By The Defense Monitor, November\/December 2006, USA.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tFor decades, the U.S. Air Force has promoted the F-22 as its fighter for the 21st century. Advocates tout its technical features: fuel efficient, high speed super-cruise, advanced electronics, and reduced profile against enemy sensors, known as stealth. While those are popular amenities, the measures that really determine winning or losing in air combat have been overlooked by the Air Force. The F-22 fails to improve America’s fighter force and degrades our combat capability. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\tThere are five attributes that make a winning fighter; they are backed up by 90 years of air combat history; they are: <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\t1) pilot training and ability; <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\t2) obtaining the first sighting and surprising the enemy; <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\t3) out-numbering enemy fighters in the air; <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\t4) out-maneuvering enemy fighters to gain a firing position; and <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\t5) consistently converting split-second firing opportunities into kills. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\tCompared to the F-15 and the F-16, the F-22 does not measure up to these central abilities. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\tThe F-22 is a mediocrity, at best, on requisites four and five, but it is a liability on points one, two and three.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\tThe first attribute is the most important pilot training and ability. Great pilots get to be great by constant dogfight training. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\tBetween 1975 and 1980, at the Navy Fighter Weapons School (Top-gun), instructor pilots logged 40 to 60 hours of air combat maneuvering per month. Flying the cheap, simple F-5, the robustly trained instructors consistently whipped their students who flew the more capable F-4 Phantoms, F-14 Tomcats, and F-15 Eagles. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\tToday, partly thanks to the pressure on the Air Force’s training budget from the F-22’s excessive costs, an F-22 pilot gets only 12 to 14 hours of flight training per month. For winning future air battles, this is a huge step backward.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\tThe aircraft’s stealth ability only contributes to the inability of the F-22 to meet standards two and three. The F-22’s stealth requirement adds significant drag, weight and size. Size is the most damaging to the aircrafts ability. The F-22 is much bigger than most fighters, thus it will be detected first by the sensor most likely to be the determinative one eyeballs completely reversing the theoretical advantage of stealth. Topgun had a saying, the biggest target in the sky is always the first to die. And once a F-22 is seen, it will have trouble outmaneuvering the enemy because its weight hurts its ability to turn and accelerate. Notably, both the F-15A and F-16A out-turn and out-accelerate the F-22. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\tThe most obvious disadvantage stealth brings and why the aircraft ails attribute three is the F-22s extraordinary cost; it grossly reduces the numbers the United States will buy. New Defense Department data shows the total program unit cost of <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\tthe F-22 has grown from about $130 million to over $350 million per aircraft. The result? The original request to buy 750 F-22s is now down to 185, thus the chances of outnumbering enemy aircraft are slim. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\tThe Air Force will argue strenuously that we are wrong and the F-22 has excelled in air-to-air exercises against all comers. However, our information is that these are canned engagements in which the F-22 is put in scenarios set up to exploit the F-22’s theoretical advantages and exclude its real world vulnerabilities. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\tBut there is a way to find out who is right: Conduct an unscripted test of F-22 capabilities by pitting it against pilots and aircraft that the tiny F-22 inventory expects to meet in hostile skies.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\tWe both would be delighted to observe any such realistic exercises. Nothing would please us more than to find that we are wrong and American fighter pilots have been given the best fighter in the sky.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\t[Notre recommandation est que ce texte doit \u00eatre lu avec la mention classique \u00e0 l’esprit, Disclaimer: In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only..]<\/em><\/strong> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Le F-22 Raptor est-il un fer \u00e0 repasser abracadabrantesque ? D’une fa\u00e7on g\u00e9n\u00e9rale, il est admis que le CDI (Center for Defense Information) de Washington est un organisme s\u00e9rieux. Ce think tank est r\u00e9put\u00e9 1) pour ses appr\u00e9ciations assez non-conformistes, tenant \u00e0 conserver avec vigilance quelque distance avec les vues conformes de l’establishment ; et… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[4996,249,3859,3519,610],"class_list":["post-68235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notes-de-lectures","tag-cdi","tag-f-22","tag-raptor","tag-technologie","tag-virtualisme"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68235"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68235\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}