India Finally Says to Hell with the Russian Su-57 (PAK FA).

[lummiuster]

The bit that you're missing there is that it's not a good thing lol.

Those countries used to do it but realised they were just wasting money when they won't be fighting each other anyway.

I.E the more planes you produce the cheaper they end up being per unit, so as they aren't going to be fighting each other why should the UK, Italy and Germany all build a plane when they can pool resources and save money while getting what they all want? It's a win win.

Russia would love to go back to sharing the cost of MiGs with Ukraine/Czech rep/etc, maybe get Germany to open it's wallet again too, etc but it's not going to happen so they have to go it alone.

Also some of those countries do have their own submarine, warship, tank, etc programs.

I know sharing the costs make things cheaper but no I don't think these countries (except USA) could produce all these by themselves in high quality under 10-15years. The point is that even though they have an unhealthy economy, they are still able to produce top end technology. They have an impressive production power that just can't be measured in terms of dollars. Spain and Russia have somewhat the same GDP, but it is clear that Spain is very far from being able to have similar output as Russia.

[Paetolus]

Why should I care what planes India buys or not ?

Well, in this case, it damages their relationship with Russia and shows that they are possibly trying to strengthen relationships with more modernized countries, it really weakens Russia. It's important if you care about foreign relations, and India is a big country that's on its way to being a big superpower, and already pretty much is.

[caervek]

I know sharing the costs make things cheaper but no I don't think these countries (except USA) could produce all these by themselves in high quality under 10-15years.

Well, no offense but you're wrong. History has shown that they can/have/did.

[Fargus]

Oh wow, look at all these people getting a hard-on for tools that are designed to kill people.

Skroe and all his supporters can GAGF. Bunch of warmongering lunatics.

[Planetdune]

Well, in this case, it damages their relationship with Russia and shows that they are possibly trying to strengthen relationships with more modernized countries, it really weakens Russia. It's important if you care about foreign relations, and India is a big country that's on its way to being a big superpower, and already pretty much is.

I don't care about India at all... I live in Europe.. I never been to India nor never will... Nothing that happens there affects my life in any way...

[Shalcker]

LOL you only throwing things out, to make Russia sound good.... the OP of the Russian claime did wrote 30m (best conditons) 50m (normal conditons) and 150m (unfavorable conditions) thats more then a a few meters.....we can ignore you as a source now considering your horribel track record.

I think i asked relatively simple question - what would you expect "dumb bomb" dispersion to be if release point is well controlled?

[zEmini]

I bet fighter jets are going to be replaced by drones in the next 10 years.

[Easo]

Ah, the good old dick waving from both sides and the usual threats of nukes (this one comes mostly from Russian side, also quite standard).
Do we even have a real, official confirmation about the cancellation? Or do we not?

I bet fighter jets are going to be replaced by drones in the next 10 years.

Impossible. Too little time and not enough money to replace thousands of fighter planes.
Tech also is not at the required level yet.

[Gaaz]

So where is the carefully reviewed data from the Russian bombing in Syria? "Russia must have done long and detail studies in Syria to be able to be so confident to brag about the system/tactic perssion.... if the data is not available.... how can they made the claime....

I agreed that low level undisturbed bomb realease is not a "shotgun"

If you think that Russian ministry of defense gives me detailed reports on performance of their air forces, I am sorry to say that this is not the case. Here is a mini collage of Russian bombing runs for 6 TU-22 M3, made on 14th of July 2016 with FAB (unguided) ammunition:

Hard to say exactly how high they are, but it is quite impressive nonetheless. I do not think it is a stretch to confirm technical characteristics at least on some basic level in terms of accuracy to what Russians claim for the system. Bear in mind that these are disruption strikes on tent camps and oil refineries. As long as operation of an installation is stopped, it is a success. So you do not really need to go all Star Wars like and start lobbing tons of explosives in manhole covers from orbit. And it cost them somewhere in the region of $400 000 in terms of ordinance to do these strikes.
Edit: Also, please consider that the accuracy claims are probability based and follow 2 standard deviation mathematical model. So if they state that accuracy is within 50m in normal conditions, in practice it means that about half of the ordinance falls within 20m of the target point. That is close enough in most cases. And it is not like they lack in the range of guided munition options, but often sheer volume trumps these extra meters in terms of accuracy. Especially if we talk about oil refineries, where your main objective is to just wreck stuff to make thing more complicated for the other party.

[Skroe]

@Skroe
How does the cheap bombing run compare to the expensive missile strike in terms of accuracy with regard to collateral damage and civilian casualties?

Good question. Kind of complicated answer.

The US arsenal has some really big bombs.
GBU-57 MOP - 30,000
MOAB - 22,000 lbs
BLU-82 - 15,000lbs
GBU-28 - 5000lbs
BLU-82 - 3000lbs
Mark 84 - 2000lbs

Most of these (specially the MOP, or Massive Ordinance Penetrator), are designed to be bunker busters. They are meant to destroyed hardened, high priority targets, that are constructed with lots of steel and concrete. The exception of the above list, MOAB, is an air blast weapon, which is designed to destroy surface targets over a large area (more on that in a moment). But in general these bombs are effective against hardened targets due to a combination of great mass, speed of impact, explosive size, materials and shaping.

Counter to what you might thing when you think "big explosion", the best way to destroy a large surface area isn't with one big bomb, but lots of small ones. Bombs "dispensers" with submunions... cluster bombs in other words... are able to destroy a much larger area than even the largest surface bombs. This is kind of a general principle. Even with regards to nuclear weapons, it was realized that an ICBM with a lot of medium sized warheads is a much, much more dangerous and effective weapon than a missile with one big warhead. This is because, with all explosions, nuclear or otherwise, the destructive radius, isn't actually all that big as a function of what the "battlefield" might be.

So why do things like MOAB exist? Why build a 22,000 lbs bomb when a much smaller bomb with submunions might do a better job? Because the dud-rate of subminions - ones that don't detonate - can be "high" (high being defined as ~5% failure rate). From an industrial perspective, this shouldn't be surprising as things that are built mass produced invariably produce some amount of failure, and every weapon every made has had some duds (even nuclear weapons). But if some kid goes along and grabs the unexploded submunion... that's an innocent casuality that nobody obviously wants.

The US, in other words, has been focusing more and more for years on making bombs smaller and less destructive. But more precise. The go-to weapon of the US arsenal nowdays is increasingly the Small Diameter Bomb.




These bombs weigh 250 lbs and are "quad packed" in the place of a 2000lb bomb. Due to the technical details of the bomb, it has the destructive capability of a much larger bomb, but with much less risk to innocent by standards by being so precise. The "explosive", just 30-something lbs, will destroy or kill within a small radius, but enough for what it is meant to be destroying.

The US Military likes this concept alot. Why? Well consider this picture.


That's a US F-15E with 20 Small Diameter bombs. Things like the SDB give one aircraft a "bigger clip" than if it were just carrying big 2000 lb bombs instead. Moreover the concept is now being applied to missiles, so Fighters can carry a couple dozen air to air missiles rather than six to eight.

A SDB though won't be really good at blowing up a hardened facility. You still need a dedicated bunker buster for that. And thats where we home in on answering your question.

Cruise missiles all have warheads of about 1000lbs, putting them at half the weight of the smallest bunker buster (and one fifth the weight of the ones used the most). And that is because a cruise missile is, again, designed to destroy enemy air defense, undefended targets... that kind of things. They are there to blast a path so that bombers can do the job. A cruise missile with a huge warhead is going to be infeasible beyond a certain point because of range issues. In fact, as I said, the Navy is considering the opposite - cutting Cruise Missile warhead size down to 500lbs, to get a significant increase an range (because the same engine will have to fly 500lbs less mass).

Conceptually all this ties into the the fact that because of high precision and smaller explosive size, cruise missiles and small, sub 1000lbs bombs, will be considerably safer to use with respect to collateral damage, then the large bunker busters on a per-unit basis. But the large bunker buster will do the job in one or two or three hits (depending on what is used), whereas it took dozens of cruise missiles... and every additional cruise missile is the risk of more collateral damage.

So to (probably completely unsatisfactorily answer your question), the answer is "it depends what you're striking". If it's a hardened target, although its a bigger risk, a one off from a big bomb is probably "safer" than a series of cruise missile strikes. But small bombs, cruise missiles, are safer to use in every situation that *isn't* that.

It may be surprising to learn, that consistent with this, the new Nuclear Warheads the US is building (the first in 25 years) to modernize and consolidate the arsenal (to have more commonality and less duplicate capabilities, at lower cost), are all producing warheads that are significantly smaller than the the current arsenal. The smallest since the dawn of the nuclear age. Why? Because precision replaces size. A precise nuclear warhead, guided by advanced sensors, has more useful destructive potential than a large on. The Pentagon, after all,, wants to blow up the Russian launch site thats tens of meters wide, right? It doesn't exactly care about the storage shed half a mile away. Nuclear weapons in the 1960s and 1970s were so large because they were imprecise. They had to be big, so that a "miss" measured in miles, still was a hit. Now, a hit can be measured in <5 meters. So because of that, they can be small.

That applies to nuclear explosives. That applies to conventional. But in the end, physics is physics, and you just need a bigger, heavier thing to blast apart concrete and steel effectively. A nuclear warhead, over a small area, comes with that regardless. With conventional warheads, size does matter to a degree.

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I bet fighter jets are going to be replaced by drones in the next 10 years.

They've been saying that for 20 years.

The reason it won't happen fully ever is exactly because of the incident of the RQ-170 crashing in Iran years ago. What happens when your all-drone air force comes up against an enemy that creatively jams or dominates the EM spectrum? You lose your Air Force then and there. An all drone air force (or any force) ASSUMED a reliable data link to operators and command and control. That goes completely against current planning which assumes that our adversaries will try first and foremost, to disrupt those very same datalinks (and they will be successful in doing so to one degree or another).

Drones CERTAINLY will be used as part of a buddy-system. For example and F-35 teamed with a drone that is slaved to it, with the drone functioning as a "clip"... basically a missile carrier that fires on whatever the F-35 orders it to. But you're more likely to see ultra long range missiles that use A.I. to decide what to hit (and are independent of data links), before you see the all-drone air force. But Ultra long range missiles like that will be very expensive.

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Ah, the good old dick waving from both sides and the usual threats of nukes (this one comes mostly from Russian side, also quite standard).
Do we even have a real, official confirmation about the cancellation? Or do we not?



Impossible. Too little time and not enough money to replace thousands of fighter planes.
Tech also is not at the required level yet.

We do. It's canceled, per Janes 360.

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Google "F-35 cost", or "F-35 problems", or "F-35 current state" or anything related to F-35 and you will see from official sources that there are lots of problems with this plane and that it is still not combat ready. It looks like barely 50% of the planes they produced are combat ready and every once and then they figure that some of these F-35 that were combat ready were actually not. This is why we are all worried because the costs keep increasing and we don't even know if they are really combat ready. And it looks like their stealth solution is not even working on russian radars...

People said the same thing about the F-22. A few years later, people were lamenting that we bought so few F-22s. It is a major acquestions program. It is going to be hard.

Most of the F-35s problems are worked out now. It's mostly about adding software support for various weapons and updating the software to qualify it for higher performance (they've taken an iterative approach to this). But they're deployed right now. F-35Bs are in Asia-Pacific on the USS Wasp.

The biggest problem with the F-35 is that Fifth Generation Aircraft are hard to buid. The US built a total of 187 F-22s, at a peak production rate of around 20 per year. Serialized F-35 production is to ramp up in 2019 at a rate of about 120 per year. And this number is dramatically less than the >200 F-16s that were produced per year in the 1980s. Lockheed is having trouble producing a consistent product at the desired rate.

This gets back to something I said last year in an F-22 discussion. With the F-16, baseline F-15 tech was taken, improved in key areas, but they are certainly of the same "generation". With the F-35... it's more than a half step up from an F-22. If the F-22 is 5th gen, by comparison, it is almost a 6th Gen aircraft, implimented with Gen 5++ technology. In retrospect, it may have been better, for the purposes of what the F-35 is (an F-16 replacement first and foremost) have made it far closer to the F-22 in technology, and leave some of the more pioneering tech it has that has so troubled it to the F-22 successor program, that is kicking off. That would have allowed Lockheed to perfect manufacturing of advanced technologies on a smaller product order (~400 aircraft) for a single customer (the US), than the gargantuan program the F-35 is.

And Russian radars would be hit by B-2s, B-1Bs, B-21s, and Stealthy cruise missiles, not by F-35s flying within 40 kilometers of them. So that's kind of a moot comparison. The F-35 has very good frontal stealth, an an F-35 armed with a long range air to air missile is probably the deadliest aircraft on earth to other aircraft.

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Clearly Russia does not have a healthy economy. But they have technology and production capability above most richest countries. Germany, France, UK, Japan are all richer than Russia. However none of them are wealthy enough to have an independent jet/submarine/warship/spaceship program. It is too expensive, they all contribute to one program together to do it. It is really impressive that Russia build all these things with technology on par and in some areas above those of the west.

This is not true. At least not how you're describing it.

Russia's industrial capacity as significantly decayed for decades. Russia's actual production is largely of legacy or upgraded Soviet designs. For example, they have their own independent space program... but they've been building or modifying the same vehicles, since the 1960s.

The West demands a greater level of technology in what they procure. And this makes projects more expensive, often international and more ambitious. When Russia tries, they have a lot of trouble. For example, the Angara rocket is Russia's first all new rocket in decades. It was planned late in the Soviet Union, put on ice for 20 years and flew for the first time a few years ago. The Angara is basically a Russian version of the American Atlas V. It would have been a great rocket.... in 1999. And it's a vastly more capable rocket, in every conceivable way, to the Soyuz and Proton's Russia has used for 50 years. But in 2018, it's highly uneconomical compared to SpaceX Falcons or Chinese rockets. It's a great design, but an implementation that, for technical and financial issues, showed up 20 years too late. And more than that, Russia is having a very hard time fabricating them. The Angara was supposed to replace ALL of Russia's rocket families except for some Soyuz variants, with one common core design being the foundation for many sizes. Now, it is unknown when it will fly consistently, or when the A5 design will displace Proton at all.

There are other examples in the things you listed. United Aircraft makes civilian jetliners which are a non-entity compared to Airbus/Boeing. It's warship program needs European help that isn't coming (see the canceled Mistrals). It's submarine program is the one I've criticized the most. Russia had the right idea... the one the US had 30 years ago... replace a ton of different families of subs and missiles with one and one, to keep costs (of ownership, of production) low. Instead, they've just added another family, and production and operation of them too, is troubled.

Russia's problem is that they're institutionally incapable of "giving up what they have". For example, if they were serious about the Su-57 program - and for the record I don't believe they are in the slightest - they should not buy a single Su-35 ever again, and come up with a 10 year plan to retire every Su-27 variant older than 10 years by 2028. The US, for example, could have bought the latest export variants of the F-15 or F-16 at any time, but it made the choice not to in order to keep cost of ownership of a unified family of better aircraft, rather than have two industrial bases supporting two aircraft doing the same job. Hell the US is going to junk the B-2 Spirit Stealth bomber in a decade, along with the B-1, just so it can pay for "just" the B-52 and the new B-21 Raider, rather than 4 different bombers.

Russia should give up Soyuz and Proton production, to focus on Angara.
Russia should give up all combat vehicle production that isn't Armata and retire all that aren't Armata-based by 2030ish.
Russia should give up all fighter production and ownership that isn't Su-57.
Russia should give up all Delta IV, Delta III and Typhoon submarines and go all-Borei/all-Bulava.


This is what the US and the West has done for 30 years. And yes, sometimes that means a program goes awry and it leaves you in a lurch (see: the delays to the F-35B and the horrible shape of the US Marine Corp's AV-8B Harrier II fleet). But across decades, it means more money for modernization and maitnence and training, and a lot less money spent on the recurring costs of owning redundant systems AND keeping their industrial bases stood up.

Russia knows this. They've expressed an intent to do it for many years. They're not stupid. But they just cannot seal the deal, likely due in no small part to the corruption Shalcker turns a blind eye. But more than that these new things they want to buy are hard, and much tougher to build than the 1960s and 1970s-legacy things Russia has been producing non-stop.

It's what I said earlier. 80% capability for 20% of the cost may have been true with 1970s-mid 1990s technology. But even with the Angara, which is a 1990s-concept space vehicle, the complexity and costs involved of modern and near-modern systems is very far beyond validating that the 80/20 principle is applicable.