M&S
The Legions were getting their heads handed to them by the steppe riders of the Black Sea and Caspian cultures like the Alae and Sarmations and the Parthians.
The Romans in turn recruited Auxilia from these peoples to serve in their armies because they couldn't afford both the Legions and the secondary cavalry formations. It was not enough. And even though an increasing percentage of the late Roman forces were split between garrison forces like the limitanei and the cataphracti heavy cavalry they simply could not keep up with nor bring to bay the large mounted threat formations they had to deal with.
The Romans in turn recruited Auxilia from these peoples to serve in their armies because they couldn't afford both the Legions and the secondary cavalry formations. It was not enough. And even though an increasing percentage of the late Roman forces were split between garrison forces like the limitanei and the cataphracti heavy cavalry they simply could not keep up with nor bring to bay the large mounted threat formations they had to deal with.
Byzantium fought a 2 century war with Persia, largely using these troops and while the Romans eventually won, the protracted effort exhausted them and set them up for defeat by Islam.
I see analogies to this in the U.S. picking every new Big Kid On Block as it's next mirror-mirror 'whose the meanest of them all' competitor while adopting a socialist welfare state as the means to keep the civilian population from complaining too much about our overt militarism and the huge costs of it.
The 'All Good' effect of the Legions depended largely on their ability to act in a creeping-offensive, expeditionary, manner which let them take away the logistic base of their enemies and rapidly replace it with a Roman styled, dependent, infrastructure and bureaucracy which only they could manage.
If you're not going to do that kind of thing in the modern era, then you need a cataphracti force which can move far quicker and bring more localized force to bear in reach-past mode than even the largest expeditionary force we can still muster can generate as sorties.
The intent is still the same: threa ten the kids and women and you destroy the ability of the threat to compete with you as a resource taker.
But the transient nature of the 'external' operational mode is far different, as is the force protection-by-mobility nature of any forced fight.
But the transient nature of the 'external' operational mode is far different, as is the force protection-by-mobility nature of any forced fight.
It is interesting here to note that the original Equites were Patrician and made to pay their way with armor and horse (though the latter were 'insured' against loss in battle) and while paid three times the amount of a foot soldier were deemed 'unaffordable' enough that their service term was also half that of the serving Legionary infantry.
By the first century (admittedly with the help of the betrayal of the Celeres and the fear of Roman Emperors deriving therefrom) this meant that the Romans effectively were an all infantry force, recruiting allied cavalry, regionally.
I think this has direct bearing on the cost of power projection by conventional, manned, platforms.
Yet selling the F-35 as a Foederati'd means of participation in our own Legionary system is foolish, we cannot 'recruit' allied auxilia on the basis of 100 million up-front fees and the Reach Past effe ct is negligible without the full expeditionary force construct built around a carrier or FW (P) as a means to shape and focus the battlespace control effort.
This is one of the reasons I believe we need to change up our game with missiles and mounted special forces because those kinds of capabilities require much less continuous effort to force-entry and protect and can provide rapid reaction TCT engagement at a tactical level fo ISR supported precision fires, simply because the (aeroballistic) missiles are supersonic and one-way biased.
That these can come rapidly from outside the theater for HVLAD air drop is also not to be ignored.
That these can come rapidly from outside the theater for HVLAD air drop is also not to be ignored.
Conversely, HSPs offer the ultimate in ability to 'go deep' -beyond- the frontal conditioned fight and hostage political and industrial assets which, at a minimum, force an entirely new form of strategic air defense buy-in upon the enemy state while providing a realistically useful means of exploiting the High Fast envelope for non-nuclear strategic interdiction (a Falcon coming out of CONUS at Mach 25 could theoretically be confused for something else and if copied, could just as easily come back the other way...). Mach 10 is technologically achievable and operationally neutral in that .the only thing it can reach out to is other theater targets.
If we -must- have heavy tactical airpower as a n intermediate putter in the golf bag then we need to do three things:
1. Condense our formations. Again, there is absolutely ZERO excuse for effectively three separate air forces. If we must accept 100 million dollar platforms then we must make do with 800-1,000 of them, from a common reserve pool which can be assigned as needed to either naval or landbased units. It's not like today's units even use differentiated tactics or weapons to truly justify their variation. 'Joint Training' assures this.
Where Carqual remains a highly training intensive task this prerequisite, by itself, means UCAV automation with JPALS.
2. Analyze the weak points in a typical 1,500nm mission radius profile.such as whether it is wiser to punch everyone through any coastal defense at a single ingress point to then spread out and cry havoc through rear areas of if VLO can make a loss in absolute mission radius worth the effort to try and thread the needle from multiple points. My own bet is that, while standoff sensorization and continued improvements in RFLO (towards -70dbsm and beyond) as well as things like dual engining with cruise and loiter powerplants for -signature- reasons as much as TSFC, will allow deep maneuver and lock down of threat military and insurgent traffic using SOMs, the actual penetration of any netcentric defense will be bet ter done as a focussed effort, if only so that manned assets like the EA-18 and (landbased) tanking can have all of their force protection gaggled up as well.
We then need to understand what happens when the threat starts fielding turbo-SAM/AAM as alternative area-intercept when high end VLO turns their area SAM into point defense weapons. Where the ability to avoid contact and sustain separation from threats is a better ideal (superior sensorization = 'first look' etc.) things like the acceleration times for supersonic acceleration sprint must be set against the weight of slab laser systems which can, at need, 'thin the herd' of any swarm pursuit.
While the combination of fast sprints = light airframes and 150KW lasers = no cockpit as a preskew towards UCAV bias, it also pushes you towards a stealthy X-36 rather than X-47 airframe configuration.
3. Do what we do, longer, faster, harder.
So that the 1.5 sortie per day surge generation of 'once every 11 hours' on non-moving building targets, becomes a more consistent and constant coverage, able to hit movers in their own rear areas, without letup.
So that the 1.5 sortie per day surge generation of 'once every 11 hours' on non-moving building targets, becomes a more consistent and constant coverage, able to hit movers in their own rear areas, without letup.
As I have comment ed elsewhere, when defending against ballistic munitions your best bet is to go for the arrow instead of the archer. You will always know where to look because the threat is coming to you and, for cost (APS = per installation, SSL = per shot), you can layer the defenses so deep that nothing gets through. This means powered ordnance on the jet to increase terminal target approach speed and yet restricts -size- (warhead class) of that ordnance to enable saturative numbers to be carried. By itself, this is going to change entirely the target classes that we can go after, more towards tactical and point targets. Volumetrics may be more important than weight here, the USAF in particular needing to get off their high horse on stacked-bay munitions loading and acknowledge that, of the 1,650lbs that a BRU-61+4X GBU-39 represents, 450 of that is rack.
While I am intrigued by recent experiments with in-air reloading, I am also skeptical unless the UCAV can be rigidly docked and/or clip-loaded.
Obviously, if you are on the wrong end of even a 300nm radius back to the weapons rack/tanker, any tactical TCT you find is going to be long gone by the time you skip out to get a reload. Secure comms may be possible as MEMS and GAN AESA change the nature of directional CDL-X/Ku band datalinks but again, if the safety and effectiveness of a UCAV formation lies, not in it's swarming but dispersion, wolf-howling for help may also be non supportable.
On a 1,500nm radius /days/ on station basis, the idea that a 1,000lb warload is practical is ridiculous. Whether you are talking CUDA or Griffin, it simply isn't enough. But at the same time, it's likely that a 4,000lb payload wouldn't be either because the kinds of target sets which are that dense are also sufficiently well defended to absorb your shots and then send a screaming horde of counter-air your way. Even if they have to turbo-SAM launch it themselves.
There is _no_ underestimating the capability of a 15lb turbine like the TJ-50M1 to push a 300lb missile 500nm downrange as the MALI. Because even if the weight is heavier than a Tor or Roland, it has the inva luable option of 'pick any two' long-lope, super sprint or reattack.
Because of all these conditions, I believe that the SSL is pretty much a given. Only the laser gives you sufficient combat persistence, defensive shoot down of inbound missiles which, if they miss, will simply come around again, and a permanent mount = lighter weight alternative to the structural (weight) and volumetric (size) penalties of supporting a large internal bay-void within the fuselage structure.
In turn, with all of these as a given and acknowledging the hard limits on pilot enduranc e, it may well be that it is the -manned- jets which will be the missileer weapons cabinets. Because of their larger mass (cockpit + bay) they will not be able to remain on station for any length of time but in a drive-by 'passing through' sense they could assign multiple weapons to UCAV pregenerated target lists using close-up (100nm vs. 300nm), directional, microwave datalinks. While themselves moving away from things like maneuvering tails and high thrust to weight ratios simply because they would be operating in presanitized backwoods areas, nowhere's near the bases, infrastructure or transit lanes apt to be highly sensorized and defended.
ARGUMENT:
The above is, in many ways, the diametric opposite of the fever dream that the F-35 crowd presents of a center-nod e F-35 being supported by waves of MALD type minidrones and a few UCLASS weapons carriers.
The above is, in many ways, the diametric opposite of the fever dream that the F-35 crowd presents of a center-nod e F-35 being supported by waves of MALD type minidrones and a few UCLASS weapons carriers.
It has to be. Because the man in the loop is the weak point both in terms of breaking-in a deep loitering asset over a potentially active/contested battlefront and holding on station for the 10-14hrs needed to generate targeting.
Indeed, _why bother_ to put a huge bunch of sensor gear on a manned asset which is purposefully intended to use a forward screen of hounds-before-hunter tripwire systems to find the enemy force, directly?
My Idea of a combat UCAV: a basic delta airframe like a Mirage or a Rafale, sculpted with 3D printed layup so that you have sufficient discontinuities of shape (see: B-2 leading edge twist) to break up travelling waves and prevent the jet from acting a single dipole to longwave radars.
Put dependent 'pods' at front and back, like an Su-27 to support sensors and the laser optics up front and the engines as vertical differential area ruling and to allow the jet to surf it's own shock.
Install two engines. One with a minimum cruise thrust of 1-2,000lbf and .15-.21 TSFC within a deep mixing plenum to minimize IR signature. The other a 7-10,000lbf cruise engine, able to in-air restart at up to 50,000ft. Whether VAATE can make this one powerplant with variable cycle doesn't matter, so long as the 'light core' is 100lbs and the heavy no more than 1,000lbs.
This buys you your loiter and your initial protection against such things as LTA drones (vacuformed rigid-integral gasbags with solar powered electric motors and a DAS type SAIRST). It also forces you to schedule your throttle settings between electric useage levels for the datalink, sensors and an active peltier cell type IR masking system for the body.
Design your weapons bay around a minimum skin cutout (one door) and either carousel or chain-driven presentation of vertically stowed or stacked munitions. Look for a minimum 20 weapon CAS, 10 weapon INT and 6 weapon SEAD loadout to provide a carriage box imperative on munition sizing. DO NOT BORROW FROM THE EXISTING MANNED COMMUNITY MUNITIONS LIST!
Consider extendible/flipup, ICE type, controls that allow for carrier landing in a non flying wing design, specifically as a pitch effector for glide slope control with spo ilerons for active lift dumping. But avoid all pretense towards high-G structures/surfaces because a turreted laser makes such superfluous.
Except for a single, flipdown, (see: EA-6B Bird Cage) avionics cage, seal the airframe. Put section breaks at particular points so that you can harvest the jet of vital systems on a limb-by-torso basis of upgrade or repair. But as much as possible design the airframe to be used until it's thrown away. Maintenance access complicates both VLO and weight considerations and also provides a means for internal corrosion. If you void the airframe, moisture cannot get it and fire has no oxygenation point.
Install hubmotors on the landing gear so that aircraft can be moved around, sans tractor or primary engine thrust, just on the power of a low end APU. Automate the deck handlers and prifly and you will greatly improve safety while allowing the jets, on long cycle, to be serviced by airwing components (as carrier crewing compliments and total size) half as large.
CONCLUSION:
Whether the above is going to be worth it in the long run, I cannot say. It would certainly go a long ways towards making airpower more effective and affordable in comparison to it's extant form, today.
But the enemy gets a vote too and everything which we do they will copy using a technology base which 'good enough' will favor capacity over capability, especially operating on their own turf.
A mix of all three options effectively means halving out capacity for an unknown persistence change in capability and/or st arving the naval and land forces to pay for the major change in airpower approach.
Again, as I have said before: War is about amalgamating your enemy's resources to your own culture while destroying their ability to ever be a threat to you again.
If we are not willing to engage in that kind of total warfare via -for gain- militarism, the notion that we need such a large force at all is ludicrous.
It is bankrupting our nation without paying for itself.
CONCLUSION:
Whether the above is going to be worth it in the long run, I cannot say. It would certainly go a long ways towards making airpower more effective and affordable in comparison to it's extant form, today.
But the enemy gets a vote too and everything which we do they will copy using a technology base which 'good enough' will favor capacity over capability, especially operating on their own turf.
A mix of all three options effectively means halving out capacity for an unknown persistence change in capability and/or st arving the naval and land forces to pay for the major change in airpower approach.
Again, as I have said before: War is about amalgamating your enemy's resources to your own culture while destroying their ability to ever be a threat to you again.
If we are not willing to engage in that kind of total warfare via -for gain- militarism, the notion that we need such a large force at all is ludicrous.
It is bankrupting our nation without paying for itself.
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