THS,
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The F-22 and F-35 is supposed to work in conjunction!
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Actually, the F-22 and the Agile Falcon were supposed to 'work in conjunction' with the latters Big Wing designed to give it both added stores options (FSX like) in the air to mud role. And the ability to play well above the tropopause where the ATF was designed from the outset to 'achieve dominance'.
The F-35 is a relative Johnny Come Lately player that owes as much to the failure of the USN to eventuate a workable AX (as the F/A-18E/F) which was appropriate to the 21st century and the equally stalled nature of the ASTOVL (as a replacement for the Harrier which is a mankiller and a budget eater) as for any _Common Affordable Lightweight Fighter_ which the USAF saw as LO + 2-4 AAM in a post-2000 followon to the F-16.
So while the JSF may well be a 'Golden CALF' there is no question that the very notion of a 'light weight supplemental fighter' is itself neither akin to the F-35s current justified premise nor anything but highly dated relative to the original spec.
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This concept will allow the F-22 to be a tactical reserve in the air:
When the F-35 gets into trouble either on an Air-Ground mission or Air-Air mission, it has to stay alive till the Raptor arrives at the scene at full supercruise - a great advantage of high speed for the F-35 is the ability to get out of there - fast.
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While it is true that the USAF designs more to a 'fast in and out' concept (Mach .9 - 1.2 or better in the target area) so that they can get back to the o'club for steaks and a beer. Even while the USN has to sacrifice some up and away performance for the decklanding and marshal stack fuel reserve; it is not true that the F-35A/B/C will drive this more towards a common threshold performance level. Because they are three different airframes sharing only a 'joint' name.
Certainly none will have more than about half the F-22s mission area perfomance.
For the STOVL this is because 'even with the SWIP' (yes, they really did use that term again...;-), the operating weight is embarrassingly close to that of the F-35C on a 460ft wing with 12-14,000lbs of gas. So that both induced drag and total endradius useable fuel margins to fight it with throttle setting argue against any useful speed margin in entering/exiting a target area as part of a joint force package op.
For the CVTOL (CATOBAR) model, this is because, while it will have 18,900lbs of fuel. To do so with a useful bring back margin will require a 620square foot wing area (i.e. more than an F-15) whose wetted area will increase total parasite drag enormously.
That said, there is a real need to question whether the idea of 'fast into the target area and faster out' is as relevant as a definition of 'good Mach' as it once was.
Specifically, it is likely that the F-22 is NOT designed (or at least best employed) to 'dash in' as leadsweep the last 150nm to a target and just /sit there/ holding the door open while the package dawdles along as best it can behind.
Any more than the Raptor is designed to accompany them 'all the way' as a shotgun escort.
Because it doesn't pay to flash aspect to every aperture out there while you hurry up and do nothin'. Because a Raptor doesn't need to exercise a TARCAP option when gliding IAM can themselves fly 50+nm. And because the F119s are tailored to truly high altitude operations which renders subsonic cruise cruise (even on an 840 square foot wing) 'problematic' as a Cheetah pacing a Tortoise race.
This dichotomy of performance values, along with modern weapons systems engineering and true LO than enables basic fence penetration unescorted further suggests that perhaps the entire nature of 'what is fast and what is good about it' must be rezeroed to a new datum not of distance but of time. And specifically the gas to support a given segment of mission flight at 'best sustained = shortest interval' persistent duration.
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This concept of tactical reserve in the air is the true leap forward - stealth is fine: No need to advertise your nefarious intend - but the real progress is rewriting air tactics.
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Except that (though it has been done, F-15 to F-117) you really don't want to monkey about with missiles across or through a friendly strike package, if only because of the TOF delays getting the round out puts the bait goat at extended risk. And frankly, it makes more sense to create a scenario which in fact _does not_ encourage an opponent to come up after the weakest targets but rather to avoid 'the best of the best' in a superior LO and cruise point envelope defeat of acquisition as much as engagement.
Given that Air Supremacy is itself a dying art relative to the number of sorties flown vs. kills made, why not minimize the importance of the mission even further through fewer vulnerable coverage zones that /require/ an supercruise-as-LRAAM effect? Indeed, if it's a fight you're looking for, the latter role could just as readily be 'real thing' done by F-teens playing sniper rifle in a shopping cart (Meteor as a 100nm weapon. Turbo-AAM as a 200-250nm weapon). The stealth assets dropping on whatever LRSAM comes up to snipe them in turn.
Which brings up another problem: Stealth as 'No See'em Too Good' is a threshold counter-detection technology not an absolute. As such, and again /particularly/ relative to the number of S2A vs. A2A shots taken, you cannot abstractly ignore the fact that NEITHER the F-35 NOR the F-22 have powered-IAM options to gain chicken-kills when popup engaged by area SAM operating in a cued or EO mode.
Yet the F-22 can, on its own, fly high and fast enough to stress the S-300/400 class WEZ flyout, sustaining 9G turns and reverse immelman slant defeats well above 40,000ft and Mach 1.5. Something the F-35 cannot match.
In this, you are further crippled by the fact (_Ultimate Fighter_, Sweetman) that the F-35 IS NOT able to carry a second missile in it's primary weapons bay, the JDAM well /never/ being assigned that capability in clearing the AVEL through the slipstream. So that, even assuming AMRAAM can take up the capability gap being left by HARM (as a Mach 3 IAM if not actual antiradiation weapon), you either have a wide-bay missileer amongst the sheep.
Or you simply don't send the sheep into wolf country and expect them to 'self defend' against both air and ground threats.
It DOES NOT mean that the F-22 is 'improved' by the presence of the F-35 however. Because the F-22 can theoretically carry 4 GBU-39 /and/ four AIM-120-as-DRM.
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The F-15/F-16 did something like it on occasion; but the coverage of the F-15 was not big enough to use the concept to its full potential.
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Teenie Fighter Hi-Lo is vastly overrated and largely based on the 70s/80s notion of 'doing the best you could' (smart airplane, dumb munitions) with inadequate standoff A2G munitions and SARH plus primitive EID in the BVR intercept roles. The resulting 'incomplete cleanup' (low initial SSKP leading to compressed weapon TOF geometry) of radar threats forcing a WVR followup engagement which the swing-bombers naturally played into because they themselves had to close to visual on a predictable ground target.
Further to this, teen hi-lo doesn't work in bad weather.
Because the detection and seeker thresholds don't give you enough point-and-click options to resolve the fight ahead of the 3/9 before becoming commited to a turning fight which, against superior numbers and/or residual threat radar weapons platforms, makes you a ready saddled victim. Particularly given that 'lo' means single seat, the workload can also skyrocket to the extent that you are also unable to both navigate and attack what is undoubtedly a 'multirole' mission tasking to which you are never optimized by training or technical aids.
In a fully populated IADS teen hi-lo also doesn't work.
Because you will, without doubt, be skulking below the primary radar S2A threat floor of say 1,000-1,500ft, right in the heart of the trashfire with neither the gas nor the radar modes to terrain follow at speed. Indeed, here the 'hi' end is just as incompetent as the lo by virtue of being 'single mission optimized' to the point where it cannot even fire self-defense ARM and so can be driven off high perch completley. Again leaving the lo jet vulnerable to opfor radar or vectored intercept engagement.
Teen hi-lo doesn't work in a 'swing role' context.
Because despite all the hooplah, when threat air is sighted, the bombs DO COME OFF, even on an F-16. Or you are just another victim. The sole alternative to which is 'scaling the radar fight' to a platform which is so 'lo' small that it cannot accomodate systems which could be rapidly and effectively (AIM-7MR or Active Skyflash) integrated with the hi platform. The major difference here being that operation over it's own IADS doesn't necessarily penalize the other team for altitude/airspeed/lookdown first shot effects in ramping down to cut off and butcher the 'swing' bomber as or even before it hit's IP as a fully laden airframe.
Here too, the MiG-23 may have sucked raw buttermilk as an 'energy maneuverability' angles fighter but it could run like skunk and had /enough/ (BVR X2, WVR X4) missiles to do the blow through attack with a vengeance.
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To avoid misunderstanding: By coverage I mean speed AND range. No use if you only arrive to attend the funeral nor getting nowhere fast.
It might have worked in the confined airspace over Southern Denmark.
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Fighting the Russians over Continental Europe and particularly the plains of Germany and the Low Countries was an exercise in futility like unto the jagdwaffen intercepting bombers 'only over the Reich'. Given surprise as the WARPACs best option, none of the USAFE bases east of the Rhine will survive the first five minutes of the war and nothing from TAC is going to make it over before the issue is settled.
In this 'range at speed' is all about a 300-350nm radius with F-15s out of England, Southern France or Italy, meeting tankers prior to running full bore (max Pole) sweeps over a CAS war in support of ground forces (i.e. Purist Anti Air vs. Threat Air divided by two target classes) and then coming back out and home to a secure basing mode. Sprinted burner time for best best-geometry set your range-at-cruise efficiencies more than anything here because the tanker can pass a lot of gas and, even at .9 Mach, you are only seldom more than an hour out from base and perhaps 10 minutes from an 'emergency divert' at CNA if not Bitburg.
Yet for the F-22, the definition of 'range at speed' is probably somewhere between 600 and 800nm, /even before/ it reaches the target area. Thus the ability to maintain there-and-back-again sortie rates of any use at all requires conserving those self same tankers to the smallest possible mission force and going supersonic, not just for the attack phase but for most of the radius, out and back.
A large part of which is inherent to the ability to hit best Mach/altitude profile cruise point (as an extended Viking type zoom) without Rutowski or fuel-light climbouts and multiple tanker rendezvous descents and step climbs enroute.
i.e. To a Raptor, it is likely that supercruise is a one-way course segment /before/ topoff and entry to the target area.
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Finally: Supersonic speed is most usefull in getting to the target. When a pair of F-104G's were scrambled from Aalborg in the old day to intercept an impertinent WAPA - it was in full burner. The small distances and high level of alert made a practical procedure.[/quote]
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The Zipper is a one man airliner at speed. Indeed, it's useful payload fraction is so minimalistic as to be /unable/ to generate supercruise (some 500nm after a 200nm sprint up phase) with a useful weapon load. Not so the Raptor.
Coupled to the (LO) eliminated requirement to wait while everybody takes their turn at the tanker teat before pushing means, a dual-mission loadout of dense standoff munitions means that while the F-22 may use twice the fuel which an F-35 might require; it's 'all good' gas dropping bombs rather than singing with the choir to guard a separate mission entity against a non existent threat.
Indeed, if an F-15E can release an SDB from 30,000ft, subsonically, and hit a target 55nm downrange-
http://www.boeing.com/news/releases/2005/q2/nr_050601m.html
Then an F-22 should be able to manage to drop on targets as much as 80-100nm away, despite being nominally restricted from topend release Mach numbers due to safe separation and bay flow field penetration. At that point, it becomes /useless/ to envision a conventional package + raid corridor system because the number of targets covered (vs. the number of possible hostile baselanes) is /enormous/.
Minimalistic standoff support jamming itself probably requiring a large array asset such as the B-52 or RQ-4 mod which, being themselves 'endurance' platforms, will not impinge much on strike fuel.
Stealth doesn't work without supercruise because too few assets get into the target area and ALL are vulnerable to long-slant SAM as much as pursuit intercept at the end of a radius where they cannot afford to waste a drop of gas. But stealth with supercruise AND standoff munitions translates to, not 150nm 'in and out', but 600nm -as leg segments- of a 3hr/1,600nm total sortie duration. So that the fuel that pushes the performance point is conserved by the very low number of mission area airframes you send over the fence.
And it is that definition of persistent 'To The Target And Back!' speed of transit, threat onset and recovery speed that the F-35 in particular will never match as 30+19+5 thousand pound EEW/Fuel/Munition massed monster being pushed along by a mere 27,000lbst military thrust engine.
Riccioni and The LWF Mafia be hanged.
Once you put /priority on the gas/ in a way that lets a Raptor complete a full mission evolution across that 600-800nm radius with as many as 3-5 sorties per airframe flying day while hitting eight targets (BRU-61 w/ GBU-39) per airframe per sortie. The numbers start to 'inverse force multiply'. So that you can push 100 Raptors through an 3200 DMPI surge window (4 sorties X8 GBU-39 X100 airframes) on a continuous rotation of 1-2 sections every hour or so (giving the endurant ISR drones time to relocate between mission areas and develop new target folders full of valid aimpoints).
Whereas 250 F-35s with the same load on the same radius /might/ manage 1.5, 7-10hr, sorties per day (and could only do so on a highly predictable 'raid window' of every 6-9 hours during which TCT live targeting would expire as rapidly as it was generated.). Thus coming up with some 1.5 X 8 X 250 or 3000 DMPIs.
Again assuming all their enablers 'come together' with perfect choreography to make radius with disparate mission platform range performance thresholds on what may well be 5 rather than 1.5 times the total number of required (force) tanker hookups. More a drag than a target area topoff.
Indeed, the real question then becomes: "If the F-22 is the GSTF kicker force that holds the door open 'until legacy platforms can flow in', exactly how big an enemy are you facing as can soak that kind of heavy precision attack and still /require/ a followon commitment?"
The F-22 is not the be all/end all of strike warfare mission systems. Because it cannot stick around to generate targeting for hours on end of empty-sack sanitized battlespace and then 'engage as it finds' them, instantly.
But especially now that the Blk.20 spiral upgrade is finally bringing SAR and Small IAM to the basic 'Air Dominance' mission role, it is far more suited to OUR kind of offensive expeditionary airpower needs (fustest with the mostest as a logistical pallet loads deployment and standup problem) than the F-35 represents.
CONCLUSION:
Probably the heart of the bad joke in all this is that the USAF _knew_ what they were doing when they began the MMTD effort that eventuated the SDB back in 1998. Heck, they may even have 'known' when they selected the F119 over the YF120 back in 1991. And yet it is the combination of extreme standoff, multiple fire and forget air to mud and LO in a -SMALLER FORCE STRUCTURE NOT AIRFRAME- which ultimately renders idiotic the notion of 'better cheap in mass quantities than capable in just enough numbers' that the JSF program effort continues to represent itself as being $olution$ To Problem$ intended to meet.
Because the solution is in the better bullet and the scoped ability to hit with it, not the rifle which carries it like a clip.
That we should have sat up and begun raised brow questioning this fool-and-his-money logic when USN and USMC decided to chop their 'must have naval LO!' requirements by half in their 2001 'Modernizing Tactical Airpower' budget planning statement is a given. That we /really/ needed to get with the ball when the KC-135 replacement program was first halved in size and then put off indefinitely is equally certain (more bombers = more gas pass required).
That we continue to plod along towards JSF first flight as an SDD-given excuse to production ramp up when BOTH modern day economics and warfighter doctrine does not support it as more than a pocket force of very high cost and limited combat utility truly irks me.
Because it means that we are whoring a for-export system whose numbers will be /fewer/ in the hands of regional users than are now total-force represented as (A: 2,400 becomes 1,200. B: 680 becomes 240. C: 450 becomes 170.) being 'less necessary' for our own services. One should never sell a sensitive system for purposes of 'securing alliances' (profiteering death and destruction) through less capability than we have yielded up as necessary to our own forces.
Indeed, if the JSF is 'half as needful a thing' as it once was. Then it's time to ask if 'half as few again, twice as good' from our standing Raptor line can generate a more believable force construct of 500 landbased tacair platforms to match to 100 tankers. And leave open the door for a followon.
IMO, given that _neither uber jet_ is adequate to the task of an Iraq or Afg context COIN fight and -only- the F-22 is truly functional in a D1/R1, high intensity, mission era of longrange expeditionary ops the only answer to JSF production can be not only NO! BUT HELL NO!.
The real danger then being that the F-35/F-22 presumption of 'conjunctive synergy' is itself a straw man designed to be debunked. The 'proof' of inability to work the same design-to-task mission profile thus being spinnable to mean they are in fact 'not compatible' as a joint warfighter. Something I'm sure will become any-excuse-in-a-tight-budget environment obvious to a whole lotta Tactical Aviators as being not necessarily the best doctrine but 'the most flexible one' (in saving their collective job descriptions).
The UCAV, as usual, is the median 'no air threat, no fighter definition need' answer. The true 'lo' end of a force which can now win air battles almost exclusively BVR and for which both urgently necessary endurance and total protective signature baseline (electro optical as well as RF) is far more readily optimized in a low-agility platform. But despite the obvious of another writeoff in Iraq thanks largely to imperfect airpower 'as is', nobody can handle the notion of the Sky Knight aristocracy being so readily replaceable as an image driven as much as pragmatic solution to our airpower needs 'for the next war'.
KPl.
