However, Bronk added, most Western air forces have concluded that the usage of thrust vectoring for an edge in a dogfight is generally not worth the extra cost, weight and complexity, given “most modern dogfighting missiles have lock-on-after-launch capabilities, 50 G turn rates and relatively large no-escape zones.”
That was a DefenseNews article on China’s J-10B fighter aircraft. It has thrust vectoring which increases its ability to turn.The new stealthy J-20 seems to be adding that capability too.
Unlike the America’s F-22, the F-35 doesn’t have thrust vectoring. But worry not! Us Westerners think it’ll all be missile engagements, no gun-shooting dogfights here.
Well, that’s also what they said when developing the F-4 Phantom II in 1958. Here’s one article describing what happened later in Vietnam:
The aerial dogfight was not supposed to happen. On May 20, 1967, eight U.S. Air Force F-4C fighters were patrolling over North Vietnam when they spotted as many as 15 enemy MiG-17 fighters a short distance away…
But the Air Force had assumed that wouldn’t be a problem — that its then-brand-new twin-seat F-4s would never even get into a close-range dogfight. Instead, the F-4s — and other Air Force and Navy fighters — would always destroy their enemies from long range, using the Sparrow and other air-to-air missiles.
It was a flawed and dangerous assumption that got scores of American aviators shot down over Vietnam. But 49 years later, the Air Force is assuming the same thing … with regards to its new F-35 stealth fighter…
The F-35A has an internally mounted gun (because it’s supposed to replace the A-10), the F-35B and C variants have an external pod. Unfortunately they don’t seem to work.
What’s worse is that it appears that the F-35 got dogged in a dogfight against an F-16.
The point here isn’t to debate the merits of the F-35. But we should be worried about the rigid biases in weapons choice. Air Force command has an ingrained culture about stealth, missiles, speed, and so forth, which denies the relevance of agility and dogfighting. It turns out they were wrong before. Perhaps they are right this time. But then it’ll be some other technology or concept that they missed entirely.
It took an amazing act of defiance by John Boyd and the fighter mafia for us to get highly maneuverable fighters in the 1970s, including the F-16, F-18, and the F-15. The F-15 was supposed to be swing-wing behemoth like the poor performing F-111 until Boyd came around. The F-16 and A-10 weren’t even wanted by the Air Force, nor did the Navy originally want the F-18.
What is needed is an acquisition process that budgets to individuals (like a Program Executive Officer) with potentially non-consensual ideas. They should be able to have wide latitude, so long as they produce results that can be tested. If the new system dogs the old in practice, and it is cheaper to maintain, then it should be put into the force structure regardless of cultural biases towards particular systems.
As Karl Popper recommends, we come up with ideas by conjecture then rigorously test them and discard the failures. We attempt to falsify ideas using experiment. We do not reject conjectures out of hand because of our personal biases. Yet such biases decide program requirements independent of technological evidence.
What is most worrying is not China’s planes, but their rapid ability to prototype and learn.
Meanwhile, high-resolution photos taken at Zhuhai reveal the low-rate initial production models of the J-20 operated by China’s air force are showing signs of what Bronk calls “rapid quality improvement.”
Whether or not the F-35 can turn itself around, the point is that we’re needed faster adaptation in defense acquisition. If air superiority is an important mission requirement, it’s inconceivable that we wouldn’t hedge our bets with parallel development or prototyping.
Usually, the reason is that we cannot prototype freely in major systems because of expense (a funny kind of argument given how far we outspend other countries). But it’s one kind of learning process to start austere and simple, then advance your way to a complex system through trial-and-error.
Its another learning process all together to promise as complex a design as possible, try to get it right on the first try, then spend 20 years patching up the deficiencies because the requirements were not physically possible.
"…nor did the Navy originally want the F-18."
The Navy did not want the F/A-18 for two impeccably sensible reasons which I'd think you'd agree with: (1) they assumed–probably correctly–that a new aircraft would be a distraction from the program they were then trying to make work, the F-14A, itself an emergency replacement for the F-111B which was foisted upon them by Secretary McNamara, and (2) the F/A-18 was sold–like the F-111–as a multipurpose replacement aircraft (in the F/A-18 case, for the A-7 and the F-4, as well as other potential candidates possibly to include the EA-6B and the S-3) and as a "self-escorting strike aircraft."
And as far as the F-14 goes, it was as nimble in a dogfight as the F-15 ever was…perhaps more so. And with the AWG-9/Phoenix weapons system, it was the king of the skies at long range, which was necessary to protect the CVBG from Soviet bombers carrying AS-4 and similar missiles.
The F/A-18 may have originally been sold conceptually as the low-end of a high/low mix, but in practice it was a hybrid airplane that was not nearly as capable in either the fighter or the attack roles as the aircraft it was supposed to replace.
Good points. I highly recommend Kelly Orr and James Stevenson's books on the F-18. Every year of its development the program faced cancellation, and the Navy was almost made to buy a variant of the F-16.
Chuck Myers complained to Congress: "YF17 to F-18 growth came as a Navy coup. It was explosive and appeared to erase the cost difference between it and the F-14 it was meant to complement. The F-16 growth was more subtle."