It’s the Range, Stupid… Part 1

Hello everybody!

Today I would like to address a number of questions and commentaries that have surfaced ever since….gosh, that was back in September this year, though feels like few ages ago… - ever since I’ve addressed specific topics and explain few additional issues related to air warfare over Ukraine. Indeed, even take a look into the future, and explain what to expect in the coming months.

Disclaimer: the title of this one might sound a little bit aggressive, even offensive, thus let me explain it. I’m not trying to be offensive or aggressive, but to prompt you into thinking outside your comfort zone - and that through merely paraphrasing certain US President’s statement about the economy. Or at least I think I recall there was one who said something like, ‘It’s the Economy, Stupid.’ So, the title of this story is thus, ‘It’s the Range, Stupid’, because it’s going to explain few thingies about the importance of the range – the distance over which sensors and weapons can reach – for the outcome of air combats: and then a few things that might not be the least pleasant to read.

***

Having ‘warned’ you, in most polite fashion, I do think I need to start by ‘taking a few steps back in history’… Long, long ago…. so long ago, there was no internet, no smartphones… unimaginable, isn’t it….? Indeed, these were completely unimaginable to the mass of humans crawling around this biosphere named ‘Earth’, back then… but I’m digressing… back to my story: long, long ago, the simplistic idea was born to revolutionise air warfare through the use of missiles.

The idea became so popular that the advent of air-to-air missiles (AAMs) and surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) led some important people all over the world into several conclusions. For example, sometimes during the second half of the 1950s, such ideas brought not a few of involved people as far as to convince not only themselves, but everybody else around them that, for example, AAMs would render gun armament of aircraft obsolete. Few years later, some went as far as to declare all the manned aircraft were obsolete: entire governments were convinced to stop financing the research and development of future combat aircraft. Others were told they could save lots of money by ordering combat aircraft without any guns installed on them, and armed with missiles only…

Then came few unexpected wars. Say, the Vietnam War, few Arab Israeli wars, first and foremost – and the experiences from these have shocked lots of people convinced about superiority of missiles and obsolescence of guns. These experiences have shown that the avionics and guidance systems installed into contemporary aircraft and missiles – like radars, like infra-red seekers, power steering, rocket motors… were all immature: not yet developed well-enough to make missiles clearly superior. The experiences even drove some into conclusions like, ‘a fighter without a gun is like a bird without a wing’.

Ironically, most of observers back then missed another important factor: the pilots and ground crews flying and maintaining ever more complex aircraft began failing to keep-up with the latest technologies. They were still obsessed with guns, and so-called ‘dog-fighting’ of the Second World War: ‘dog-fighting’ means that practice of trying to attack the enemy from the rear, using machine guns or auto-cannons.

Point is: especially contemporary pilots they lacked the skills necessary to deploy the latest technologies to their full advantage. An entirely new generation of fliers was necessary to change that.

….and before such a new generation of fliers entered service and became influentila, though around the time the origins of the mass of combat aircraft currently in service in Ukraine and Russia came into being, back in the 1970s, almost everybody involved was foremost preoccupied with taking great care to install modern guns into fighter jets.

Problem…. actually, there was not just one problem…. Foremost was that back then nobody would ever come to the idea that the combat aircraft in question would be used in a massive war fought some 50 years further forward in the future. At most, everybody expected the fighter jets of the 1970s to all be replaced by new designs of the 1980s and 1990s… Moreover, the politicians of the time were either preoccupied with criticising existing missiles, for example in the ‘West’; or, with lulling themselves into the false sense of security about the superiority of their own missile technology, for example in the ‘East’. Moreover, when, just few years later, in the early 1990s, the dominating conflict of the times – something called the ‘Cold War’ – was suddenly over, almost everybody quickly forgot about combat aircraft, AAMs, and SAMs: all of a sudden, almost everybody was busy playing with different other toys, celebrating parties, learning to make use of the internet… or with fighting wars against ‘Islamo-Fascist goat-herders’ somewhere in the deserts of Northern Africa and the Greater Middle East…

Another problem – and then one almost unnoticed by the mass of the public – was that the advances in information technologies meanwhile resulted in a ‘small revolution’ in aerial warfare. All the dreams once dreamt about missile domination were gradually realised, and combat aircraft gradually equipped with the capability to really detect and shoot their opponents with missiles from well outside the range of a gun. Perhaps the (Second) Gulf War of 1991 was not yet perfectly clear in this regards, but: at least NATO’s operation against Serbia, in 1999 (also known as the ‘Kosovo War’) - not to talk about that ‘some bush-fire war’ fought between Ethiopia and Eritrea around the same time - have clearly demonstrated just how far the technology advanced over the previous 20 years.

‘All of a sudden’, fighter jets started killing each other from ranges of 30, 35, 40, 45, even 50 kilometres…

Indeed, for a while, it appeared as if air warfare was full of technological marvels once again. So much so,

a)       the mass of modern pilots and ground personnel meanwhile had to possess a know-how equal to academic degrees in engineering and electro-technics in order to operate technology equipping them. And so much so that,

b)      mere ten years later, the first unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) appeared armed with AAMs, and, in 2002, one of them even fired a man-portable air-defence missile (MANPAD), adapted to serve as a short-range AAM, at an Iraq-operated MiG-25 interceptor that was about to shoot it down…

Alas, the ‘AAM’ fired by that UAV was much too short-ranged, and much too slow: the big, fast R-40 air-to-air missile released by that MiG-25 (ASCC/NATO reporting name ‘AA-6 Acrid’) rapidly cut the range and blew away the UAV well before its FIM-92 Stinger could hit the MiG in return. And then, two decades later, in late February and early March of 2022, the results of the first week or so of the air war during Pudding’s all-out invasion of Ukraine have dramatically demonstrated: just having ‘years of flying experience’ on own fighter jet, and ‘huge balls’, is simply not enough to win a modern air war. On the contrary: lack of understanding for latest technology – and resulting tactics – of aerial warfare is nothing else than lethal. De-facto suicidal.

***

….with which I’m getting to the point: to the very essence of the problem the Ukrainian Air Force (PSU) is going to experience for years in advance – at least as long as trying to counter modern-day fighters and interceptors of the Russian Air-Space Force (VKS) with such fighter jets like F-16AMs, only.

What am I talking about?

The essence of the answer to that question can be read in this diagram:

Missile ranges cited above are based on confirmed or ‘known’ experiences from air combats of the last 20 years, NOT on advertisments by manufacturers.

As should be obvious, the radar- and missile range of such fighters and interceptors operated by the VKS, like Su-35S and MiG-31BM are vastly superior to those of the F-16AMs, which are in the process of being introduced to service with the PSU.

In simplest possible terms: any Ukrainian F-16AM trying to approach a Russian Su-35S or MiG-31BM is very likely to be detected and targeted by the enemy’s R-37M long-range AAMs, and that well before it can release its primary ‘long-range’ (actually: medium-range) weapon, the AIM-120C AMRAAM.

….as should be obvious alone from keeping in mind that ‘AMRAAM’ is an abbreviation for ‘Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile’, not for ‘long-range-…’ or ‘stretched-range-…’ or whatever else, but for medium range missile….

Of course, anybody with any kind of serious clue about modern air warfare is now going to remind me that: ‘hey, it’s not like every air combat is fought under ‘ideal circumstances’, with the two opponents approaching each other from straight ahead, like when two medieval knights were jostling, and with their sensors providing their pilots with perfect situational awareness.

And, I’m promptly going to agree.

….though, this is then going to prompt me into… something I’m going to discuss in the `Part 2’ of this feature. 😉

(…to be continued…)