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Red Flag and the F-35 Kill Ratio Is 15:1
The much maligned F-35 did very well at the February 2017 Red Flag exercises at Nellis AFB in Las Vegas, Nevada. In fact the F-35 dominated the skies. When paired with F-22 the kill ratio may have been as high 17:1.
In the past few months reading through news stories about the F-35 I wondered why the F-35 was denigrated in the US, but Australians and Europeans were so impressed by this aircraft. The F-35 is available for purchase by American allies, the F-22 is not. The Red Flag exercises provided the answers to that question.
In the first day of sorties during Red Flag not a single F-35 was lost to “enemy action”, and not one F-35 was grounded to mechanical or electronic malfunctions. Throughout the exercise the operational ability to keep the F-35 flying was approximately 92%.
What this means to NATO is that the Russians would not be able to support ground troops and it would allow NATO to dominate the sky. The Russian Air Force would not be able to protect Russian armored or infantry units. The Russian Air Force would have to sit on the ground, or risk being destroyed in a very short time, or confined to Russian airspace.
Published in MilitaryRunning from January 23 to February 10, this year’s Red Flag involves more threats to pilots than ever before, including surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), radar jamming equipment, and an increased number of red air, or mock enemy aircraft. Against the ramped-up threats, the F-35A only lost one aircraft for every 15 aggressors killed, according to Aviation Week.
The F-35 Lightning II’s advanced avionics software was the star of the show, as multiple F-35s successfully compiled data into a detailed layout of the battlefield with each individual threat pinpointed. The stealthy aircraft could then slip into weak spots in the defensive layout and take out SAM targets, opening up the space for follow-on forces of legacy fighters. Even when the F-35s ran out of munitions, F-22 and fourth-generation fighter pilots wanted the aircraft to remain in the combat zone, soaking up data and porting target info to the older fighters.
Before where we would have one advanced threat and we would put everything we had—F-16s, F-15s, F-18s, missiles—we would shoot everything we had at that one threat just to take it out, Lt. Col. George Watkins, 34th Fighter Squadron commander, told Aviation Week. Now we are seeing three or four of those threats at a time.
The F-35 and the F-22 Raptor pair up to make a particularly deadly team, according to the pilots. The Raptor uses its advanced air maneuverability to shield the F-35 from airborne threats while the F-35 relays data to the F-22 to paint a clear picture of the battlefield. Once the duo of fifth-generation fighters take out an initial wave of ground and air targets, F-18s, F-16s, and F-15s bring up the rear to provide support, all receiving target data from the F-35s in the field.
Doug,
Very impressive but when you are flying low to the ground and slow you are going to take a hit. How survivable is F-35. We know that no plane can take the punishment like A10 and still bring its pilot home safely.
Regards,
Jim
You cannot use the F-35 like you use an A-10. If I was in charge I would want the A-10 line to keep producing A-10’s. I would have also kept the F-22 line producing the F-22. The F-35 is going to be more effective with high speed strikes on Russian aircraft and SAM missile sites. There job would be to keep the Russian Air Force on the ground. The A-10 handles the low and slow destruction of Russian armor, but they can only do that once you control airspace.
For example when President Obama drew his line in the Syrian sand the plans were in place to use cruise missiles to destroy Syrian airbases. I would have destroyed the airport in Damascus, and mined Syrian harbors as well. Ivan the Syrian would not have been able to fly the friendly skies of Syria.
Comment 33 continued…. All hindsight, I wasn’t in charge. The F-35 VTOL capability means you can disperse on highways, even if the Russian strike a big airbase you can still use the F-35.
Doug,
Perhaps you should have been.
Regards,
Jim
I’m afraid all those that would have waved at the planes flying into Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 would have been apoplectic.
Doug,
Sounds like a plan.
Regards,
Jim
This is not correct.
For starters, if a satellite is taken out, a drone will follow a “recovery” program to return to base. This is basic programming. Drones without communications never “crash straight into the ground.”
More importantly: satellites are HARD to kill – it requires technologies that are possessed by very few nations, and the kill vehicle to a satellite could very easily be more expensive than the drones one is trying to disable. Which helps explain why satellites are almost never killed.
The F-35 would melt any road it tried to take off from.
Once it took off, it wouldn’t care.
MWM,
Well, if a column of Russian tanks were coming down the road, I wouldn’t care either.
Regards,
Jim
My point is rather simpler: It sounds very nice that an F-35 would take off from any stretch of highway or road. But it should give one pause to realize that the F-35 has never demonstrated this capability. And why not? Because a near-vertical landing on normal road would melt and/or ignite it, and you would lose a very pricey airplane.
Here is a link to the difference between the Harrier and the F-35B VTOL systems. I don’t know if it answers the question about setting a road on fire, but for those interested in the technical end this at least explains the system.
Worse than that. They can steal it while it’s still in a lab at Boeing and get it into the field before we can.
They do not have the same political constraints we do. They are not as concerned with safety as we are.
That speed advantage is particularly the case with the F-35 where the three versions slow us down even more. At each stage of development, we are slowed to the slowest of the three versions and then slowed some more reconciling issues between the versions before going to the next stage. The speed with which their better version of the F-35 (absent the three-service compromises) is progressing is amazing.
STOVL, not VTOL. Plus, its short takeoff would be without significant fuel and ordnance.
Many countries have plans to base CTOL aircraft on highways, etc. STOVL would be smaller roads, parking lots, fields, etc.
These things are usually rigged.
They send future US aircraft up against not merely present enemy aircraft but obsolescent aircraft. In this case they probably specified early model Flankers and Fulcrums rather than versions the Ruskies and ChiComs will be fielding in 5+ years.
They also screw around with numbers. Sometimes giving the enemy little to no numerical advantage.
The classic example of this scam was when they were flying the F-15 against aggressor F-5 to simulate Mig-21 (rather than simulate future Ruskie aircraft). They also sabotaged the electronic capabilities of the aggressor aircraft. The pissed off aggressor pilots bought radar detectors at Radio Shack and used them to get the upper hand on the F-15.
Fifteen to one is all well and good until you realize that you can only afford to buy a few planes. Then the enemy, who can pay for thirty jets to our one F-35, can just attack all over the place and our air force will be gone.
It was a waste of money. We have 100% air superiority everywhere we go. We did not need fewer planes to still only have 100% air superiority everywhere we go.
Could you provide a source for this info. I’d be interested in reading about this.
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a476975.pdf see p. 161
So reading the pdf this seems to be a test to determine the effectiveness of the Sidewinder missile during a 1977 test. Basically 40 years ago. So I see a difference between the 2017 Red Flag exercise and this exercise:
I don’t read anything in the pdf that indicates these pilots were dealing with threats from both ground and other aircraft.
One of the commodities I buy for a living is circuit card assemblies, and I have many of the F-16 flight-deck CCAs under my buyer code. There is a constant, steady demand for them. The US is still selling that aircraft to foreign countries, and those customers buy lots of spares. Funny, we also did the B-52 flight deck, and demand is also steady for spares for those, too.
An F-35 centered discussion took place on my Facebook feed the other day. I wrote:
I think there’s a big lack of perspective on the F-35 which leads the media to fixate on every piece of negative news they can find, much of which is standard growing pains. And since its positive capabilities are either yet unrealized (because it hasn’t faced combat), or classified, there is no upside to report on.
There are always plans to install avionics upgrades. One upcoming upgrade is a Helmet Mounted Cuing System for targeting high off-boresight. But it’s not trivial to just plug-and-play swap components like with a PC. All this hardware and software has to be custom fit for the job and it’s very expensive because lives depend on it.
That sounds like a non-fact-based statement. The F-35 is comparable to the F-16 in maneuverability. It has a higher thrust engine to accompany its larger airframe. It has comparable high-angle-of-attack performance to an F/A-18 (i.e. better than an F-16). In what way would it be a sitting duck?
I would need to see this supported by analysis. If that were truly the case it would probably be classified Top Secret by the Israelis and the US.
Can you elaborate on this? What aspect of knocking out “communications” would cause a pilot to become dead?
This is nonsense. It was pure posturing, no real world consequences. He made some grumbling noises about cost overruns, took credit for cost reductions that were already planned, and then called off his dogs.
The main things you need to know are:
None of these are subject to reasonable challenge.
The ChiComs and Ruskies are not likely to similarly sabotage their own products.
That is another significant issue. The ChiComs and Ruskies are willing to take much greater risks. That cuts their development time relative to ours. If we did not want to match that, then we should not have done the other things that slowed development.
Define “greater risks”. That could encompass nearly all of the growing pains the F-35 has gone through, including technical risk, cost risk, schedule risk, and safety risk. Rough catapult takeoffs, lack of fire suppression, misfitting weapons bays, buggy software, lack of software support for the cannon and lots of ordnance, glitchy Distributed Aperture System, suboptimal control system gains … Is your point that the Chinese would just ignore these and deploy the jet anyway without fixing them?