheers

Richard.
 

Rich

Member
Poor old Australia with all those junky Yank made aircraft. Korea, Vietnam, Libya, Israeli/Arab, Gulf-1.....et al All those conflicts where communist bloc warplanes have wiped the skys clean of "made in USA".:rolleyes:

Put it this way. When the F-35s of the RAAF become operational you are going to have the dominant regional air forces.
 

Lanz0r

New Member
I don't like moderen fighter planes any how, theres no sport in guided missiles, we shoud scap all the F-111 and F/A -18's and get some bi-planes, or Spitfires or something with more of a "hold the trigger down till the other fella catches fire"
 

gf0012-aust

Grumpy Old Man
Staff member
Verified Defense Pro
Gekko_1 said:
Am I correct in thinking that Australia is being beaten to death in the Fighter arms race?
Not by a long shot. Outside of Singapores new build F-15's, the HUG-Bugs are the most competent platform in the region. Why would you think that? Look at systems as well as platforms.

Gekko_1 said:
What I mean is, most of our Asian neighbours either have or are about to acquire one form or another of the Su-27/30 Flanker, these include: China, Indonesian, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam.
and that means very little. look at the threat matrix, look at the pilot and system capability and look at the supporting systems - who in our region would constitute an effective threat? - ans = no one.

Gekko_1 said:
The RAAF won’t be getting the JSF for at least another 9 years and our F/A-18’s and F-111’s will surely be operationally ‘worn out’ by then. In the mean time the Flanker could have been significantly upgraded by Russian/Chinese/French/Israeli technology to keep it effective against the F-22.
I think you've been influenced by too much SMH, Kopp and Goon. I'm not going to go into it ad-nauseum again in here- but the above 3 have been caught with their pants down severely in the past for misrepresenting capability against some glaringly obvious factors.

Gekko_1 said:
So are we going to see a time when the RAAF is way behind our Asian neighbours in terms of an effective Fighter?
No, not national policy is to stay ahead of the curve.

Gekko_1 said:
Also, even if/when we get the JSF, is it effective enough to be able to fill the roles of the F/A-18 and F-111, plus be able to take on any future variants and versions of the Flanker in terms of weapons carriage capability and range?
RAAF pilots flying F-35As in Ex Op Agile Endeavour 1 Sim have had no trouble shooting down multiple Su-35s in all the air-to-air engagements - with no losses. More details will be made avail over the next 2-3 weeks, but there is no nervousness at all on our ability to deal with the most modern Sukhois even if they were deployed into our region. Su-27's are certainly not seen as a viable threat as there are a number of advantages purely at the platform level - let alone battlespace level. Su-30's, although accorded more respect, still don't warrant the kind of idiotic pressure that some of these clowns are creating - they do have their own agendas. Again I don't want to rewrite and copy everything thats been debunked in the past - as its quite substantial.

Let me make it kind of obvious. Some of the people who are making a big song and dance about Sukhoi emerging threats etc don't have the security clearances and thus access to all info about platform capability. In the harshest of terms, they are internet warriors only able to scrape data together from the internet and publicly cleared sources. In other words - they have NFI. Drawing impressive graphs and collating nice photos with an overstated text does not make someone an expert - esp when they don;t have the clearances to get access to real useful data.
 

gf0012-aust

Grumpy Old Man
Staff member
Verified Defense Pro
Lanz0r said:
I don't like moderen fighter planes any how, theres no sport in guided missiles, we shoud scap all the F-111 and F/A -18's and get some bi-planes, or Spitfires or something with more of a "hold the trigger down till the other fella catches fire"
Huh? a fat lot of good a gun is going to be against a target that you could slot at 100km. To use the cowboy analogy, why go into a knife fight when you can shoot someone from 1km away?

We have responsibility to protect and police 1/9th of the worlds major oceans and waterways - restricting our capability is lunacy

If we can see aircraft entering our airspace at 2000+km via JORN etc, then you could assume that we aren't going to wait for them to get in gun range before we remove them.

Warfighting is not about sport - this isn't the days of Biggles and Snoopy - people actually get killed protecting national interests. The idea is to win the war - not get caught up in some game of aerial tennis.
 

tphuang

Super Moderator
the fact that the Russians are offering su-30s to Thailand for chickens should calm anyone who is getting nervous about the flanker prowess. Bottomline, su-35 hasn't managed to get close to the final round of a bidding competition that contains other advanced fighters like F-15, typhoon and Rafale despite price advantage and generous ToT offers. It saddens me that certain people would use the recent Indonesian purchase of su-30mkk as a sign of arms race. Despite the aggressive sukhoi marketting and constant re-designation of the flanker to have bigger numbers (27 to 30 to 35 to who knows what), the best it can probably do in the future is the current capability of F-15E. I'm not saying they are there right now, but rather they probably will get there when the Americans are mass producing JSF.

Basically, Australia has no worries.
 

gf0012-aust

Grumpy Old Man
Staff member
Verified Defense Pro
tphuang said:
It saddens me that certain people would use the recent Indonesian purchase of su-30mkk as a sign of arms race.
Esp seeing that the poor old Indons don't even have missiles for them, they're a guns only platform.

As for their future 48, I can't see that happening. Their economy is stuffed and Aust has donated the equiv of $1.25bn in aid money to help them through recent crisis. They have no money for warfighting.

On top of which, they are very keen to get access back into US platforms, I'd suggest that they are manouvreing for US platforms so as to attract US FMS aid as well as reconstruction monies.

Relationships between Aust and Malaysia have improved since the retirement of Matahir, and Vietnam and Aust have a very strong relationship that has built up over the last 12 years. Then there is the FPDA.

Thailand is a long term political ally and has had australian advisers in place for the last 5 years at some significant levels of govt - and they have very close links to the King. Thailand has also accepted donor F-16's from Singapore - and trains regularly with Aust in DACT.

I could go on.... but this nonesense about an asian arms race in region ignores a lot of issues that were prevalent prior to the economic meltdown in region circa 1997
 

MIGleader

New Member
Australia may have been out-flanked, but its not in a corner yet. Even if all these naeighbors do have more advanced aircraft, its not like they intend to use them on Australia any time in the near future. Thus, the country has plenty of time to wait for its JSF's, though im not sure how a downgraded one might hold agaisnt an upgraded flanker.
 

gf0012-aust

Grumpy Old Man
Staff member
Verified Defense Pro
MIGleader said:
Australia may have been out-flanked, but its not in a corner yet. Even if all these naeighbors do have more advanced aircraft, its not like they intend to use them on Australia any time in the near future.
The issue is that there would have to be a rapid and dramatic change of relationship for deterioration to occur to the point of going to war. All of the countries that some people get frantic about actually engage in military exercises, are negotiating for military exercises or are conflict neutral to us. The bottom line is that talking up the regional Su-27nn and Su-3nn-nn as a threat is pretty removed from reality.

MIGleader said:
Thus, the country has plenty of time to wait for its JSF's, though im not sure how a downgraded one might hold agaisnt an upgraded flanker.
Contrary to press reports - and publicly denied last week - australia is not getting downgraded capability - neither is the UK. again, its important to understand the local personalities who were involved in writing those articles - they were, quite frankly not in a position to know, misunderstood the answers they were given, and actually don't have the right access at both the security level and contact level to know the facts. On top of that the articles were replete with errors, and they deliberately skewed the comments. Not good serious military journalism. Thats why its important to understand the authors - and their motives.

as for upgraded Flankers - there has been extensive modelling done against Su-35's - and to date the JSF has more than held its own.

I'm hoping that some more detail will be available soon - but, as it is, release of info is going to hit the public domain in 2-3 weeks.
 

Whiskyjack

Honorary Moderator / Defense Professional / Analys
Verified Defense Pro
If you look at the air forces closest to Australia and say IF they were to threaten Australia (and that is a very very BIG if for all of them) how much of a threat would they be now then the answer is pretty much none. The most capable is Singapore and that is not structured to threaten at long range.

As for the rest I may be going out on a limb here but with the exception of Indonesia none have the range to fly over any Australian cities and Indonesia which is close enough to does not have the equipment, training or infrastructure to actually be a threat!

In 10 years time I don’t think that the situation will be much different. In most scenarios I can think of it is most likely that these nations will be allies and the RAAF would deploy into them to help defend them from any external threat.
 

alexsa

Super Moderator
Staff member
Verified Defense Pro
This is definately third had information but; I understand from a mate who is an ex-RAAF jock that the Russian aircraft, while potent, are a bit of a maintenace handful and in real operations the engine are pretty short lived.

The other fact IMHO is these aircraft are still a generation behind and all the thrust vectoring and engine power is not worth a damn if you don't have a clear picture, i.e. know here the bad guy is before flying into hostile airspace and, more importantly, be able to see him before he sees you when you do.

Just a comment from a complete novice.
 

gf0012-aust

Grumpy Old Man
Staff member
Verified Defense Pro
alexsa said:
This is definately third had information but; I understand from a mate who is an ex-RAAF jock that the Russian aircraft, while potent, are a bit of a maintenace handful and in real operations the engine are pretty short lived.
the russians were keen to flog off Su-27's to aust about 5 years ago. so we do have an idea about serviceability issues - plus the US has a pair of Su-27's - and we get access to some other data.

we do know that atypically, the russian service and maint rates are a min of 3 times higher than a typical western equiv - and sometimes its 4 times higher.

couple that with the pretty tragic track record of sukhoi (and mikoyan) not being able to provide critical parts on time (and this has been exp by both malaysia and indonesia) - and we get a pretty good feel of overall system reliability.
 

abramsteve

New Member
Not being an expert, but would it be safe to say that the standards of the Indonesian Air force would be well below that of the RAAF? If so then surely them operating matainence intensive aircraft is a mistake. In this case maybe we have very little to fear from a small number of poorly maintained aircraft. It may be our saving grace.

This is a bit off track but would the Grippen have been a better choice for them?
 

vinnanater

New Member
gf0012-aust said:
...Contrary to press reports - and publicly denied last week - australia is not getting downgraded capability - neither is the UK. again, its important to understand the local personalities who were involved in writing those articles - ......
Yep, I know a lot of people working on the JSF, including foreign nationals from the various partner countries, so far there has been no talk about "downgraded" equipment for the partner countries...if there is such a thing...it is a "super duper top secret" so much so, that the people who are working on the airplane are unaware of it ;). The only thing that is ever talked about is that all potential customers have unique requirements, and the planes will be fitted to the CUSTOMERS' unique requirements, Ofcourse, this has to be within reason...and are you the customer willing to pay for that "unique" requirement.
 

Cootamundra

New Member
abramsteve said:
Not being an expert, but would it be safe to say that the standards of the Indonesian Air force would be well below that of the RAAF? If so then surely them operating matainence intensive aircraft is a mistake. In this case maybe we have very little to fear from a small number of poorly maintained aircraft. It may be our saving grace.
Well below would be an understatement and it has nothing to do with patriotism. They have no weapons for starters, they have no force multipliers to go one step further and at prsent they hardly have enough $$$ to fly them in training - so to be frank the Indo AF and the RAAF are not even in the same league

abramsteve said:
This is a bit off track but would the Grippen have been a better choice for them?
Yes, if they had the money to buy Grippens and weapons to operate from the platform.
 

Whiskyjack

Honorary Moderator / Defense Professional / Analys
Verified Defense Pro
Guys, I can’t help but be a wee bit frustrated by the threads that turn into platform based discussions. Quite a few of you will know what I mean:
‘this tank, fighter, missile, ship, sub etc…is better than this one.’
‘we have 100, you only have 50’

The simple fact is that for an air force (or any military force/unit) to conduct combat operations, effective combat operations is extremely difficult and most underrated ability. It has taken me years to pick this fact up. Fondly I remember the days where I thought fighters roared across the sky and dropped bombs, shot missiles etc.
Never thought about the following things (I’ll restrict my comments to Aircraft as this is the theme of the thread.):

1. Training, how many hours a year do the pilots fly and exercise? How realistic is the training? Do they train against other aircraft, ships GBAD? I think NATO standard is 180 hrs (?) not many achieve that. If you are flying in a coalition with allies, have you trained with them? Do you use the same tactics? Logistics? etc…
2. Critical mass of aircraft. For every 1 aircraft on operations I estimate that you need 1.5 to 2 other aircraft that will be in maintenance, training other pilots and used as attrition replacement. So for 12 aircraft on deployment there will be around 18 at home. Now consider that 12 aircraft a reasonable distance from the targets can probably sortie 10 aircraft per day. Now think about how many aircraft you need to support those 10 aircraft, fighter escort, SEAD, AWACS, Tankers, ECM (if you are lucky enough to have these support aircraft), which also need to be protected. Then you need your base protected just in case the enemy is mounting the same sort of strike. How many aircraft do you need now? You may be in a coalition, but that has problems as well (see 1).
3. Logistics. If you aircraft is forward deployed to another airbase/country etc, can you maintain the logistics to keep up combat operations. Fuel, ammunition, spare parts etc.. will be needed in great numbers. It may be a long supply line, is it secure? What resources do you need to make it secure? Are there decent war stocks as more may not be forthcoming!
4. Intel/Recon/planning, you have to find the targets, monitor damage, plan missions in enough time to hit the non-fixed targets, what is the threat level? GBAD? Fighters? What is the safe route in and out? Is there a secondary target if the first is not acquired? What about collateral damage around the target areas? What ordinance should be used?

There is much more I have not even touched upon!

Just because a country is buying an aircraft does not threaten anyone. The cheaper the purchase price the less threat. The greater the price usually means training, spares, war stock and a more prepared air force.

Spleen vented please continue
 

alexsa

Super Moderator
Staff member
Verified Defense Pro
Cootamundra said:
Yes, if they had the money to buy Grippens and weapons to operate from the platform.
This appears to be the nub of the issue. some of the 'cheaper' Russian equipment is bloody (can we now use that word) expensive to operate and maintain while aircraft like the Grippen cost more to purchase but much less to operate. From an economics perspective perhaps we should look at whole of life costs on expected flying hours rather than the initial cost of the airframe.
 

Cootamundra

New Member
Whiskyjack said:
Guys, I can’t help but be a wee bit frustrated by the threads that turn into platform based discussions. Blah, blah, blah......Spleen vented please continue
I couldn't agree more Whiskey - not to mention the fact that all these questions have been discussed ad naseum in other threads. In fact the F-111 thread and the F-35 thread both have multiple pages listing all of this stuff. I think gf said as much in his responses:eek:
Cheers, Coota
 

Whiskyjack

Honorary Moderator / Defense Professional / Analys
Verified Defense Pro
Cootamundra said:
I couldn't agree more Whiskey - not to mention the fact that all these questions have been discussed ad naseum in other threads. In fact the F-111 thread and the F-35 thread both have multiple pages listing all of this stuff. I think gf said as much in his responses:eek:
Cheers, Coota
Yeah, well what ya gonna do? Round and Round we go. :cool:
 

gf0012-aust

Grumpy Old Man
Staff member
Verified Defense Pro
Whiskyjack said:
Yeah, well what ya gonna do? Round and Round we go. :cool:
if you want to sort the stayers from the players then talk about logistics. ;)

quite a few threads in here would empty faster than free beer going off at a wharfies picnic.

although to be fair - the number of people in here who just look at bright shiny planes and ships and think that it equals capability has dropped dramtically...
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top