Category Air Warfare

The F-35 Is Not A Fighter

I’ve been listening to Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work speak on the Third Offset Strategy.  He spoke at Defense One Production forum (2015-09-30), and again to Air Command and Staff College students, (2016-05-27).  What follows are some rough notes and paraphrasing, aimed at understanding the strategy, and connecting the F-35 platform and its capabilities to the strategy.

Work gives an interesting description of his job as Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the Department of Defense (DOD), which is “one of the biggest corporations on the planet,” and having a “simple” mission, “to organize, train and equip a joint force that is ready for war and that is operated forward to preserve the peace.”

The Roots of the Third Offset Strategy

Why do we care about Third Offset?  “We have to deal with the resurgence of great power competition.”  What is a great power? Work credits John Mearsheimer’s definition, but in his own words, it is “a large state that can take on the dominant global state (the United States) and really give them a run for their money, and have a nuclear deterrent force that can survive a first strike. Don’t really care about economic power, or soft power, the focus is only on military capabilities.”

This is quite interesting, since economic power begets military capabilities.  A poor China and a rich China are worlds’ apart in terms of the military power that they can field.  Also, the stop and start nature of basing agreements with the Philippines under Duterte might remove key bases close to the South China Sea battlefield, having a huge impact on the ability of the US military to project power, as the RAND briefing from yesterday’s post illustrated in rather stark terms.

What has changed to require the Third Offset?  Great power rivals have duplicated our Second Offset strategy, of precision guided munitions, stealth and operational (campaign) level battle networks.  This strategy gave the US and allies an advantage for forty years.  “We’ve lived in a unique time in post-Wesphalian era, where one state is so dominant relative to its peers.”  He sees a dividing line in 2014, when two events occur:

  1. China starts to reclaim islands in the South China Sea
  2. Russia annexes Crimea and destabilizes Ukraine

Also, the nature of technology development has changed as well.  In the Cold War, technological innovation happens in government labs:

  • 1950’s – nuclear weapon miniaturization
  • 1960’s – space and rocket technology
  • 1970’s – precision guided munitions, stealth, information technology
  • 1980’s – large scale system of systems

From 2012, militarily-relevant technologies are happening in the commercial sphere:

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI)
  • Autonomous Weapons Systems
  • Robotics
  • Digitization
  • Fight from Range
  • Operate from inside their battle network
  • Cyber and EW, how to take down their network?

“This means we know where to start, but we don’t know where it ends.”  Of this list of technologies, he calls out AI and Autonomy as at the forefront.  He defines Autonomy as “the delegation of decision authority to some entity in the battle network. Manned or unmanned system … what you are looking for is human-machine symbiosis.“

What do you need to do this?  First, deep-learning systems.  “Up until 2015, a human analyst was consistently more accurate at identifying an object in an image than a machine. In 2015, this changed. …  when a machine makes a mistake, it makes a big one.”  He then tells the story of a baby holding a baseball bat, “which the machine identified as an enemy armed combatant. … machines looked for patterns, and then provide them to humans who can use their intitive and strategic acuity to determine what’s going on.“

The F-35 and Strategy

As an example of how this might play out, a machine can generate the Air Tasking Order (ATO – which is a large document that lists all of the sorties and targets to be prosecuted by joint air forces in a 24-hour period, per Wikipedia) … in minutes or hours, instead of many analysts working for hours or days. “We are after human-computer collaborative decision-making.” In 1997, super computer “Deep Blue” beat Gary Kasparov in chess, which was a big deal at the time. In 2005, however, two amateur chess players using three computers beat a field of grand masters and field of super computers. “It was the human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of the computer that we believe will be the most important thing.”  He then goes on to highlight an example of this human-machine collaboration:

The F-35 is not a fighter plane. It shouldn’t even be called the F-35. It should be called the BN-35, the “Battle Network”-35. It is a human-machine collaboration machine that is unbelievable. The Distributed Aperture System (DAS), and all the sensors, and the network which pours into the plane; the plane processes it and displays it to the pilot, so that the pilot can make accurate, relevant and quick decisions. That’s why that airplane is going to be so good.

Work also covers another topic near and dear to me, wargaming.  Perhaps a war game is a great opportunity for humans and machines to practice collaboration?

We are reinvigorating wargaming, which has really gone down over the past years. We’re looking at more at the service level, more at the OSD level, and these are very, very helpful for us to develop innovative leaders, and also helpful for us to go after new and innovative concepts.

He mentions the Schriever Wargame. “[O]nce you start to move forces, your great power rival will start to use cyber to try to slow down those forces … the distinction between away games and home games is no longer relevant to us.”

Next, I’ll look at the perspectives of the services as they adopt the F-35 in different ways.

 

F-22 vs. F-35: Thoughts On Fifth Generation Fighters

F-22 and F-35 [War on the Rocks]

[This is the first post from Geoffery Clark, a guest contributor to Mystics & Statistics. TDI is pleased to share his perspective and insights.]

This post begins a series on air warfare, how it has evolved, and where it is headed in the future. My goal is to highlight key facts that I believe are meaningful to help understand capabilities, both existing and emerging, and how they might play out in battle. Of course, I will also hypothesize, speculate from time to time, perhaps even downright evangelize. Those actions will obey the doctrine of separation of church and state. A good place to start a series on air warfare is the current state of the US Air Force (USAF) fighter programs, specifically the fifth generation F-35 and sibling F-22.

To disclose my own biases, I’ve been a skeptic of the F-35 aircraft for a long time, largely because my father worked on the F-22 program, and a certain amount of rivalry exists between these two programs. Often the F-35 capabilities have been compared to the F-22, as they are the first two fifth generation fighters into service with any air force. USAF Air Combat Command (ACC) has stated that anything that you can do in a Raptor (F-22) you can do with a Lightening (F-35), you just need more of them to do it. This has stoked the embers of those on the F-22 program, who saw their program end after several build curtailments, as prospects for export were squashed in congress; although production resumption bills spring up from time to time.

My personal opinion is that the F-22 advantages are fleeting, as all military advantage seems to be (“military secrets are the most fleeting of all.” ~ Spock, Star Trek, “The Enterprise Incident”), we should thus sell the Raptor to allies, dulling the stealth coatings to acceptable export levels, and using the opportunity to upgrade the Raptor’s avionics, sensors, cockpit and software (aka “real-time sensor fusion engine”, per Lt Col Berke, see below) to keep the platform optimized and relevant in the decades to come.

I’ve not been alone in my skepticism of the F-35; from War is Boring:
* ‘Your New Stealth Fighter is Really, Really Awful‘ (I bought this book for my Dad!)
* ‘The F-35 Stealth Fighter May Never Be Ready for Combat‘
* ‘Denmark’s F-35 Decision is Pretty Dumb‘
* ‘F’d: How the U.S. and Its Allies Got Stuck with the World’s Worst New Warplane‘

Perhaps most famously, the “Pacific View” briefing from RAND to the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) back in 2008, which was leaked and apparently caused a bit of embarrassment for RAND. This was widely reported by F-35 critics, echoing the lines in the report “F-35A is “Double Inferior” … can’t turn, can’t climb, can’t run.” (see attached slides, number 80). Dr. John Stillion, one of two listed authors, departed RAND, and is now at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), and has published some interesting viewpoints on future air warfare.

In the course of data collection and analysis, however, I’ve come to challenge my own bias, and consider the F-35 for what it is, what capabilities it brings to the field, and what that means for air warfare. What has caused this change of heart? More information about what the F-35 can do, for example, Aviation Week’s “Check Six” podcast, interview with Lt Col David Berke, USMC. Berke has flown both fourth generation fighters (F/A-18, F-16 “loves them”) and fifth generation fighters (F-22, F-35). Such first-hand evidence is essential to understand the capabilities of these aircraft as they develop in the hands of operators, whom he likens to app developers on the iPhone platform. They don’t ask “what can this plane do for me?”, rather “what can I do with this airplane?”

F-35 is in a world of its own, you’re talking about a level of awareness. Data is fused and presented, I can look at it and tell with a glance what’s happening, almost like watching a baseball game, I can see where everyone is. Then I can choose to drill into something, such as second base, and I can see what sensors are contributing, how confident those sensors are, see who else might be helping me out, constantly presented with information on the spectra, and thinking about which sensors are best to use in different situations. How can you best contribute to the development of this information? This is nothing like fourth gen platforms, which might have the link 16 network, but they did not fly around thinking ‘how can I better contribute to the link 16 network?’

Berke was quite candid about the state of the military networks, saying that “evolution of what this networking will allow us to do, we are in the infancy with this… those networks are in some ways yet to be created.” Indeed, USAF leadership is asking for help with technology; “fusing sensor data and communications from the land, sea, air, space and cyberspace will be key to the U.S. military’s success in future battlefields,” General David Goldfein said at the Air Force Association’s annual Air Warfare Symposium in Orlando Florida. “The victory in future conflict … will go to that leader who can command and control his or her forces to create multiple dilemmas from multiple domains … at a pace that would overwhelm any enemy on the planet while denying the enemy the ability to do the same.”

According to Berke, “the most precious commodity by a huge margin is data … situation awareness … information. The ability to make a more intelligent decision, earlier than your opponent, and do something smart with an airplane because you know what is going on around you.”

This reminds me of John Boyd’s famous OODA loop – Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.

More to come on this topic!

F-22 vs F-15

Hard to pass by this article: http://www.businessinsider.com/watch-one-f-22-five-f-15s-2017-3

This video at the end shows one F-22 in a simulated exercise in 2003 against five F-15s. Spoiler alert: The F-22 wins. Apparently the F-15s could not see or get a lock on the Raptor, effectively allowing it to freely shot them without receiving any return fire (meaning missiles).

This has also been the case in the past, like in the 1980s when U.S. F-14s engaged Libyan MIGs over the Gulf of Sirte.

U.S. Army Record Keeping

The Dupuy Institute was involved in three record keeping contracts done for the U.S. Army from 1998-2000. This effort generated six reports. They are:

R-1: U.S. Army Records Survey (March 1999)

R-2: Records Management Survey Meeting (Oct. 20 1998)

R-3: War Records Workshop (March 23, 1999)

R-4: U.S. Army Force XXI Records Analysis (March 2000)

R-5: Analysis of U.S. Army Force XXI Record Keeping (May 2000)

R-6: Final Report of the Test Record Redesign Matrix (June 15, 2000)

The list of TDI publications is here: http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/tdipub3.htm

This work came about because I was working in the Vietnam records in 1968-1970 for the I Corps area and saw how poorly they were kept. They were the worst U.S. Army records I had ever seen. The U.S. Army World War II combat records were much better kept, and they were at least as busy at the time. In fact, U.S. Army records during Red Cloud’s War (1866-1868) were much better. Hundred year later, the U.S. Army records were incomplete, majors potions of the records had been thrown away, there were significant gaps in the daily operational reports, basic statistical data was missing, etc.

We ended up flagging this issue up to senior leadership in the Army, and were pleasantly surprised when they gave us a contract to look further into it. We ended up doing a survey of U.S. Army record keeping at that time (the peacekeeping effort in Bosnia was the major operation going on).

Several years later, well after we had completed our work, we did go back to the Army to recommend that we do a second survey. This time “the suits” showed up at the meeting (senior SES government managers) and assured the command that everything was fine, they had it under control and another survey was not needed. I am not sure the general we were talking to believed them, but this was the end of the discussion. We went back to analyzing warfare instead of record keeping.

Spotted this article today in the Military Times. It is worth reading in its entirety: http://www.militarytimes.com/articles/airstrikes-unreported-syria-iraq-afghanistan-islamic-state-al-qaeda-taliban

The problem may be as simple as the Army was not sharing its record keeping of helicopter sorties and drone strikes with the Air Force. If that is the problem, then it can be simply corrected. I kind of doubt it is that simple.

Anyhow, record keeping is not as exciting as tanks, but it is part of the nuts-and-bolts issues of running an army.

The Yemen Raid

Hard to ignore this one. According to White House reports 14 members of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) were killed. We lost one person, three  four injured and a $70 million Osprey. There were 10, 15, or 16 civilians killed. According to one report there were a total of 30 people killed (14 + 16 = 30?).

A few news reports:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/civilians-likely-killed-us-raid-yemen-pentagon-014654537.html

This article provides the figures of 16 civilians killed (8 women and 8 children)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/us-military-probing-more-possible-civilian-deaths-in-yemen-raid_us_5892bf5de4b0af07cb6b8930?

This article provides the estimate of 30 people killed at the site, including 10 civilians. It also say at least 15 civilians killed, according to U.S. military officials. “The military officials who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity said “a brutal firefight” killed Owens and at least 15 Yemeni women and children.” It also notes that “Some of the women were firing at the U.S. force, Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis told reporters.”

Also:

U.S. military officials….said, the attacking SEAL team found itself dropping onto a reinforced Al Qaeda base defended by landmines, snipers, and a larger than expected contingent of heavily armed Islamist extremists.

One of the three U.S. officials said on-the-ground surveillance of the compound was “minimal, at best.”

“The decision was made—to leave it to the incoming administration, partly in the hope that more and better intelligence could be collected,” that official said.

There were two Osprey’s used in the raid. One suffered engine failure (remember Operation Eagle Claw: Operation_Eagle_Claw).

The UK Guardian is more direct: http://theweek.com/speedreads/677442/trumps-disastrous-first-military-strike-previously-been-rejected-by-Obama

[Colonel John] Thomas said he did not know why the prior administration did not authorize the operation, but said the Obama administration had effectively exercised a “pocket veto” over it.

A former official said the operation had been reviewed several times, but the underlying intelligence was not judged strong enough to justify the risks, and the case was left to the incoming Trump administration to make it own judgment.”

Colonel Thomas is the Central Command spokesman:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-acknowledges-civilian-deaths-in-trump-authorized-yemen-raid/2017/02/01/e1f56c3c-e8e0-11e6-80c2-30e57e57e05d_story.html?utm_campaign=pubexchange&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=huffingtonpost.com&utm_term=.76e64d7a6149

Anyhow, I think people will be talking about this one for a while.

 

DOD Successfully Tests Micro-Drones

The Defense Department announced yesterday a successful test of the world’s largest micro-drone swarm. Conducted at China Lake, California in October 2016 by the DOD’s Strategic Capabilities Office, in partnership with Naval Air Systems Command, three F/A-18 Super Hornets launched 103 Perdix micro-drones. According to the DOD press release, “the micro-drones demonstrated advanced swarm behaviors such as collective decision-making, adaptive formation flying, and self-healing.”

The micro-drone swarm comprises an autonomous system.

“Due to the complex nature of combat, Perdix are not pre-programmed synchronized individuals, they are a collective organism, sharing one distributed brain for decision-making and adapting to each other like swarms in nature,” said [Strategic Capabilities Office] Director William Roper. “Because every Perdix communicates and collaborates with every other Perdix, the swarm has no leader and can gracefully adapt to drones entering or exiting the team.”

The Perdix micro-drones were originally designed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineering students, and modified for military use by the MIT Lincoln Laboratory in 2013.

To get an idea of the military potential of this technology, watch the demo video tracking the simulated mission.

In related news, the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and Georgia Technical Institute is developing the capability for soldiers in the field to 3D-print swarms of mini-drones to specific specifications within 24 hours. As reported by Defense One,

“A soldier with a mission need uses a computer terminal to rapidly design a suitable [drone],” says a poster by project chief engineer Zacarhy Fisher. “That design is then manufactured using automated processes such as laser cutting and 3D printing. The solution is sent back to the soldier and is deployed.”

Inspired by the modular adaptability of Legos, Fisher says the each drone could be fabricated in less than a day, with total turnaround time of less than three days.

Economics of Warfare 1

If you look at our “Interesting Links” down towards the bottom of the right side of the page, you will see a link to a blog called Wars, Numbers and Human Losses with the byline “The Truth Counts”: https://mikespagat.wordpress.com/

This is the blog of Professor of Economics Michael Spagat of England’s Royal Holloway University. He is American. We think highly of Dr. Spagat’s work. In particular, there a series of blog posts that publish the lectures of his course “Economics of Warfare.” A look at the first lecture is worthwhile: economics-of-warfare-lecture-1

The link to the lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%201.pdf

A couple of highlights:

  1. Slides 13 & 14 on the causes of casualties among civilians in Iraq.
  2. Slide 20 is damn interesting. More on civilian casualties over the first years of the Iraq War.

For those few who have read my book America’s Modern Wars, I do address civilian casualties, primarily in Chapter 9 “Rules of Engagement and Measurements of Brutality.”

Over 50,000 killed

OK…latest estimate from DOD is that they have killed over 50,000 ISIL fighters over the last two years: Body count = 50K+

Here is my post on the subject in August when the count was a mere 45,000: some-back-of-the-envelope-calculations

I don’t think I have much more to add to this without getting very sarcastic. Note that they refer to it as a “conservative estimate.”  Something does not add up somewhere (either their loss estimates are way too high or their force size estimates have been way too low).

Slow and Low

Slow progress in retaking Mosul and low casualties: mosul-battle

A couple of points that caught my attention:

  1. “Baghdad doesn’t release official casualty figures, but some medics estimate that it is at least in the low dozens.”
  2. “As of late October, US officials said ISIS had lost roughly 900 fighters.”
  3. From 17 October to 1 November, 2,400 precision bombs, artillery rounds, missiles, and rockets were launched into the Mosul area.

So, Iraqi casualties less than 60?…..I have some doubts about the claimed 900 ISIL fighters killed.

Now….tempted to count number of bombs, artillery rounds, etc. per ISIL fighter killed….but not sure this is a particularly meaningful metric.

Anyhow, Mosul is effectively isolated. The main roads have been cut. I gather there is a open area of desert to the west that is not occupied, but any significant movement in the open with our airplanes and drones overhead is probably not advisable. This is fundamentally a mop-up operation, and not surprisingly, it is going slow and with low casualties. We shall see if they take the city in 6 weeks or so.

I still wonder how many ISIL fighters they actually left behind in Mosul.

Colonel Toon

One more article from The National Interest, this one is from the past about the “famous” North Vietnamese Ace: Colonel Toon: The Legend the Vietnam Wars Mystery Fighter Ace

I remember one company even issued out a plastic model of the MIG flown by Col. Toon. Such is the stuff of legends.

Wikipedia has a list of Vietnam War flying aces: List of Vietnam War flying aces

The guy third on that list served 7 years in prison for taking $2.4 million in bribes.  A pretty sad end to a career. He also supposedly shot down Col. Toon (and they made a documentary of this dog fight).