Slitherine

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ORIGINAL: trevor999

A very good article on current and future data link/information sharing at The Drive dot com/The War Zone

"The RQ-180 Drone Will Emerge From The Shadows As The Centerpiece Of A Air Combat Revolution"

Sorry, it won't let me post links yet.

I was astonished that the F-35 and F-22 can't data link with each other. I wonder who thought that was a good idea.

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Not to put on my tin foil hat, but one has to wonder why the Air Force would purposely do that. I recently read an article where an Air Force general was going off on the Army for trying to develop land-based anti-ship/ground strike missiles for stationing in the West Pacific. He went off on a rant about how the Air Force could handle this mission on their own. I wonder if this Air Force general has seen any of the wargames about how the USAF performs in the opening days of, say, an invasion of Taiwan. A significant fraction of air assets are destroyed on the ground and the rest of the air assets have trouble getting into theater. You can only cram so many planes onto Anderson AFB in Guam - assuming that the Anderson runway is still functional, which is a big if.

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ORIGINAL: maverick3320
I wonder if this Air Force general has seen any of the wargames about how the USAF performs in the opening days of, say, an invasion of Taiwan. A significant fraction of air assets are destroyed on the ground and the rest of the air assets have trouble getting into theater.

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ORIGINAL: Dragon029

quote:

ORIGINAL: maverick3320
I wonder if this Air Force general has seen any of the wargames about how the USAF performs in the opening days of, say, an invasion of Taiwan. A significant fraction of air assets are destroyed on the ground and the rest of the air assets have trouble getting into theater.

To be fair, that's partially why the USAF General thinks it's dumb; if China can take out facilities in Guam, then what's stopping them from also taking out the Army's land-based systems? At least with the USAF you can fly B-52s, etc from Hawaii or Alaska (or CONUS with extra refuelling) and launch your hypersonics from those. When tensions get high you can also just have B-52s constantly rotating in the air, armed with ARRWs in case an attack is launched; if intelligence can't provide targeting before the facilities in Guam, etc are destroyed, then that's unfortunate but at least some of the B-52s are still airborne and can launch when the targeting is ready; the aircrew can then either land somewhere else in the region or ditch near allied territory. The Navy is in a similar position to the USAF.

Now on the other hand, the Army could position its launchers in discrete and changing locations in South Korea or Japan, etc where saturation attacks aren't as feasible, but generally the US doesn't use run & gun tactics with its SAMs, etc and it looks to me like their plan for LRHW isn't any different: