On Thu, 4 Mar 2004 18:03:52 -0500, "Kevin Brooks"
wrote:


"Scott Ferrin" wrote in message
.. .

,snip agreeable type stuff


As to the F-22 (Roche's belated addition of "A" being little more
than a sop to congress), yeah, we should produce enough of them to be our
silver bullet, but unless it is developed to be a better striker as well,
the 200 number look quite sufficient. Are you really worried about
Chinese
Flankers? With no effective AWACS support for them, and precious little
tanking support? Not to mention the questionable quality of pilot
training?


If all I had was F-35s? Yep. In a China / Taiwan scenario the
Flankers wouldn't NEED tanking.

Begging the question of how much value *any* of the landbased tactical
fighters would be in such a scenario--I don't see us likely to base fighters
on Taiwan proper. That places under the the gun of the complete threat
envelope, including TBM's, cruise missiles, SOF attack, etc.


My point is that regradless of where we strike from those Flankers
will be able to be on station without tanking at enough distance that
we'd still have to run the gauntlet to deploy our weapons. Air
delivered that is. I wasn't implying US fighters would be stationed
on Taiwan but then the further away you station the fighters from
where they are needed the more useful supercruise becomes.



IMO the China
scenario, as *unlikely* as it is to actually materialize, is a place where
the truly long range strike assets, in cooperation with the air wings from
the USN CVBG's and Tactical Tomahawks launched from CG's and SSN's, would be
the primary players. Plus, your Flankers are still without good C4ISR
support from AWACS.

Today that is the case. Nothing stays the same forever and China has
already tried to get real AWACS capability from Israel. True they
didn't get it this time but even 80's technology AWACS is nothing to
dismiss.


As far a pilot quality goes all it
would take is for someone over there to determine that they NEED top
of the line pilots and in a few years they could have them.

I believe you are minimizing the requirements to solve that problem. They
would have to finally completely do away with their "mass is the answer"
approach (they have admittedly made progress in that direction, but they are
not there yet, and won't be in the immediate future), and they have a
problem with their basic foundation (i.e., tactics/techniques/procedures,
qualified instructors and doctrinal developers, and last but not least, the
PLA's historical mistrust of individual initiative). That is a lot to have
to contend with before they even *start* developing a world class fighter
force.

Again, hoping China doesn't figure it out isn't the best way to go
IMO. Every conflict that occurs drives home that mass isn't the
answer and that good pilots willing to use initiative and having the
skills to use it is the way to go. Eventually China will figure it
out, it's just a matter of time.




Look what
the USN did with Top Gun during the Vietnam war. I don't doubt that
in the end we'd still win, but at what cost? We want it to stay as
close to zero loses as possible.

The USN had one heck of a foundation to start out with--the PLAAF does not.

Not on hand. How hard would it be to invite in some Israeli pilots to
get advice on how China ought to train it's airforce? Or from
somewhere else. The talent is out there and if China ever does put
the pieces together they will be a force to rekon with. Just because
they don't today doesn't mean they never will.




Or, is it worth buying *more* F-22's than we really need to ensure against a
rather remote threat set, while other critical needs go unfilled?

No. That's not what I'm saying. They've got the cap in place and
whatever they can buy with it would likely be sufficient to deal with
the China scenario. I only mention China, not so much because I think
that it's going to happen, but that it's the biggest threat on the
horizon from an air to air perspective. As I pointed out in another
thread, in Desert Storm there were suprisingly few F-15Cs tasked for
patroling air to air in comparison to how many the USAF has. Even the
180 number that has been kicked around would likely be enough. The
fact is though it's apparently been decided that the cost cap that has
been given to the F-22 program is affordable. They should just let
the USAF do with it what they can rather than cancelling the program.
To sum up I don't think MORE is what we need but we do need SOME.



the budget
is not completely elastic--and it appears that it is not going to have the
largesse we have seen the last couople of years for all that much longer.
How many ground troopies are likely to die in *other*, more likely
scenarios, because we still lack a decent mounted breaching system for
minefields? How many more convoy participants lost to off-route mines
because we don't commit enough money to developing countermeasures against
that threat? Or, how many strike missions get cancelled because the tanker
force continues to decline? Ya gotta rob from Peter to pay Paul, and
anything more than the absolute minimal F-22 buy makes a pretty goof Peter
IMO.

I agree. I'm saying that we shouldn't cancel the F-22. I'm not
saying we need 500 of them :-) Troops are getting wounded and killed
almost every day and they definitely need to solve that problem. The
talk of "let's be transformation and kill heavy armor" scares me
though.