La-7, Kursk Battle Museum, Belgorod (photo by Christopher A. Lawrence)
The Fifth Guards Fighter Regiment was the highest scoring Soviet air regiment of the war with 739 victories claimed. It was lead by twice Hero of the Soviet Union, Major Vasilii Zaitsev (1911-1961) who was credited with 34 kills during the war (and 15 or 19 shared kills). The unit’s deputy command was ace Lt. Vatalii Popkov (1922-2010), also twice Hero of the Soviet Union who was credited with 41 kills during the war.
On 7 July the regiment’s records report the following kills:
Date Pilot Plane Time Notes
7 July Lt. Shumilin Me-109G 0710-0817
7 July Jr. Lt. Belyakov Me-109 0855-0945
7 July Jr. Lt. Glinkin Fw-190 0855-0945
7 July Lt. Bayevskii Me-109 1440-1610
7 July Lt. Yaremenko Ju-88 1730-1835
7 July Jr. Lt. Glinkin He-111 1730-1835
7 July Captain Dmitriyev Ju-52 1730-1835
7 July Major Pindyur Me-109 2000-2110
7 July Lt. Stokolov Me-109 2000-2110
7 July Jr. Lt. Bugreyev Me-109 2000-2110
7 July Jr. Lt. Kalsin Me-109 2000-2110
7 July Jr. Lt. Sverlov Me-109 2000-2100 ***
It also reports the following losses:
Date Pilot Plane Time Notes
7 July Lt. Shumilin 1730-1835 *
7 July Jr. Lt. Belyakov 1730-1835 **
7 July Jr. Lt. Sidorets 1730-1835 Did not return
7 July Jr. Lt. Sverlov 2000-2100 ***
* Lt. Shumilin after an air battle made a forced landing on wheels in the area of Mikhailovka. The pilot was seriously wounded.
** Hit by fire from antiaircraft artillery and an Fw-190, pilot cross the front line and made a landing. Pilot was wounded in the legs. Plane was burned on the ground by German artillery and mortar fire.
*** but he himself was caught in fire by two Me-109s, as a result, the La-5 burned and the pilot died.
So for 7 July, they claimed 8 Me-109s and four other planes at a loss of four planes, two pilots lost and two pilots wounded. On 7 July, the German VIII Air Corps lost 4 or 5 Me-109s (see Tables IV.27 and IV.28 of my Kursk book, page 1416). This was but one fighter regiment of the 26 fighter regiments in the Second and Seventeenth Air Armies on 7 July 1943.
Ivan Kozhedub was the highest scoring allied ace of World War II, having been credited with 62 or 64 victories. Hard to nail down the exact number. Most sources say 62, including Wikipedia. Many sources also credit him with also shooting down two U.S. P-51s. The Wikipedia article then lists his victories based upon the book Stalin’s Falcons by Mikhail Bykov. That listing records 64 planes, but no P-52s. The Wikipedia article also has a section of the “Alleged shooting down of two USAAF P-51 fighters.” That write up does not appear to accept the story.
A number of other sources also credit him with 64 claimed kills, or 64 claimed kills and two P-51s. Sort of mystified why this is an issue. I assume there are records of his claims somewhere.
So….what do we have out there:
……………………….Claimed Kills
Source…………….62…….62+2……..64……..64+2………63…….and 29 group kills
Wikipedia………….Y……….?…………..Y………..?
Seidl…………………………..Y
Polak……………….Y
Bykov……………………………………….Y………..?
Hardesty……………………………………Y
Red Falcons……….Y…………………….Y……….Y…………Y………..Y
Seidl is Stalin’s Eagles by Hans D. Seidl’s, Polak is Stalin’s Falcons by Tomas Polak with Christopher Shores, Bykov is Soviet Aces 1941-1945: The Victories of Stalin’s Falcons by Mikhail Bykov, Hardesty is Red Phoenix Rising by Von Hardesty and Ilya Grinberg, and Red Falcons is the Red Falcons website here: http://airaces.narod.ru/all1/kojedub.htm. Maybe the title of this post should have been “bird droppings.”
It is, of course, a different issue than the validity of those 62+ claims, which can be justifiably challenged. I will post about that later.
As some are aware, I am working on a book on the air battles during the Battle of Kursk. On 2 June 1943, the Germans organized a mass raid on the Kursk railway station using aircraft from the 1st Air Division of the Sixth Air Fleet and from the VIII Air Corps of the Fourth Air Fleet. The Sixth Air Fleet sent in 95 bomber sorties and 64 “destroyer” sorties (Me-110s) during the day, with heavy fighter cover. That night, they hit the Kursk area again with another 52 bomber sorties. The VIII Air Corps sent in 138 bomber missions during the day and 150 more during the night.
The German Air Force (Luftwaffe) burned its records towards the end of WWII, so in most cases there are not detailed records of their activity. In this case, there was. In the files of the Second Army, west of Kursk, are the records of the air liaison officer. It is in the National Archives, in the Captured German Records collection, file T312, roll R1234. The sortie counts given above are from those records. They also report their losses as 13 aircraft. The VIII Air Corps lost 1 Hs-126, 1 Ju-87, 3 He-111s and 1 Me-109 during the day and a Ju-88 at night. The Sixth Air Fleet lost 4 Ju-88s, 1 Me-110 and 1 Fw-190 during the day and nothing at night. I state in my book that “German losses connected with these raids were about 10 aircraft (2 percent losses)” as I am guessing that some of those 13 planes may have been lost in other operations (for example, the lost Hs-126 was probably doing reconnaissance). See Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka, page 303. E. R. Hooton in the book War Over the Steppes, page 200, states that the Germans lost 17 bombers. He does not footnote his sources. Bergstrom in Kursk: The Air Battle: July 1943, page 21, states that “Seventeen of these aircraft were shot down and destroyed and another eight sustained severe battle damage.” His source is the Luftwaffe Quartermaster reports. These claims from the Luftwaffe Quartermaster reports probably include losses from other causes (like mechanical, accidents and returned planes that were later scavenged for parts) and other missions.
On the other hand, another book written by two U.S. based authors state that “Certain Soviet sources list 145 German aircraft down (104 by VVS fighters and 41 by antiaircraft fire), with a modest loss of 27 Soviet fighters.” They footnote the source as a Soviet-era book from 1977. I had found the same claim of 145 kills in a Soviet-era Progress Press publication from 1974.
I am not breaking new ground by pointing out that Soviet-era publications often exaggerated enemy casualties. As discussed in my Kursk book, the units involved often made these outrageous claims and this it what was in their unit records. Therefore these claims ended up in the Soviet historical accounts.
Needless to say, one needs to cross-check all Soviet-era claims before they are used in a book. It is not enough just to say “Certain Soviet sources…” and ignor the German records. It certainly does give the wrong impressions of the operations, especially to the casual reader. Yet this is done repeatedly in this book, even though it was updated and published in 2012.
So we created three campaign databases. One of the strangest arguments I have heard against doing validations or testing combat models to historical data, is that this is only one outcome from history. So you don’t know if model is in error or if this was a unusual outcome to the historical event. Someone described it as the N=1 argument. There are lots of reasons why I am not too impressed with this argument that I may enumerate in a later blog post. It certainly might apply to testing the model to just one battle (like the Battle of 73 Easting in 1991), but these are weeks-long campaign databases with hundreds of battles. One can test the model to these hundreds of points in particular in addition to testing it to the overall result.
In the case of the Kursk Data Base (KDB), we have actually gone through the data base and created from it 192 division-level engagements. This covers every single combat action by every single division during the two week offensive around Belgorod. Furthermore, I have listed each and every one of these as an “engagement sheet’ in my book on Kursk. The 192 engagement sheets are a half-page or page-long tabulation of the strengths and losses for each engagement for all units involved. Most sheets cover one day of battle. It took considerable work to assemble these. First one had to figure out who was opposing whom (especially as unit boundaries never match) and then work from there. So, if someone wants to test a model or model combat or do historical analysis, one could simply assemble a database from these 192 engagements. If one wanted more details on the engagements, there are detailed breakdowns of the equipment in the Kursk Data Base and detailed descriptions of the engagements in my Kursk book. My new Prokhorovka book (release date 1 June), which only covers the part of the southern offensive around Prokhorovka from the 9th of July, has 76 of those engagements sheets. Needless to say, these Kursk engagements also make up 192 of the 752 engagements in our DLEDB (Division Level Engagement Data Base). A picture of that database is shown at the top of this post.
So, if you are conducting a validation to the campaign, take a moment and check the results to each division to each day. In the KDB there were 17 divisions on the German side, and 37 rifle divisions and 10 tank and mechanized corps (a division-sized unit) on the Soviet side. The data base covers 15 days of fighting. So….there are around 900 points of daily division level results to check the results to. I drawn your attention to this graph:
There are a number of these charts in Chapter 19 of my book War by Numbers. Also see:
The Ardennes database is even bigger. There was one validation done by CAA (Center for Army Analysis) of its CEM model (Concepts Evaluation Model) using the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Bases (ACSDB). They did this as an overall comparison to the campaign. So they tracked the front line trace at the end of the battle, and the total tank losses during the battle, ammunition consumption and other events like that. They got a fairly good result. What they did not do was go into the weeds and compare the results of the engagements. CEM relies on inputs from ATCAL (Attrition Calculator) which are created from COSAGE model runs. So while they tested the overall top-level model, they really did not test ATCAL or COSAGE, the models that feed into it. ATCAL and COSAGE I gather are still in use. In the case of Ardennes you have 36 U.S. and UK divisions and 32 German divisions and brigades over 32 days, so over 2,000 division days of combat. That is a lot of data points to test to.
Now we have not systematically gone through the ACSDB and assembled a record for every single engagement there. There would probably be more than 400 such engagements. We have assembled 57 engagements from the Battle of the Bulge for our division-level database (DLEDB). More could be done.
Finally, during our Battle of Britain Data Base effort, we recommended developing an air combat engagement database of 120 air-to-air engagements from the Battle of Britain. We did examine some additional mission specific data for the British side derived from the “Form F” Combat Reports for the period 8-12 August 1940. This was to demonstrate the viability of developing an engagement database from the dataset. So we wanted to do something similar for the air combat that we had done with division-level combat. An air-to-air engagement database would be very useful if you are developing any air campaign wargame. This unfortunately was never done by us as the project (read: funding) ended.
As it is we actually have three air campaign databases to work from, the Battle of Britain data base, the air component of the Kursk Data Base, and the air component of the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base. There is a lot of material to work from. All it takes it a little time and effort.
I will discuss the division-level data base in more depth in my next post.
The Battle of Britain data base came into existence at the request of OSD PA&E (Office of the Secretary of Defense, Program Analysis and Evaluation). They contacted us. They were working with LMI (Logistics Management Institute, on of a dozen FFRDCs) to develop an air combat model. They felt that the Battle of Britain would be perfect for helping to develop, test and validate their model. The effort was led by a retired Air Force colonel who had the misfortune of spending part of his career in North Vietnam.
The problem with developing any air campaign database is that, unlike the German army, the Luftwaffe actually followed their orders late in the war to destroy their records. I understand from conversations with Trevor Dupuy that Luftwaffe records were stored in a train and had been moved to the German countryside (to get them away from the bombing and/or advancing armies). They then burned all the records there at the rail siding.
So, when HERO (Trevor Dupuy’s Historical Evaluation Research Organization) did their work on the Italian Campaign (which was funded by the Air Force), they had to find records on the German air activity with the Luftwaffe liaison officers of the German armies involved. The same with Kursk, where one of the few air records we had was with the air liaison officer to the German Second Army. This was the army on the tip of the bulge that was simply holding in place during the battle. It was the only source that gave us a daily count of sorties, German losses, etc. Of the eight or so full wings that were involved in the battle from the VIII Air Corps, we had records for one group of He-111s (there were usually three groups to a wing). We did have good records from the Soviet archives. But it hard to assemble a good picture of the German side of the battle with records from only 1/24th of the units involved. So the very limited surviving files of the Luftwaffe air liaison officers was all we had to work with for Italy and Kursk. We did not even have that for the Ardennes. Luckily the German air force simplified things by flying almost no missions until the disastrous Operation Bodenplatte on 1 January 1945. Of course, we had great records from the U.S. and the UK, but….hard to develop a good database without records from both sides. Therefore, one is left with few well-documented air battles anywhere for use in developing, evaluating and validating an air campaign model.
The exception is the Battle of Britain, which has been so well researched, and extensively written about, that it is possible to assemble an accurate and detailed daily account for both sides for every day of the battle. There are also a few surviving records that can be tapped, including the personal kill records of the pilots, the aircraft loss reports of the quartermaster, and the ULTRA reports of intercepted German radio messages. Therefore, we (mostly Richard Anderson) assembled the Battle of Britain data base from British unit records and the surviving records and the extensive secondary sources for the German side. We have already done considerable preliminary research covering 15 August to 19 September 1940 as a result of our work on DACM (Dupuy Air Combat Model)
The database covered the period from 8 August to 30 September 1940. It was programmed in Access by Jay Karamales. From April to July 2004 we did a feasibility study for LMI. We were awarded a contract from OSD PA&E on 1 September to start work on the database. We sent a two-person research team to the British National Archives in Kew Gardens, London. There we examined 249 document files and copied 4,443 pages. The completed database and supporting documentation was delivered to OSD PA&E in August 2005. It was certainly the easiest of our campaign databases to do.
We do not know if OSD PA&E or LMI ever used the data base, but we think not. The database was ordered while they were still working on the model. After we delivered the database to them, we do not know what happened. We suspect the model was never completed and the effort was halted. The database has never been publically available. PA&E became defunct in 2009 and was replaced by CAPE (Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation). We may be the only people who still have (or can find) a copy of this database.
I will provide a more detailed description of this database in a later post.
The two large campaign data bases, the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base (ACSDB) and the Kursk Data Base (KDB) were designed to use for validation. Some of the data requirements, like mix of personnel in each division and the types of ammunition used, were set up to match exactly the categories used in the Center for Army Analysis’s (CAA) FORCEM campaign combat model. Dr. Ralph E. Johnson, the program manager for FORCEM was also the initial contract manager for the ACSDB.
FORCEM was never completed. It was intended to be an improvement to CAA’s Concepts Evaluation Model (CEM) which dated back to the early 1970s. So far back that my father had worked with it. CAA ended up reverting back to CEM in the 1990s.
They did validate the CEM using the ACSDB. Some of their reports are here (I do not have the link to the initial report by the industrious Walt Bauman):
It is one of the few actual validations ever done, outside of TDI’s (The Dupuy Institute) work. CEM is no longer used by CAA. The Kursk Data Base has never used for validation. Instead they tested Lanchester equations to the ACSDB and KDB. They failed.
But the KDB became the darling for people working on their master’s thesis for the Naval Post-Graduate School. Much of this was under the direction of Dr. Tom Lucas. Some of their reports are listed here:
Both the ACSDB and KDB had a significant air component. The air battle over the just the German offensive around Belgorod to the south of Kursk was larger than the Battle of Britain. The Ardennes data base had 1,705 air files. The Kursk data base had 753. One record, from the old Dbase IV version of the Kursk data base, is the picture that starts this blog post. These files basically track every mission for every day, to whatever level of detail the unit records allowed (which were lacking). The air campaign part of these data bases have never been used for any analytical purpose except our preliminary work on creating the Dupuy Air Campaign Model (DACM).
Continental U.S. Air Defense Identifications Zones [MIT Lincoln Laboratory]
My last post detailed how the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 prompted the U.S. to undertake emergency efforts to bolster its continental air defenses, including the concept of the Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ). This post will trace the development of this network and its gradual integration with those of Japan and NATO.
The permanent network depended on each radar site to perform GCI [Ground Control & Intercept] functions or pass information to a nearby GCI center. For example, information gathered by North Truro Air Force Station on Cape Cod was transmitted via three dedicated land lines to the GCI center at Otis AFB, Massachusetts, and then on to the ADC Headquarters at Ent AFB, Colorado. The facility at Otis AFB was a regional information clearinghouse that integrated the data from North Truro and other regional radar stations, Navy picket ships, and the all-volunteer GOC [Ground Observer Corps]. The clearinghouse operation was labor intensive. The data had to be manually copied onto Plexiglas plotting boards. The ground controllers used this data to direct defensive fighters to their targets. It was a slow and cumbersome process, fraught with difficulties. Engagement information was passed on to command headquarters by telephone and teletype. At Ent AFB, the information received from the regional clearinghouses was then passed on to enlisted airmen standing on scaffolds behind the world’s largest Plexiglas board. Using grease pencils, these airmen etched the progress of enemy bombers onto the back of the Plexiglas board so that air defense commanders could evaluate and respond. This arrangement impeded rapid response to the air battle.
It is hard to imagine an air defense challenge of the magnitude that potentially faced the U.S. and USSR by 1955. The Strategic Air Command (SAC) bomber fleet peaked at over 2,500 in 1955-1965, with 2,000 B-47s (range of 2,013 statute miles) and 750 B-52s (range of 4,480 statute miles). The range of U.S. bombers was extended considerably by the ~800 KC-135 aerial re-fueling tanker aircraft fleet as well.
In spite of the much publicized “bomber gap,” taking Soviet production numbers (and liberally adding aircraft of shorter range or unavailable until 1962…) produces an approximate estimate for a Soviet bombing fleet:
M-4 “Bison” (range of 3480 statute miles) = 93
Tu-16 “Badger” (range of 3888 statute miles) = 1507
Tu-22 “Blinder” (range of 3000 statute miles) = 250-300
Tu-95 “Bear” (range of 9400 statute miles) = 300+
That gave the U.S. an advantage in bombers of 2,750 to ~2,200 over the Soviets. Now, imagine this air battle being conducted with manual tracking on plexiglass with grease pencils…untenable!
Air Defense and Modern Computing
However, the problem proved amenable to solutions provided by the pending computer revolution.
At the Lincoln Laboratory development continued on an automated command and control system centered around the 250-ton Whirlwind II (AN/FSQ-7) computer. Containing some 49,000 vacuum tubes, the Whirlwind II became a central component of the SAGE system. SAGE, a system of analog computer-equipped direction centers, processed information from ground radars, picket ships, early-warning aircraft, and ground observers onto a generated radarscope to create a composite picture of the emerging air battle. Gone were the Plexiglas TM boards and teletype reports. Having an instantaneous view of the air picture over North America, defense commanders would be able to quickly evaluate the threats and effectively deploy interceptors and missiles to meet the threat.
By 1954, with several more radars in the northeast providing data, the Cambridge control center (a prototype SAGE center) gained experience in directing F-86D interceptors against B-47 bombers performing mock raids. Still much development, research, and testing lay ahead. Bringing together long-range radar, communications, microwave electronics, and digital computer technologies required the largest research and development effort since the Manhattan Project. During its first ten years, the government spent $8 billion to develop and deploy SAGE. By 1958, Lincoln Laboratory had a professional staff of 720 with an annual budget of $22.5 million, to conduct SAGE-related work. The contract with IBM to build sixty production models of the Whirlwind II at $30 million each provided about half of the corporation’s revenues for the 1950s and exposed the corporation to technologies that it would use in the 1960s to dominate the computer industry. In the meantime, scientists and electronic engineers in the defense industry strove to install better radars and make these radars invulnerable to electronic countermeasures (ECM), commonly called jamming.
The SAGE development effort became one of the foundations of modern computing, giving IBM the technological capability to dominate for several decades, until it outsourced two key components: hardware to Intel and software to a young Microsoft, both of which became behemoths of the internet age. It is also estimated that this effort brought a price tag which exceeded that of the Manhattan Project. SAGE also transformed the attitude of the USAF towards technology and computerization.
Current Air Defense Networks
In the 1950s and 60s, the U.S. continental air defense network gradually began to expand geographically and integrate with NADGE and JADGE air defense networks of its NATO allies and Japan.
NATO Air Defense Ground Environment (NADGE): This was approved by NATO in December 1955, and became operational in 1962 with 18 radar stations. This eventually grew to 84 stations and provided an inter-connected network from Norway to Turkey before being superseded by the NATO Integrated Air Defense System (NATINADS) in 1972. NATINADS was further upgraded in the 1980s to include data from the E-3 Sentry AWACS aircraft (AEGIS (Airborne Early-warning/Ground Environment Integrated Segment); not to be confused with the USN system with the same acronym.)
Base Air Defense Ground Environment (BADGE): This was the automated system, in the same fashion as SAGE, which replaced the manual system in place with the JASDF since 1960. The requirement was stated in July 1961, and was actually modeled on the Naval Tactical Information System (NTDS), developed by Hughes for the US Navy. This was ordered in December 1964, and operational in March 1969. This was superseded by Japan Aerospace Defense Ground Environment (JADGE) in July 2009.
Air Defense Identification Zones (ADIZ) in the South China Sea [Maximilian Dörrbecker (Chumwa)/Creative Commons/Wikipedia]
My previous posts have discussed the Japanese Air Self Defense Force (JASDF) and the aircraft used to perform the Defensive Counter Air (DCA) mission. To accomplish this, the JASDF is supported by an extensive air defense system which closely mirrors U.S. Air Force (USAF) and U.S. Navy (USN) systems and has co-evolved as technology and threats have changed over time.
On June 25, 1950, North Korea launched an invasion of South Korea, drawing the United States into a war that would last for three years. Believing that the North Korean attack could represent the first phase of a Soviet-inspired general war, the Joint Chiefs of Staff ordered Air Force air defense forces to a special alert status. In the process of placing forces on heightened alert, the Air Force uncovered major weaknesses in the coordination of defensive units to defend the nation’s airspace. As a result, an air defense command and control structure began to develop and Air Defense Identification Zones (ADIZ) were staked out along the nation’s frontiers. With the establishment of ADIZ, unidentified aircraft approaching North American airspace would be interrogated by radio. If the radio interrogation failed to identify the aircraft, the Air Force launched interceptor aircraft to identify the intruder visually. In addition, the Air Force received Army cooperation. The commander of the Army’s Antiaircraft Artillery Command allowed the Air Force to take operational control of the gun batteries as part of a coordinated defense in the event of attack.
In addition to North America, the U.S. unilaterally declared ADIZs to protect Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan in 1950. This action had no explicit foundation in international law.
Under the Convention on International Civil Aviation (the Chicago Convention), each State has complete and exclusive sovereignty over the airspace above its territory. While national sovereignty cannot be delegated, the responsibility for the provision of air traffic services can be delegated.… [A] State which delegates to another State the responsibility for providing air traffic services within airspace over its territory does so without derogation of its sovereignty.
This precedent set the stage for China to unilaterally declare ADIZs its own in 2013 that overlap those of Japan in the East China Sea. China’s ADIZs have the same international legal validity as those of the U.S. and Japan, which has muted criticism of China’s actions by those countries.
Recent activity by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) and nuclear and missile testing by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) is prompting incremental upgrades and improvements to the Japanese air defense radar network.
In August 2018, six Chinese H-6 bombers passed between Okinawa’s main island and Miyako Island heading north to Kii Peninsula. “The activities by Chinese aircraft in surrounding areas of our country have become more active and expanding its area of operation,” the spokesman [of the Japanese Ministry of Defense] said.… “There were no units placed on the islands on the Pacific Ocean side, such as Ogasawara islands, which conducted monitoring of the area…and the area was without an air defense capability.”
A schematic rendering of Japan’s proposed F-3 fighter [Tokyoexpress.info]
In my previous post, I discussed the progression of aircraft in use by the Japanese Air Self Defense Force (JASDF) since World War II. Japan has also invested significant sums in its domestic aerospace manufacturing capability over this same time period.
Japanese aircraft manufacturing has long been closely tied to the U.S Air Force (USAF) and U.S. aerospace majors offering aircraft for sales, as well as licensed production. Japanese aerospace trade groups categorize this into several distinct phases, including:
Restarting the aircraft business – starting in 1952 during the Korean War, Japanese aerospace firms like Mitsubishi and Kawasaki reacquired aircraft manufacturing capability by securing contacts with the USAF for maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) of damaged USAF aircraft, including the F-86 Sabre, considered by the Americans to be the star aircraft of the war (although many believe its opponent from the Soviet side, the MiG-15 to have been superior.) There was little doubt, then, that the JASDF would purchase the F-86 and then license its domestic production.
Licensed production of US military aircraft – “Japan has engaged in licensed production of U.S. state-of-the-art fighter planes, from the F-86 to the F-104, the F-4, and the F-15. Through these projects, the Japanese aircraft industry revived the technical capabilities necessary to domestically manufacture entire aircraft.”
Domestic military aircraft production – Japanese designed aircraft, while independent, unique designs, also leveraged certain Western designed aircraft as their inspiration, such as the T-1 and eventual F-1 follow-on and the clear resemblance to the British Jaguar. This pattern was repeated in 1987 with the F-2 and its clear design basis on the F-16.
Domestic Production of business, and civil aircraft – “Japan domestically produces the YS-11 passenger plane as well as the FA-200, MU-2, FA-300, MU-300, BK-117, and other commercial aircraft, and is an active participant in international joint development programs with partners such as the American passenger aircraft manufacturer Boeing.”
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) won a contract to build the wing for the Boeing 787, a job that Boeing now considers a core competency, and is unlikely to outsource again (they kept this task in house for the more recent 737 MAX, and 777X aircraft). This shows MHI’s depth of capability.
Also in the previous post, I could not help but include the “F-22J,” a hypothetical fighter that has been requested by the Japanese government numerous times, as the air power threat from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) has grown. The export of the F-22, however, was outlawed by the Obey amendment to the 1998 Defense Authorization Act (a useful summary of this debate is here). So stymied, the JASDF and supporting Ministry of Defense personnel conducted a series of design studies in order to establish detailed requirements. These studies clarified the approach to be taken for the next aircraft to put into service, the F-3 program, ostensibly a successor to the F-2, although the role to be played is more of an air superiority or air dominance fighter, rather than a strike fighter. These studies concluded that range, or endurance is the most important metric for survivability, a very interesting result indeed.
Airframe developers…appear to have settled on something close to the 2013 configuration for the F-3 that emphasized endurance and weapons load over flight performance… That design, 25DMU, described a heavy fighter with a belly weapons bay for six ramjet missiles about the size of the MBDA Meteor. The wing was large and slender by fighter standards, offering high fuel volume and low drag due to lift but penalizing acceleration.… The key factor was that the high-endurance design provided more aircraft on station than would be available from an alternative fleet of high-performance fighters. – (Aviation Week & Space Technology, February 15-28, 2016)
I am curious about the air combat models that reached the conclusion that endurance is the key metric for a new fighter. Similar USAF combat models indicated that in a conflict with PLA armed forces, the USAF would be pushed back to their bases in Japan after the first few days. “In any air war we do great in the first couple of days. Then we have to move everything back to Japan, and we can’t generate sufficient sorties from that point for deep strike on the mainland,” according to Christopher Johnson, former CIA senior China analyst [“The rivals,” The Economist, 20 October 2018]. (History reminds us of aircraft designed for range and maneuverability, the Mitsubishi A6M “Zero,” which also de-emphasized durability, such as pilot armor or self-sealing fuel tanks … was this the best choice?) Validation of combat models with historical combat data seems like an excellent choice if you are investing trillions of Yen, putting the lives of your military pilots on the line, and investing in a platform that will be in service for decades.
Given this expected cost, Japan faces a choice to develop the F-3 independently, or with foreign partners. Mitsubishi built and flew the X-2 “Shinshin” prototype in April 2016. The JASDF also issued an RFP to existing aircraft manufacturers, including the BAE Eurofighter Typhoon, the Boeing F-15 Eagle, and the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor. In October 2018, the Typhoon and the Eagle were rejected for not meeting the requirements, while the Raptor was rejected because “no clear explanation was given about the possibility of the U.S. government lifting the export ban.” The prospect of funding the entire cost of the F-3 fighter by independently developing the X-2 also does not appear acceptable, so Japan will look for a foreign partner for co-development. There is no shortage of options, from the British, the Franco-Germans, or multiple options with the Americans.
[Sources: IHS Jane’s All the World’s Fighting Aircraft, Wikipedia, militarymachine.com, author’s estimates}
In my previous posts, I explored impact the political aftermath of the Pacific War on Japan and the gradual restoration of sovereignty had on its air power policy. During this time, aircraft and air defense technology changed rapidly and the roles and mission of the Japanese Air Self Defense Force (JASDF) evolved rapidly as well.
The JASDF has been closely tied to the U.S. Air Force (USAF) since its inception. This was true in terms of missions, doctrine, technology and equipment. The primary role of the JASDF has been air defense and the protection of Japanese sovereignty (Defensive Counter Air, DCA), since 1958 when this mission was transitioned back from the USAF. The 1978 National Defense Program Guidelines (NDPG) mandated this, and also prohibited mid-air refueling and precision-strike munitions. These missions were gradually permitted as the threat environment evolved. (See this thesis for a good summary.)
The role of offensive air power (i.e. Offensive Counter Air or OCA; attacking enemy airbases, missile launch sites and similar military facilities) has traditionally been reserved for the USAF due to legal limits on the possible missions by the JASDF. Specifically the U.S. Armed Forces, Japan, 5th Air Force is a considerable force, including the 18th Wing at Kadena, Okinawa with four squadrons of F-15s, and the 35th Wing at Misawa in Northern Japan with four squadrons of F-16s, among other support squadrons to tankers, AWACs, etc.
In the early 1980’s, the F-1 attack aircraft had a strike capability against shipping with the ASM-1 and ASM-2 missiles.
In the late 1990’s, the F-4EJ upgraded “Kai” version added ground attack and the ability to strike with the ASM-1 and ASM-2 missiles.
In the early 2000’s, the F-2 aircraft was introduced, with ground attack with precision-guided munitions and the ability to strike with the ASM-2.
Currently, as the F-35A is adopted, it will have state-of-the-art precision strike capabilities, and likely use the Joint Strike Missile (JSM).
Nonetheless, the primary mission of the JASDF remains air superiority and interception. The data visualization above illustrates the different types of air superiority aircraft in service with the JASDF over time. This chart is based on six quantitative measures of analysis, and has a moderate level of information density:
Service Year – on the horizontal axis; when was this type introduced into service by the JASDF? This is often significantly after the similar type was introduced into service with the USAF. In some cases, this is an estimate, or in the case of the hypothetical “F-22J”, alternative history (aka wild speculation).
Aircraft Type – each bubble represents an aircraft type.
Range SMI (statute miles) – the color of the bubble, with darker being longer range; this is a the combat range of the aircraft type, often with optional drop tanks.
Max Speed MPH (statute miles per hour) – the size of the bubble represents the maximum speed of the aircraft, measured from a base of 100 MPH. This is typically at high altitude.
Rate of Climb FPM (feet per minute) – this is the ability of the aircraft to climb to altitude, and a key metric for an interceptor with a mission to rise to bombers which have violated the airspace of a nation.
Thrust to Weight Ratio – this measures the ability to propel the aircraft compared with the loaded weight of the aircraft. This is often used to express the capability to climb, for when an aircraft has a high angle of attack, thrust becomes lift, so when an aircraft has more lift than weight, it can climb, and even accelerate while moving straight up.
Wing Loading LBS/SquareFoot – this measures the size of the wing (and thus by proxy the lift generation capability) as compared to the weight of the aircraft, it is typically used to indicate the ability to turn quickly (i.e. change in degrees per second).
A few insights become clear when visualizing the data in this way. First, the F-104J in the role of interceptor was a huge leap in capability over the F-86 Sabre types. In many ways the F-104J set the standard to which later aircraft would match. Next, the linear progression between 1960 and 1980 of aircraft performance capability reached an apex with the F-15J, with a period of upgrades reflected in the “Kai” versions. Also, with some knowledge of these airframes, it can be seen that the Japanese market for military aircraft has been dominated by the Americans as opposed to the Europeans (or Russians). There are many aspects of these aircraft which are not captured in this chart, including weaponry, sensors, and stealth. I have discussed the relevance of these metrics in previous blog posts.
Today, the JSDF operates a wide range of aircraft, specialized in missions ranging across the spectrum of domains, with modern air force capabilities. A list of aircraft currently operated by force, and with numbers is presented in the annex, based upon the most current authoritative sources, but also updated for recent decisions by the Japanese government on procurement.
An “F-22J” is included as an “alternative history” in the chart above since the Japanese government has repeatedly sought to purchase this aircraft from Lockheed Martin for the JASDF. They have been stymied by the Obey amendment to the 1998 Defense Appropriations Act, which specifically forbade the export of the F-22 in order to protect the secrecy of its advanced technology.
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