The F-15 Eagle: Origins and Development, 1964-1972 [pdf] (opens in new tab)

I had some hope that this biographer wouldn't take Burton's claims at face value, but alas.

The Bradley was designed to survive 14.5mm HMG fire. This is in line with IFV doctrine. The three most important layers of the survivability onion come before "don't get penetrated" and Bradley has proven to be very good at those.

The army did not plan to perform live fire testing with an RPG designed to destroy tanks weighing twice as much as the Bradley because it would be a waste of a vehicle. The outcome was already known, the vehicle would be catastrophically destroyed. When Burton asked, they agreed to do it anyway. The army Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL) wanted to modify the test so that they might actually learn something they didn't already know. Burton interpreted (Ed: or portrayed) this as a conspiracy against him to hide a fact that was a matter of public record before the first vehicle was built.

In that test, the fuel tanks were filled with water so that vehicle damage assessment could be performed after the test. It's much easier to look at the spalling pattern of a projectile, or see what internal systems got damaged, when you're not trying to look at a burned out husk.

I could go on but I'm on my phone.

I'm not sure if Burton was a Luddite who didn't believe in statistics or the scientific method, or if he didn't care about learning from his tests and just wanted to blow up as many Bradleys as possible in order to create a hoopla to get the program cancelled.

Source: The Bradley and how it got that way, Howarth.

The story about the Bradley procurement as written by John Boyd, and made popular by the Pentagon Wars is misleading at best, and entirely wrong in many regards.

The movie's most famous scene ( the Bradley design montage) is entire fictional. The Bradley was designed intentionally from the ground up as an Infantry Fighting Vehicle NOT, as the movie states, an APC whose design was fiddled by meddling generals. While this may seem pendantic, this completely invalidates the critiques leveled against the vehicle by the movie characters during the design montage. The design characteristics that would be silly for a vehicle operating in an APC role are perfectly reasonable given the role of an IFV. Also worth noting that the program also came in under budget, contrary to movie's portrayal of ridiculous cost overruns. The program was expensive. Much more expensive than a program for a slightly more modern APC should be. But completely reasonable for what was then a completely new class of vehicle.

The supposed meddling with the live fire testing was John Boyd failing to understand what the purpose of a live fire test was for. The Bradley cannot take an RPG round. It was not designed to. John Boyd's insistence that the Pentagon was covering up a flaw in the Bradley's design by not shooting a Bradley with an RPG is just wrong. The Pentagon didn't want to do this test because they already knew what would happen and would learn nothing from doing so. A similar thing occured with the supposed "scandal" of replacing the fuel with water for the small arms fire testing. The objective of the test was not to hit the Bradley until it broke under realistic combat situations, but instead to learn about specific locations where the amour is vulnerable. If the Bradley catches fire and is destroyed, you lose the information you tried to gain. By placing water in the fuel tanks, you can identify where the bullets penetrated, while also ensuring the bullet pass through a fluid (important for a realistic sense of the bullet dynamics after penetration. John Boyd did not understand the objective of the tests, and cried conspiracy.

This narrative is nonsense. To point out one example

>> To further insure that the Bradley appeared impregnable, the Army filled the internal fuel tanks with water rather than with diesel fuel.

No, the reason is so that you can see what got hit by shrapnel and where afterwards, and not have a burned out wreck of metal. The goal of testing is to make improvements to the design, not produce very expensive fireworks displays.

Likewise it was obvious that no amount (or composition) of armor was going to make it survive direct hits from a tank or ATGM, so heavily compromising the design in a futile attempt to do so would be wasteful, as would blowing up several dozen of them with such tests as Boyd and co. wanted to do.

We now have decades of experience with the Bradley and while it's not a perfect vehicle, it is pretty good.

I've read that book - it was my introduction to Boyd. I read it as a teenager, and it really spoke to me. I believe that Boyd is incredibly important and has made very very valuable contributions.

I think it is slightly suspect that basically everyone either becomes a whole-hearted follower of Boyd, or is some bullshitter out to protect their backsides and finding how to backstab Boyd and their followers. I also think it's suspect that the book never really engages with the "what-if" scenarios had the reformers gotten everything they wanted.

What would have happened if the F-16 shipped with an airframe too small to practically retrofit a BVR capable radar?

What would have happened if the Bradley tests went exactly the way Burton wanted? What were the alternatives? Would any alternatives provide meaningfully better outcomes than the Bradley in the same tests that Burton wanted? Would they provide meaningfully better outcomes in actual battlefield use?

Maneuver warfare and mission command can generate tremendous outcomes (but they do not guarantee them... see Battle of France vs Barbarossa) . But what if there were meaningful reasons to want to hedge against going all in? What if synchronization of forces and actions cause a temporary reduction in velocity, to generate a surge in velocity at a later timepoint - what if this approach could also be beneficial to collapsing the opponent's decision loop? What if synchronization of forces is helpful with logistics?

I am not saying that procurement or the military is perfect. I am certain there are shit shows everywhere. I think Boyd and the reformers did a valuable job in trying to keep the services publicly accountable. I think it's important (in fact vital) for a democracy to be able to explain to their citizens why they are spending money on specific programs, and why these tradeoffs are being made, and ultimately what missions/requirements these programs are for - and ultimately what is the purpose of the military.

I just think also think that the reformers were not right about all of their technical thrusts, and certainly don't think we should take their recollections of events at face value.

My recollection is that Burton didn't understand the purpose of the tests nor the system he was raging against. If the Bradley was totally annihilated in the test, there'd be nothing to analyze and nothing would be learned (other than a Bradley is obviously not a tank, which is also why it was not called a tank). His objections were misplaced and so failed to have much influence outside of an entertaining film starring Cary Elwes.

>Really makes you wonder what procurement is actually about.

He seems clever on the surface level until you consider that not only did the existing M113 which the Bradley was to replace was worse by every single criteria that Boyd had selected, but so were the BMP-2's which the US Army was facing. If there wasn't a contemporary vehicle which could meet the specifications Boyd had set, and the Bradley was a improvement over the existing vehicles, one would think that it's pretty clear the requirements Boyd had set were wildly incorrect.

The Bradley's capability was later combat proven in the Gulf War as an incredibly effective vehicle.

Oh that’s grim - and seems so foolish. People will die.

Assuming that is a direct quote, the editor has missed ‘insure’. It should be ’ensure’.

Edit: others have posted possible reasons for the test method which give important context.

There's an HBO movie about development of the Bradley called 'Pentagon Wars'. It's a rare bureaucratic comedy movie.

Wikipedia is wrong. Conflicts between two powers where both have fighter jets are infrequent so of course BVR engagements are infrequent, so saying "it hasn't happened in 30 years" would be misleading even if it wasn't incorrect.

But it is incorrect, because most engagements in Ukraine ever since the first month of the war have been at beyond visual range. And should a conflict ever break out between China and the US, pretty much if not literally every air engagement would happen at beyond visual range. Just because it hasn't happened much doesn't mean it's an outdated idea, it just means that powers with significant air forces haven't shot at each other lately.

Russia has been nibbling at and slowly attriting the Ukrainian air force with R-37's.

BVR is a tricky technology. If your rules of engagement let you indiscriminately kill something without being sure of its identity, it's capable. But you need to not have normal air traffic in the area or not give a shit about the consequences or both.

Indiana Jones captures the benefits of stand-off weapons here https://youtu.be/vdnA-ESWcPs?t=120

Hence "Fat Amy" for the F-35

That’s what I meant. The PDF is the first I’ve seen.

I'm one of those people who complain about "videos replacing text". The difference here is context.

I don't want to watch a video about how to configure my shell, or Kubernetes. I want hypertext for that, so I can quickly seek through the information and find what I need. I want it to be searchable. I want to be able to reference it. I don't want to wait for YouTube to buffer just to see the config file path for a setting that would be one paragraph up in text.

Megaprojects, Asianometry, and friends are entertainment. They curate some content that is generally relevant to some topic and then present it in a simple way. I can basically switch off and learn about something new that is relevant to my interests. I don't expect them to be the authorotative source on the topic but I also don't expect them to lie to my face. Wikipedia has a random page but it doesn't have a "random pages visited by people like you". That's all these channels are.

Nothing in life is absolute. There is no one true media format. I like to read technical documentation in text, watch high fantasy on a dedicated screen, and consume popsci brain candy with my phone's screen. Similarly I listen to music on vinyl and Spotify. None of this is contradictory.

He might be talking about Belenko's defection with a MIG-25 to Hokkaido in the early 1970s. Though neither aircraft is really related to the other except in very basic visual sensibilities (twin engine, twin tail).

My point is that multi-service aircraft are entirely possible, and have been all along. That several notable aircraft emerged as multi-service aircraft is all the more evidence that a multi-service aircraft (really, a family of tightly related aircraft) can be designed as such. The reason there are more USN->USAF success stories is that it is much easier to design an aircraft with the stresses of carrier operation in mind than it is to navalize a entirely ground-based design, and it is much easier for the USN to make the case politically that a USAF aircraft "can't possibly meet their requirements" than the reverse.

The USAF and USN are just incredibly unwilling to have to compromise to work with each other, and for most of the cold war had the budgets and supplier diversity to acquire entirely separately.

I'd say the F-111 is a particularly odd case, given the vastly different initial requirements involved. To be clear, everything that made the F-111 a great long-range interdictor for the USAF would have have also made for a great long-range interceptor and strike platform for the USN. It wouldn't have made a good air superiority fighter, and the experience over Vietnam made it clear that this capability was still very much necessary, and there was nowhere near enough budget (or, more critically, carrier deck and hangar space) for the USN to operate both an air superiority fighter and a dedicated long-range interceptor.

There is a very long list of could-have-been multi-service aircraft, though. If you look at the number of ground-based operators of the F-18, clearly the USAF could have been satisfied with it as well. The USN probably could have been satisfied by a navalized F-22 derivative (the story of 1990s/early 2000s procurement is complicated), the USMC definitely could have been satisfied by a navalized AH-64 rather than developing the AH-1Z, etc.

The services are just very resistant to ever needing to compromise on procurement issues unless Congress and the DoD make it clear that they have to. The USN feels their needs are special, and that the USAF would dominate any shared procurement and force them to compromise too much, while the USAF feels like every pound added for carrier operation is a direct affront. Neither view is entirely wrong - the development delays and compromises of a navalized platform like the Dassault Rafale are another good example of the costs of shared development - but the simple reality of modern aircraft development costs and defense budgets means joint platforms are here to stay.

This is why both platforms exist. There seems to be this strange idea that the F35 must be compared against the abilities of fighter in a direct 1v1 dogfight scenario, despite that this situation would almost never happen. Modern air-to-air engagements are not squads of fighters dueling one another, but instead entire fleets of aircraft with differing roles and responsibilities working together in a coordinated fashion. AWACs, electronic warfare planes, missile trucks (like the F15EX), and fighters that can get in close all working together. This is environment the F35 was designed for. The fleet level data-link and sensor fusion capabilities of the F-35 are it's main feature, as they augment the capabilities of the entire fleet. Then fact that F15EX can act as a better standalone interceptor is not really relevant, since it would almost never perform this role unsupported. An F35 and F15EX operating in tandem would be much more effective than either operating alone, since the F35 could enter areas covered by opposing fighters / ground fire, and feed sensor information to the F15EX to take out threats outside of its own sensors range.

This is why both platforms were designed to be used together as a team. F-35 provides sensor fusion and the F-15 is the missile truck. That also allows the F-35 to continue to evade detection, since launching attacks tends to get you noticed by the enemy.

Modern air combat can't be measured in direct comparison like this, or even thought of in terms of "we should be using X instead of Y"

The F-35 costs are also going down relative to it's peer group as the export market has grown significantly. The F-35s issue is that it's misunderstood, not that it doesn't meet expectations.

Isn’t the F22 the successor to the F15, being air superiority fighters?

The f15 is going to be shoot down 60km from target by s400s, the f35 can get close enough to drop an harm on them at a speed they cannot intercept, so there's that.

Also the f15 has speed or range, and if you need one it reduces the other.

You try flying an F-15 with 12 to 24 Slammers (and bags since you'll have so much drag. That's going to fly like a pig. Just because Boeing does some demo of it to sell more airframes doesn't mean it's going to be used that way.

The F-35 has been proven in simulations with aggressor squadrons. The Air Force does that all the time: real aircraft in the air, real pilots, real weapons, they just don't actually shoot them for obvious reasons. But they have other ways of simulating kills.

https://www.businessinsider.com/f-22-pilot-describes-going-u...

Here's what a F-22 pilot (!) had to say about the F-35.

"It is challenging, even flying the Raptor, to have good [situational awareness] on where the F-35s are," he said.

Bowlds said that inserting F-35 aggressors into Red Flag made things "more challenging because there is a little bit of an unknown in terms of what they are going to be able to do."

Additionally, "red air detects are happening at further ranges," Bowlds explained. "It inherently poses more of a threat to allied blue-air forces than older aggressors," such as the fourth-generation F-16s.

The F-35s "have better detection capabilities kind of against everybody just because of their new radar and the avionics they have," he said. "It definitely adds a level of complexity."

“Proven in combat” seems like a tricky concept. I mean the F-15 has that incredible 104:0 record, but that is because

1) it was ahead of the rest of the world when it came out

2) it spent a lot of time fighting older MIGs

Which is to say, the circumstances requires to get a real peer fight for a US plane are quite rare. Thankfully!

The Israelis have released footage of shooting down two drones, so they have the first kills with the F-35. Obviously this was not against a maneuvering human pilot, but still important.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdSFEpqwA6Q

What does proven in combat even mean? Win a war against China?

F-35s have flown over 1,000 combat sorties. When would you consider it "proven"?