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Bad ideas in war

theprestige said:
This turned out to be a training and doctrine issue. Navy pilots with proper training did better with missiles than Air Force pilots did with their precious gunz.


Hear me out: Maybe it's more effective to simply take the occasional dogfighting L, rather than trying to be really good at it. Instead focus those efforts on being really good at the more efficient air combat strategies. Like BVR combat or straight-up IADS.


My thesis is that once your enemy starts investing heavily in being really good at dogfighting, you can win by investing heavily at not having to dogfight. If one of your interceptors occasionally gets in a jam with a dedicated dogfighter, that's not really a big problem for you on a strategic level. Your resources are focused on things that matter more than winning dogfights you're not getting into.
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An example:

When the USA first entered World War II, they came up against a Japanese naval fighter called the Mitsubishi A6M Zero. It was superior in almost all respects to the American fighters it encountered. If an American entered a dogfight with a Zero, he would likely die.

The solution, which actually doesn't seem to have taken long to find, was to not get involved in dogfights with Zeros. The Americans developed tactics that avoided dogfights and exploited the Zero's weakness i.e. it was very lightly built and would explode in a fireball at the slightest provocation. The light build was at least partly inspired by the desire to make a good dogfighter.

I think the reason for the fetishisation of dogfighting ability is in the statement "if you're in a dogfight, the best dogfighter will live to fight another day". People forget about the first part of that statement and focus on the second part, because that's the glamorous Biggles/Snoopy and the Red Baron bit. But if you can make it so that the first part "you're in a dogfight" is almost never true, the second part is irrelevant.
 
Zero was faster, out turned and out climber the Wildcat. But, the Wildcat was better armed and a lot tougher than a Zero and importantly could out dive a Zero.
Another advantage the Japanese had was their pilots were all experienced in air combat.

It didn't take long to work out tactics that favoured the Wildcat, swoop down from higher altitude and then gun and keep diving through the attack. By the time of Midway the Wildcat squadrons were holding their own against the Zero
A combination of improved models, good tactics and better trained pilots benefitting from experienced pilots passing on their skills. Something the Japanese never did, like the Germans they kept pilots in action until they were killed whereas the US rotated experienced pilots out and used them as trainers so Japanese skills deteriorated whereas US skills increased.
When the Hellcat came in to service the Zero was totally outclassed.
 
Kinda, sorta, but also not completely.

- For a start, the Zero's light build was more because of the range requirement than all other requirements combined.

- Zero was faster OR out turned the Wildcat. But it had a problem doing both at the same time. As I mentioned before, it had no assist on its control surfaces, so past a speed you physically couldn't even move the stick. Unless you were some kind of Superman, it would be stuck immovable like Excalibur in the rock :p

- Which brings us to what Andy Ross correctly notes, a lot of that superiority actually needed experienced pilots. Which Japan had plenty after their wars in China. A skilled pilot would know by reflex when to throttle the engine to the max to have speed, and when to hit the airbrakes and turn on a dime. A pilot with barely a couple of hours training on a wooden bench with a wooden stick, like most late-war kamikaze pilots had (literally,) wouldn't even know that his stick could lock up and what to do when that happens. So the majority of those really couldn't hit anything but the water.

In fact, the fact that inexperienced pilots would just be cannon fodder in it and die without achieving anything anyway, was one factor in WHY Japan switched it to kamikaze duties.

- I will disagree with Andy Ross on one point, though. By the end Japan didn't have attrition just because pilots shot down instead of being turned into instructors. When they started the Kamikaze program, actually a lot of experienced fighter pilots and trainers were ordered to "volunteer" for Kamikaze duty. But even before that, the encouraged mentality was to do the Bushido thing and take someone or something with you to the afterlife, instead of bailing out or whatever.

- Also the decline in pilot quality by the end goes even farther (and less humane.) A lot of those kamikaze pilots were "volunteered" Koreans slaves and the like. But I digress.

- MORE IMPORTANTLY, some people seem to have weird idea of what "dogfight" even means. It just means ANY kind of short range combat between fighter planes. Whether you got into a turning and looping match in your Zero against a Wildcat, or use boom-and-zoom against the Spitfires in a ME-262, it's still a dogfight. So the USN did... what? Switch from dogfighting to dogfighting against the Zero? :p
 
We already had one for more than a century: it's close range fight between fighter planes. Like, literally even in 1917, if you came back to base and said, "I just took a straight dive behind the Sopwith Camel, with the sun behind my back, and just riddled the pilot and engine with bullets, then zoomed away", nobody would say "yeah, but if you didn't get in a turning context, it's not a dogfight, you don't qualify for the Blue Max" (AkA the Pour Le Merite medal.) :p
 
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steenkh said:
Now it seems we need a definition of what is a dogfight.
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"The fetishized vision of burning energy to convert momentum into an optimal firing position at close range via pure skill and testicular mass of the human pilot."

My thesis is, it behooves air forces to get as far away from that situation as possible. And that any scenario that calls for aggressive conversion of energy into position is better served by an anti-air missile. Rather than spending enough energy to get a whole-ass airplane and its entire payload into an advantageous position in the merge, only spend enough energy to get the warhead itself into that position. And then design your doctrine, your bombers, and your interceptors around that principle. Even if it means your interceptors are less likely to win the occasional dogfight. The losses you suffer in that rare situation will be far outweighed by the savings you realize from a more efficient air combat doctrine.
 
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I would say that any airforce I know of would agree with that, once missiles got good enough. That's why the USA paid for AIM-120 air-to-air missiles (aka AMRAAM,) with a range of 150km (about 93 miles for the imperials.) And now for its shiny new AIM-174B, which can attack aerial targets as far away as 400 km (250 miles.)

Seems to me like they very much would rather not end up in close range if they can avoid it.
 
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HansMustermann said:
I would say that any airforce I know of would agree with that, once missiles got good enough. That's why the USA paid for AIM-120 air-to-air missiles (aka AMRAAM,) with a range of 150km (about 93 miles for the imperials.) And now for its shiny new AIM-174B, which can attack aerial targets as far away as 400 km (250 miles.)

Seems to me like they very much would rather not end up in close range if they can avoid it.
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Unless you're a partisan of the jet fighter mafia, and as far as I can see few combat pilots gravitate to that crowd.
 
Well, yes, unless you're the fighter mafia or such think-tanks. That's why I phrased it at the level of any country's airforce.
 
HansMustermann said:
Well, yes, unless you're the fighter mafia or such think-tanks. That's why I phrased it at the level of any country's airforce.
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Yup, if anything it was a bad idea in war for air forces (or defence ministries) to write off dog fighting decades too early.

Whether the F35 should have guns is possibly a different question. I'd guess yes, ironically because of future proofing - it's possible to think that guns/directed energy weapons might be useful in the future.
 
Wudang said:
Aren't guns still useful for ground attacks on targets of opportunity etc? Not my area of expertise but can a fighter carry enough missiles for varying values of enough?
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Or air attacks of opportunity. It's not like cruise missiles do a lot of dogfighting.

But I don't think modern jet fighters spend much time loitering over the battlefield.
 
Wudang said:
Aren't guns still useful for ground attacks on targets of opportunity etc? Not my area of expertise but can a fighter carry enough missiles for varying values of enough?
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One can also warn with guns in a way that doesn't make sense for missiles.

It's possible to envision waves of high performance drones requiring low cost interception as well
 
The focus on maneuvering with modern fighter planes is AFAIK not to dodge other fighter planes, but to dodge missiles.
 
steenkh said:
The focus on maneuvering with modern fighter planes is AFAIK not to dodge other fighter planes, but to dodge missiles.
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A lot of it is to use shorter runways with larger payloads. The Eurocanards* have converged on a hybrid design that seeks to maximize both efficiency at high speeds, and lift at low speeds and high angles of attack. Hence the canards (US designs seek the same result through leading edge root extensions and American exceptionalism).

---
*Typhoon, Rafale, Gripen
 
theprestige said:
A lot of it is to use shorter runways with larger payloads.
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No, not really. STOL is a whole different concept than manoeuvrability. Some design elements help with both, some with just one, but it still doesn't make them equivalent.
 
HansMustermann said:
No, not really. STOL is a whole different concept than manoeuvrability. Some design elements help with both, some with just one, but it still doesn't make them equivalent.
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I'm saying that a lot of the design elements we're seeing in 4.5 gen fighters are to assist with lift at low speeds and high angles of attack. High agility is a side effect of that.
 
To some extent, yes, but that's been the case since 1914. People trying to go for higher climb rates incidentally might or might not also help with taking off, but the two are still different goals with different motivations behind them, and different design elements might help with one or another or both. And, as any design is a compromise, something that happens to tick 2 or 3 checkmarks is a plus.
 
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jimbob said:
Yup, if anything it was a bad idea in war for air forces (or defence ministries) to write off dog fighting decades too early.

Whether the F35 should have guns is possibly a different question. I'd guess yes, ironically because of future proofing - it's possible to think that guns/directed energy weapons might be useful in the future.
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If anything gunned aircraft have been held onto too long in the US air forces. For example, the only thing keeping the A-10 alive is the more dakka aspect of it. Operationally Desert Storm showed that it was obsolete even in its alleged role as a ground attack aircraft.

And with drones and missiles becoming better and better with each passing year, guns are less and less useful.
 
I would say Theiu's decision in 1975 to abandon the Central Highlands and the Northen Third of Vietnam is up there in the "Bad Military Decisions" of all time.
Granted, South VIetnam was pretty much doomed anyway, but it would have lasted a lot longer if Theiu had not made the stupid decision. Destroyed moral in South Vietnam.
 
Gulliver Foyle said:
If anything gunned aircraft have been held onto too long in the US air forces. For example, the only thing keeping the A-10 alive is the more dakka aspect of it. Operationally Desert Storm showed that it was obsolete even in its alleged role as a ground attack aircraft.

And with drones and missiles becoming better and better with each passing year, guns are less and less useful.
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Yes that's the current situation. But fighter designers have to consider the life of the aircraft.

It's easy to imagine defence against improved attack drones flying low and needing look-down, shoot-down capability because of their low flight height, numbers and performance. Maybe with a mixture of manual control and AI .

High speed airborne guns or their replacement could be potentially useful in such situations again. Not BVR missile engagements but more like interceptors
 
I'd say that drones also bring something else to the equation. They're cheap. If you have to use a $400,000 AIM-9X (for a Block II Plus model) to take down a $400 drone (assuming it could even lock onto one, which it can't,) you soon have a problem. It's not even hyperbole: it can literally cost just 400 bucks for a racing drone that can haul an old RPG-7 warhead around just fine.

Even the behemoth that is the US economy would eventually go broke if they tried to fight each drone with a missile.

And that cheapness brings another problem with it: numbers. You can easily just put more of them in the air than the other guys even have space for on their wing pylons.

Guns simply are the better option.

Not sure I'd use a fighter plane as a platform for those guns, but if they can make the sensors and computers able to do that, one extra option can't hurt, right?
 
Speaking of dogfighting, though, I wonder why nobody is making fighter drones yet. (Well, ok, the F-35 wingman drones kinda is just that.) You'd need better latency than going to orbit and back, but otherwise a couple of 5.45mm rounds (just to use one calibre that Ukraine has plenty of) is probably the cheapest way to dispose of an enemy drone. If you can make a drone that can carry and fire, say, an AKS-74U, that could take care of enemy drones just fine. And if they can't find one, hey, they can also mag-dump on some Russian conscripts on the way back to base :p
 
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HansMustermann said:
Speaking of dogfighting, though, I wonder why nobody is making fighter drones yet. (Well, ok, the F-35 wingman drones kinda is just that.) You'd need better latency than going to orbit and back, but otherwise a couple of 5.45mm rounds (just to use one calibre that Ukraine has plenty of) is probably the cheapest way to dispose of an enemy drone. If you can make a drone that can carry and fire, say, an AKS-74U, that could take care of enemy drones just fine. And if they can't find one, hey, they can also mag-dump on some Russian conscripts on the way back to base :p
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Video in link

https://x.com/wilendhornets/status/1831403531988844566
 
Stability of the firing platform, accuracy, complexity. They're working on it, though. Meanwhile, they're getting better at just ramming drones with other drones. Apparently it's a pretty cost effective way to get enemy recon drones out of the sky.

Long term, I expect we'll see something with a lidar designator, cueing either EXACTO type bullets, or a variant of the APKWS.
 
HansMustermann said:
I would say that any airforce I know of would agree with that, once missiles got good enough. That's why the USA paid for AIM-120 air-to-air missiles (aka AMRAAM,) with a range of 150km (about 93 miles for the imperials.) And now for its shiny new AIM-174B, which can attack aerial targets as far away as 400 km (250 miles.)

Seems to me like they very much would rather not end up in close range if they can avoid it.
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It's an air launched Standard and weighs nigh-on a tonne; a stand-in while the AIM-260 is persuaded to actually work.
And like all such very long range missiles it has the problems of target designation and flight time.
 
Well, nevertheless, it shows that they want SOMETHING to hit that far away. They're not proposing to go into gun range with the enemy AWACS (equivalent.)
 
HansMustermann said:
some people seem to have weird idea of what "dogfight" even means. It just means ANY kind of short range combat between fighter planes. Whether you got into a turning and looping match in your Zero against a Wildcat, or use boom-and-zoom against the Spitfires in a ME-262, it's still a dogfight. So the USN did... what? Switch from dogfighting to dogfighting against the Zero? :p
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You're on your own there.
 
HansMustermann said:
I'll start this out with the WW2 British idea that German paratroopers could just land in Central Park, and who's gonna stop them?

Well...

1. The German paratrooper units had been depleted in the invasion of Crete. They had won, but they took serious losses that were never replenished. Sure, Germany conscripted more soldiers, but they tended to go to just about any unit except paratroopers. Even when they devised a paratrooper weapon like the FG-42 (Fallschirmjägergewehr 42 = "paratrooper rifle 42") it only got issued in limited numbers in 1943 and beyond, way after the Battle Of Britain, and really, still the number of paratroopers they had was really just to tick the box that they had any at all.

2. MORE IMPORTANTLY, you have to undertstand how German paratroopers worked AT ALL. Seriously, it's counter-intuitive.

You may have seen in stuff like Band Of Brothers how the allies jumped with their weapons attached to themselves in various bags and all.

The Germans didn't.

The Germans jumped with just a pistol on themselves, while the rest of their weapons (not just heavy equipment, but even rifles or SMGs) dropped separately. After you landed, you had to scramble towards WTH place you saw a parachute fall and search for your equipment. (Sounds dumb, and IS dumb, but nobody said the Nazis were geniuses:p)

So, yeah, if they paradropped in Central Park, they'd have just about a Luger or Mauser C96 between every second or so of them, while even their basic rifles dropped in, say, Peckham or Camden:p

The Londoners among you will understand the problem, but for everyone else, imagine your rifles and ammo dropping a couple miles away in an urban jungle, AND YOU DON'T KNOW WHERE. Literally.

The whole German paratrooper doctrine was devised for open fields, not urban jungle.

Would "Dad's army" of old reserve guards be able to take them on? <BLEEP!> even a couple of angry cop precincts could :p


Feel free to add your own mis-conceptions in wars in any era.
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Evidence of how vulnerable Paratroopers can be is what happened when German Paratroopers tried landing near three airfields in Crete in 1941.
the paratroopers were very vulnerable and many were just massacred has they landed. Student's plan to seize the three airfields was very poorly thought out and frankly landed paratroopers much of the time far to close to well armed troops.

In fact Cretan civilians near Malme for example killed the paratroopers with crude guns and in some cases with rocks and sticks and took the Guns etc., of the Germans and then used the weaponry to kill, capture and wound even more Germans. The landing at Malme worked out for the Germans for a lot of reasons which some were sheer luck.

Late on the first day a little over 1,000 paratroopers landed successfully east of the airport with little to no opposition from anyone. The following early morning the British withdrew from a hill over looking the airport, allowing the Germans to take it. Student realizing he had largely blown it seized this chance to get victory by flying troops fast and furious to Malme. The Allies were hampered by the following delusions. They actually thought German aircraft could land in all sorts of places and not just at airfields. Further the Allies thought if they just prevented the Germans from landing troops by sea they would win. Of course German air supremacy was very important.

It is interesting to think about what might have happened if the Allies had distributed 10,000 or so rifles + ammo among the local population near the airfields, given how effective the Cretans turned out to be.
 
Pacal said:
Evidence of how vulnerable Paratroopers can be is what happened when German Paratroopers tried landing near three airfields in Crete in 1941.
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We don't even have to reach all the way back to World War 2 anymore. US Army Rangers and Special Forces got badly mauled in Mogadishu much more recently. And even more recently than that, "Elite" Russian airborne infantry got absolutely massacred at Hostomel Airport in Ukraine.

Similarly, the security teams in Benghazi were hard pressed. While not exactly paratroops, they had similar training and experience, and fall squarely into the same "elite light infantry" category. These kinds of troops are great at surprise attacks via rapid movement, but cold suck at holding ground without immediate heavy reinforcements.
 
Paratroops need very rapid reinforcement and support on the ground. They can take a position quickly but don't have the firepower to hold it.

German paratroops famously couldn't carry any equipment with them other than a pistol and a couple of grenades because of the design of their parachute. It attached to one point on a belt on their backs. When they landed they had to roll and they couldn't control their direction of descent etc.
They relied on quickly finding and securing their equipment canisters that were dropped with them.
Having the benefit of the earlier German experience British and later American para's had the now standard two point shoulder attachment for their chutes and an equipment bag secured to their leg which, after they opened their chute hung below them attached to their harness. When they landed the equipment hit the ground first so the weight wasn't on the para.
Consequently they had proper weapons and ammunition with them right from the start.

British paratroops at Arnhem took vehicles and light tanks with them and secured their objectives but couldn't be supported as the ground offensive stalled and where overwhelmed.

Probably the best use of airborne troops in the war were the attacks on the Pegasus Bridge and those around it in Normandy and the Bruneval raid that captured and stole a German radar installation.
 
Pacal said:
Evidence of how vulnerable Paratroopers can be is what happened when German Paratroopers tried landing near three airfields in Crete in 1941.
the paratroopers were very vulnerable and many were just massacred has they landed. Student's plan to seize the three airfields was very poorly thought out and frankly landed paratroopers much of the time far to close to well armed troops.

In fact Cretan civilians near Malme for example killed the paratroopers with crude guns and in some cases with rocks and sticks and took the Guns etc., of the Germans and then used the weaponry to kill, capture and wound even more Germans. The landing at Malme worked out for the Germans for a lot of reasons which some were sheer luck.

Late on the first day a little over 1,000 paratroopers landed successfully east of the airport with little to no opposition from anyone. The following early morning the British withdrew from a hill over looking the airport, allowing the Germans to take it. Student realizing he had largely blown it seized this chance to get victory by flying troops fast and furious to Malme. The Allies were hampered by the following delusions. They actually thought German aircraft could land in all sorts of places and not just at airfields. Further the Allies thought if they just prevented the Germans from landing troops by sea they would win. Of course German air supremacy was very important.

It is interesting to think about what might have happened if the Allies had distributed 10,000 or so rifles + ammo among the local population near the airfields, given how effective the Cretans turned out to be.
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Partially the issues at Crete were down to poor Fallschirmjäger equipment, their equipment design meant that they didn't have proper small arms until after landing.
 
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