One of the downsides of the missile interceptor mentality of the late 1950s that gave birth to the GIB, was that fighters lost their guns and became very big and heavy, resulting in close range dogfighting skills to be forgotten. Their extra power made them great fighter-bombers to do quasi-strategic bombing but NVAF pilots like Colonel Tomb flying very maneuverable day dogfighters like the MIG-17 would exploit our fighter-bombers lack of dogfighting capability by close-in attacks with cannon to get us to pre-maturely drop ordnance and prevent the mission targets from being bombed. We'd then go chase after the MIGs but not have a gun and dogfighter skills in an agile highly maneuverable aircraft to be as successful as we could have been.

Thus, at the end of the Vietnam war, the USAF and USN vowed the F-4 replacement would be a pure air superiority fighter with the ability to dogfight well with a gun and in the case of the USAF not have a GIB to ruin the ego pecking order politics of the service. The USAF would excuse getting rid of the GIB by stating that computer electronics made his radar operation unnecessary and they could get better raw flight performance and range by not having the extra weight/height of a 2-seat canopy/cockpit, resulting in the F-15 Eagle.

The Navy kept the GIB in the F-14 Tomcat so it could have a more powerful AWG-9 radar to fire Phoenix AAMs with 100 mile ranges. However both aircraft are very expensive to build and complicated to maintain with all the black boxes to replace the GIB, so a cheaper single-seat, usually single engine fighter was chosen to do the less glorious fighter-bombing and pitch in once in awhile with air-to-air if up against the Soviet hordes. Thus begat the F-16 Fighting Falcon and tweaked with a second engine for over-water flight safety, the F-17 which became the overweight F/A-18 Hornet.

Meanwhile, the Army wanted an attack helicopter with wings to destroy the Russian tank armies on the ground called the AH-56 Cheyenne. However despite the fact that the USAF agreed when the Army handed over its Caribou STOL transport aircraft to them that there would be "no limits" to helicopter parameters the selfish egotist liars at HQAF went back on their words and complained about the Cheyenne and got its funding revoked. However, Congress wise to the USAF's hidden BS agenda of fighter pilot self-exaltation insisted that it take up its CAS job it says it wants to do and develop a fixed-wing armored attack aircraft that can kill tanks for the Army and the magnificent A-10 was born.

Single Seat is bad for Air-to-Air

Thus until the advent of the AMRAAM missile, the F-14 had a BVR range advantage over the F-15 which had only shorter range Sparrow radar-guided missiles. This edge ended with the long-range AMRAAM missile which has its own mini-radar in its own nose cone to paint and track enemy aircraft, making almost any single-seat fighter capable of long range BVR air-to-air kills. The barely Mach 2 F-16 killed a previously untouchable Mach 3.2 MIG-25 Foxbat in the first Gulf War because the missile flew itself to target, overcoming the former's lack of speed and altitude. The woefully underpowered, overweight F/A-18 even looks like a fighter if it can shoot AMRAAMs at long range. As could A-10s or helicopters or anything. But therein lies the rub with the "magic missile" mentality.

You can only carry a limited X amount of AMRAAMs. And even the U.S. can only afford a limited X amount of $1 million dollar AMRAAMs.

What do you do if you have fired all your AMRAAMs and the enemy fighter force that outnumbers you 3 to 1 is still approaching?

You still have not done your job but you have guns and short-range AIM-9X Sidewinder AAMs: you must be able to dogfight. In a dogfight, he who sees the other guy first has the best chance of turning to get onto his tail. Thus, if you have a GIB you have an extra set of eyes to get the advantage in a dogfight. But a second set of eyes will not be immediately possible because the USAF and USN by pecking order ego have wed themselves to the single-seat fighter for bureaucratic manning simplicity and a marginal gain in flight performance.

But the weapons system versus countermeasure struggle is NOT a zero sum game.

Anything you can do with one pilot you can do better with two-----thus computer electronics can now have the pilot's helmet steer the missile's guidance head to aim/fire and track all the way to the target without him having to get a good angle onto the target aircraft. Thus, is a turning dogfight a Chinese Communist MIG though "inferior" in flight performance if its pilot has a helmet slewing missile firing capability could get a missile exploding into the American pilot's more expensive single-seat F-15, F-16, F/A-18 first. To fully exploit helmet offset aiming/firing as has been common in the U.S. Army attack helicopter community with first the AH-1 HueyCobra and now the AH-64 Apache, the USAF/USN's aircraft need a GIB to get the drop on the enemy fighters first.

However, the GIB is a curse word in the fighter jock community and this explains why the single-seat F-22 (oh, F/A-22) is so viciously fought for by the ruling AF hierarchy: its stealth and supersonic cruise features will enable it to shoot down the enemy first at BVR without itself being detected! And the internal weapons bay will carry lots of AMRAAMs! Once they are expended, the F-22 will have thrust vectoring to dogfight if it has any more missiles to shoot, but more likely allow it to break contact and run back to base immune to enemy radar guided missiles via its low radar cross section and countermeasures. The F-22 is really a BVR interceptor to shoot and kill all the blips it can from a safe stand-off then run home to base. Then the single pilots become aces and pick up chicks.

However, what if the enemy floods the F-22's radar screens with unmanned drones/decoys to absorb all of the expensive BVR AMRAAMs? After all these blips are shot down, then what? Then the F-22 will have to dogfight even (or at a disadvantage if the enemy pilots have helmet offset aiming/firing) or run back to base in the face of superior CHICOM aircraft numbers.

By trying to use gadgets to work-around having a GIB, the U.S.'s fighter aircraft are now so complex when called on to fly CAP over America's cities on a 24/7/365 basis they simply cannot sustain it. By wanting to fly high and fast, these aircraft lack long range fuel efficiency for loiter time like the straight, fat-wing A-10s attack plane can do, but when a threat like terrorist airliners diving into crowded buildings is in the public limelight the USAF hierarchy cannot afford to let the hated A-10 get the glory, so the fighter CAP over our cities has stood down.

So much for "Air Supremecy"!

Single Seat is VERY BAD for CAS

To fly CLOSE air support attack missions to get a line-of-sight on enemy targets is very difficult from a 300 mph aircraft low to the ground, its next to impossible in a single-seat 500+ mph aircraft. A survey of the rash of single-seat A-10 crashes attrributed to "pilot error" begs the question that had the aircraft been a 2-seat OA-10B the GIB could have eased the workload by looking for targets and the pilot may have not made that error that flew him into the ground. Remember, every A-10 that crashes is one less of that hated platform the USAF fighter jock hierarchy has to pay homage to; if numbers dwindle like the B-26Ks in Vietnam, they will have a logistical excuse to retire the aircraft from service and no longer have a visible reminder that there are indeed other ways to bomb targets than from 10K and a stand-off. Congress and the public will not know any better from then on to question the USAF's egotistical prerogatives.

However, rather than embrace the GIB, the USAF is again looking to magic munitions to fly themselves to target so the aircraft can stay high and away from danger. That this mentality does not offer responsive CLOSE air support for U.S. Army ground maneuver units is immaterial, this is what the USAF wants to do. The USAF doesn't want to do CAS safely for the men on the ground by an armored, low-speed flight agile attack aircraft gun strafing by careful air or ground FAC nor safely for the men in the air by a GIB to manage the pilot's low-altitude workload. What the USAF wants to do is actually DAS--"distant air support"--from at least 10,000 feet above and several miles away which could be a B-52 dropping JDAMs within a glide path circle of reach to fly over the Army Soldier's heads and land on the enemy by GPS/INS coordinates. If the GPS is degraded or jammed, the INS is off, the ordanance fins get bent on release etc. and the JDAM lands on the Army Soldier's heads it c'est le guerre (ie: fuck you, too bad!). Like not wanting to close-range dogfight, the USAF doesn't want to do close-range attack missions with its (german accent) "Das is gewd" mentality, least of all to further the glory of their hated rival for Congressional dollars and public affection, the U.S. Army that gave birth to them in 1947 in the first place.

The precision bombardment from a distance mentality is just a manifestation of the DoD Tofflerian/RMA world-view that war is about blowing things up; when in reality war is about CONTROL; control of the ground where human being live on and the ruling ideas and governments that guide them. That dangerous enemies to the U.S. have escaped our so-called "global precision strike system" when it tries to win wars without decisive and in force Army ground maneuver, should come as no surprise. When a U.S. city is leveled to ashes by a nuclear 9/11 attack because we couldn't get the terrorists before they got us, will anyone be left standing to point out that the cause of this failure was our over-reliance on stand-off aircraft firepower to try to blow up problems on the ground instead of facing enemies up close and insuring they get taken care of?

Single-Seat is bad for maturing leaders

We talk a lot about "teamwork" and in the Army we do not ever send a Soldier alone on the battlefield, the very least he has a "Ranger Buddy" to look out for him. While having only one person die when a fighter crashes minimizes the pressure on the bureaucracy which can then write-off the tragedy as "pilot error", the fact being overlooked is a second set of eyes/awareness to include emergency flying capability could PREVENT many aircraft crashes and deaths. Two-seat aircraft could safely give a young pilot stick time with an overseeing mentor instead of him being totally alone in the cockpit where a second's inattention could cost him his life. But it takes HUMILITY to admit you need the help of a GIB, a virtue in short supply in the USAF!

A big thing is defined by the current AF buzzword of "situational awareness". Simply means you gotta know and take into account EVERYTHING affecting the mission. If you lock on to one facet to the exclusion of all other factors you won't last long even in peacetime. This is why GIBs are needed, because "two heads are better than one" Why should this be any less different in a fast moving jet? It should be even more urgent.

The ability to have situational awareness must be a factor that must be recognized by instructors and supervisors clear back in training - and acted upon. That last, acting upon - is where USAF Training Command has historically been weak - they tend to look at how much they have invested in the guy's training and are hesitant to throw it away by washing him out. This is short-sighted and extremely stupid because to cover their own asses and up the graduation rate they jeopardize a fifty million dollar airplane and pilot's lives down the pike. They'll claim their testing and evaluation processes are so good that any one admitted to pilot training is almost certain to graduate. That is not borne out by the evidence of dumb crashes after graduation.

Flying into the ground is a dumb crash.

I just got an e-mail from a friend down in Australia whose friend was washed out of RAAF fighter training 4 missions short of graduation.

He's now flying Caribous.

Hurrah for the RAAF!

A lot of guys can fly multi-motor transports perfectly well but are not suited for fighters. Things happen lots slower in transports, there's at least two brains divvying up the load, and they don't have such a demanding mission as fighters do.

The USAF should set up a limited-duty career field - fighter pilot - and weed out the clucks and keep the good guys in the cockpit instead of trying to make everyone a general. The guys who decide they want a career path to General would transition to GIB before leaving the cockpit for the armor-plated desk.

Instead, today, once a guy makes major or LTC he is shipped out of the cockpit just when he becomes a world-class expert and gets a big fat desk to fly. A guy is still fit to fly fighters at any age if the docs pass him and he measures up to the job and is competitive with his colleagues. Just think what the services would be like if we took our 35-40 year old NCOs and stuck them all behind desks? So why in hell should we park a pilot with 15 years experience so some second lieutenant of unknown capabilities can take his cockpit slot, fly some single seat missions, destroy the aircraft and get himself killed?

USAF/DCS Personnel calls it "career progression"

I call it fucking stupid.

Since when did career progression rank combat capability?

The USAF must become a 2-seat aircraft, humble, war-fighting force

The fix is simple; embrace HUMILITY.

Being a fighter pilot does not make you a god with a small "g".

Realize an air show at 10,000 feet exploding a lot of dirt does not impress an asymmetric enemy giving you decoys to waste expensive ordnance on. Wars require ground maneuver from the brothers in arms, Army and marines and this maneuver should be embraced by the USAF and magnified unselfishly. The Warden BS of concentric circle Douhet bombing must be scrapped. If the Army wants ANY kind of aircraft (to include fixed-wings) to help its men win and stay alive if the USAF cannot provide it, it shuts the fuck up and stays out of the way. Realizing that one size or aircraft type cannot be possibly optimized for all flight arenas, the slower and armored attack plane must not be looked down upon. By going to two-seat air force we can get non-pilot ground observers in the back to better spot and hit ground targets as well as provide a way to transition pilots and non-pilots to the desk leadership positions that will take the AF into the 21st Century. No longer will there be a two class AF society of "haves" (the pilots) and the "have nots" (everyone else) who can never reach high command.

With 2-seaters we will have simpler, less costly and easier-to-maintain aircraft with more reliability by an extra set of thinking awareness eyeballs that can fly in an emergency if the pilot is killed/incapacitated. We might be actually able to do long-term CAPs over cities. For long range and difficult missions where human flying cannot be replaced by an autopilot the GIB/emergency co-pilot can keep the main pilot fresh for when reaching the target area. Reduced pilot work-loads means less dumb crashes into the ground and millions of dollars in aircraft and lives saved. 2 pilots means better CAS and more enemy ground targets hit to enable decisive U.S. Army ground maneuver to locate, encircle, collapse and destroy enemies.

And we might not bankrupt our nation with ever more expensive and costly fighters in the fatal "Death spiral" that afflicts DoD.

itsg@hotmail.com

Phil West writes in:

"Homeland air defence is nothing to do with MAS (other than finding a better use for the F16s) -but it is something that some of the brains here should think about.

What would be a good patrol plane? There are the joint STARs and E-3 AWAC -nothing wrong with using a civilian airframe in this context -but is there smaller/cheaper so we(you?) can have more, and operate them from small airfields down south. Doesn't israel use the Hawkeye from the land? Mohawk carried SLAR.

The U.S. military is composed of adolescents who are co-dependants that do fun things they like to do and reverse engineer their fun to a quasi-battlefield function.

I've sometimes spoken of the U.S. military as "Toy clubs" -the big ship club, the sub club, the shiny jet club, the tank club etc.

Sadly there is too much truth in that"

REPLY:

OK....

The Homeland Defense interceptor has to:

1. Be already in the air to be able to respond in time to a border crossing or take-over of a civilian aircraft within CONUS.

2. Speed rapidly to the culprit and be able to shoot the f***er down

3. Not be out-run or out-maneuvered by the bogie

The surveil planes, E-2s and E-3s and EP-3s already exist.

Since the bogies could be JET airliners, we need a jet that is miserly on the fuel and cheap to operate.

ANSWER?

The A-37!!!

Look at where the A-37B shows up on the aircraft speed chart:

www.geocities.com/equipmentshop/aircraftspeeds.htm

Maybe we should go ask Peru to come guard American skies with their A-37B Dragonflies?

Remember, the USAF doesn't want an unfavored platform getting the Congressional/public limelight.....why A-10s were not in Afghanistan from day 1....

Airborne!

Mike

An Australian Aerospace expert writes:

"I am a big fan of 2 seat for the niggly CAS/BAI and such bomb trucking, and many other bomb trucking roles. On the balance I favour 2 seats for mud bashing of all varieties.

Am less convinced that it is needed for air-to-air. We got by with single seat air superiority fighters until the F-4B when the technology was not up to the job. With the kind of modern dogfight missiles with defacto BVR capabilities these days I think a GIB is irrelevant in air-to-air, and will become more so in time.

Expect you will cause a major argument with this article. Many of your criticisms of air force are not entirely fair. However, I do agree that any good fighter pilot who wants to remain in a cockpit until he starts failing medicals or losing the edge should be allowed to do so. Putting them in desk jobs simply sees them run away to fly 767s for living. This is not a smart personnel policy and has cost the RAAF a fortune over the years."

Last Dingo writes in:

"The F-16 vs. MiG-25 combat was on December, 24 1992 over the no-fly zone. I believe it was the southern one.

There was no F-16 engaged in the first Gulf War, and in the second (1991), there were neither AMRAAM fired (but carried by F-15) nor kills by F-16s. Further, I cannot remember any such confrontation with Israeli pilots.

There are also a lot of things in modern air combat technology which are much more important than one or two seats:

high off-boresight IR seeker

imaging infrared seeker

helmet-mounted visor or even helmet-mounted display

IRST (infrared search & track, like MiG-29, Su-27, EFA) with LRF

electro-optical I.D. device, probably retractable (something like this was already seen in the 60's on F-4's)

internal IR detectors for missile approach warning

thrust vectoring for turbofans (one or even two dimensional)

thrust vectoring for missiles

dogfight missiles which shoot backwards (a AA-11 variant can do so in cooperation with rear radar!)

anti-G-suits with water content ("Libelle", allows two more Gs!)

rear radar (probably only the AMRAAM radar, seen first and only in late Su-27 family member)

internal ECM (jammer, flares, chaff)

internal reserve space for later DIRCM (directional infrared countermeasures - a anti-IR missile dazling IR laser, retractability desired)

active or passive phased array antenna with I.D. mode

enhanced dazzling laser protection bigger parachutes, allowing gliding over much greater distances to safety 1980's aerodynamics (several aspects, some of them unsuitable for upgrades)

radar stealth and low observability

super cruise

Most of this is available to other nations (mostly allies or at least friends) and some of this is planned for F-22 (but usually not in the latest state-of-the-art like one dimensional thrust vectoring).

The USAF refuses upgrades for air combat and focuses on reconnaissance and ground attack. There was no - I repeat, NO - air combat capabilities relevant innovation in the USAF in the last fifteen years except the introduction of the AIM-120 AMRAAM.

It's possible to beat the USAF by technology if realistical amounts of money, competent personnel and five years of time come together. I see really no reason for the opinion that the USAF is up to date.

I've got a picture of a Russian article on the rearward firing R-73R dogfight missile (cooperates with late Su-27 family rear radar, normal position on pylon - turns within meters after launch) if you're interested..."