First couple of minutes is funny.
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HOLYHOLYHOLY!
If the tailplanes were straight it’d be REALLY close to the Veritech! 
EDIT: Guess what! I made a lot of liveries for a lot of users, both here and somewhere else. I think it finally clicked and now I KNOW what skin I want for my planes.
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Give me two weeks, some speed tape and a reality show where i can throw tools at my brethren and i will get you that franken16 
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I hate to bring in a political point to the discussion, but: the US taxpayer is broke.
No amount of hand wringing, screaming, or stamping of feet from the USAF is going to change that fact.
Put the axe on the A-10? Then the money for that mission gets taken away from the Air Force and put into the Army or the Marines. I know, the mission sucks, there’s no flying fast and high with sunglasses, streaking into glory to battle the evil communist hordes, but Congress funds that mission because, irritatingly enough, it keeps becoming a vital and necessary part of our operations. Maybe if the Air Force would instead mothball the A-10 for a cheaper turboprop and convince Congress to reduce the budget for the mission because they can instead do that with this other airframe at 1/10th the cost, then put that money into the F-35 new F-15s, they could afford to maintain the F-15s. The key thing is convincing Congress that the mission isn’t necessary in light of current global events; if you can do that, then the mission goes away and that funding is freed up for other uses.
The F-16 solution is being thrust forward because the Air Force is now caught with their pants down because they didn’t ask “What happens if the F-35, like so many other defense projects, gets delayed and goes over budget?” This has affected everything from their tankers, AWACS, tactical airlift, to helicopters – because they have screamed up and down that they want the F-35 now. So now we get things like F-15s falling apart because they didn’t ask what would happen if they didn’t get all the F-22s they wanted, coupled with not getting all the F-35s they want on the schedule they planned for. Like it or not, they’re not going to get 2,500 F-35s – plan for maybe half that number at the most.
The Air Force is so used to getting the 110% solution that they have an aneurysm when Congress tells them no, we can’t afford that; here’s an 80% solution instead. A greater number of working F-15s and the assets to support them beats the snot out of a few F-22s that have to sit in the hangar because you don’t have the resources to get them in the air.
I think they have a intention to buy 1700+ F-35’ as is. I doubt they settle on 1250 in any case, nor would it be any cheaper then 1700 for Lockheed would need to raise the price, limiting foreign sales and driving up domestic costs.
I can assure you, they are not falling apart. It’s just that old airframes don’t handle stress as well and start showing fractures. This require replacements of trusses, stringers etc. Often times doublers are made and applied, prepreg’s fitted on, the list goes on and on. This adds tremendously to the maintenance costs and the amount of inspections that need to be done, it also adds a extra layer to the inspection(what once was a simple Visual Inspection, now becomes something you need ultrasonic equipment for). Falling apart in this case is not really a fair term. Just maintenance heavy.
Buying new aircraft is a solution in the interim, with the F-15 there’s not much of a different choice short of investing in new fixes. The F-16 has been flown to it’s life limits and then waaay beyond by many allied countries, these developed new technique’s and applied them, giving the mothballed F-16 a easy new lease of life.
Besides, isn’t the US defence budget increasing for the upcoming period?
I remember when the Navy finished retiring the last Tomcat… 
And this is what’s driving it, right here. It’s not that the F-15 are a hair’s breadth away from plummeting to the ground, it’s that keeping them from doing so is starting to get harder and more expensive to do.
I have no problem with CILOPing older aircraft into new roles and extending the lives of the airframes, Heaven knows we did that often enough with the F-4. Just because it’s old, doesn’t necessarily mean it is completely without use. But, at some point, we will come headlong into the Law of Diminishing Returns.
At what point are we willing to say, “okay, we’ve sunk enough money into this and we’ve gotten every last dime we can out of this asset, let’s get something new”? I’d argue that the F-15s have more than paid for themselves given the amount of use we’ve wrung out of them. It’s time to explore some new options.
I’d love to see the Advanced Hornet make into the fleet. It looks like a beast and if upengined and given CFTs, it addresses two of the major concerns with that airframe. There is no reason not to do that if it is cheaper and gives us more capability than our adversaries have. But, if we’re hanging on to something out of nostalgia, and we endanger the men and women who use and maintain that asset in the process, we’ve done them a disservice.
Why doesn’t the Navy use a hi-lo mix of the JSF and the Advanced Hornet? The Air Force will operate the hi-lo mixture of the JSF and the Raptor, give the Navy the same advantage. I will make no apologies for being a fan of the F-35, given the age of our current aircraft fleets. I’m also a big fan of the Raider LRS-B, but that doesn’t mean we should retire the B-1 if we can still get some use out of it.
Point is, we shouldn’t throw away useful assets, but we shouldn’t hang on to things that will cost us more to operate safely because we’re afraid of something new.
[quote=“boomerang10, post:61, topic:3889”]
Look at it.
LOOK AT IT[/quote]
You have to admit. That is one seriously badass piece of hardware.
You fly these things for a living, don’t you? If you could have anything for your mission, what would you want?
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Here is one of many, many factors driving the discussion:
Just FYI for those who didn’t watch the original hearing, the interceptor mission Gen Rice referred to was the Noble Eagle/NORAD type mission of which he is the main force provider. The F-15 is an important part but those are already flown mostly by F-16s and CF-18s. He was also clear that there is more to aircraft capability than missile load, speed, and maneuverability. He described the importance of working within a system of systems and how overall capability is tied into how effectively an asset collects, fuses, shares, and receives information. I believe his point was that ‘capability’ of a system doesn’t necessarily mean what it used to.
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Wow! A great conversation. Lots and lots of good points and counter points. Lots of great arguments for and against all sorts of things. Performance, finances, every facet explored…except the most critical one.
Yes I am a Navy guy, but I’ve done my share of Joint Service tours (in fact I’m a Qualified JSO…Joint Service Officer…that and a quarter, etc.)
What that means is that I’ve rubbed elbows with USAF officers who have had insights to the goings on at the USAF General Officer level.
It will never be admitted and will always be denied, but there is an “F-16 Mafia” in the Air Force ranks.
It first reared it’s head in the mid-1990s claiming the F-16 could do anything an A-10 could do regarding air-to-mud. They were wrong. Operation ALLIED FORCE (the real thing, not the Falcon 4.0 mod) proved them wrong. I was at HQ EUCOM running the HQ Intelligence Watch during ALLIED FORCE. I had a ring side seat on the whole thing. Everything came to a crux when an F-16 accidentally put a LGB on some refugees in a cart being towed by a tractor. The NATO spokesman (Brit RAF whom I later met) had the bright idea of bringing in a sample of the F-16 MFD to explain how the pilot had made the error. The first press question was something to the effect,“Why is that screen so small and how do you expect anybody to be able to distinguish anything on it.?!” The answer was basically “Its small because it has to fit in an F-16’s small cockpit.” It wasn’t the best moment for the F-16.
The there was the role the A-10’s played as Sandy the night the F-117 went down (a long, long night for me…but probably seemed longer for the goy on the ground behind enemy lines). Bottom line, although they didn’t fire a shot, the rescue wouldn’t have been possible without the A-10s and their low level capability.
The F-16 Mafia retreated, licking their wounds.
And now they are evidently back. Now they are trying to say the F-16 can fill in the air-to-air role for the F-15 C & D.
Maybe, but I doubt it.
The key to successful air battles is “Gas in the Air”. Period.
How much fuel you can get airborne–in the tanks of your aircraft and in your tankers–is EVERYTHING.
The rescue of that F-117 pilot almost failed due to insufficient tankers airborne to support the force. I have served on Carrier Strike Group staff in the Pacific where I saw this truism in exercises and real world ops. I have done exercises at the Pacific Fleet level that showed the same thing.
“Amateurs think about tactics, but professionals think about logistics.”
– General Robert H. Barrow, USMC (Commandant of the Marine Corps) noted in 1980
“Gas in the Air” is logistics and it is the real lynch pin of air battles.
So, with that in mind… I haven’t checked the numbers and counted pylons but with its conformal and external fuel tanks, my gut tells me that , adjusting for tank capacity vs rate of burn (comparing apples with apples), an F-15 can carry more fuel an F-16 and still have more room for more missiles than an F-16. I may be wrong. But if an F-15 can bring comparatively more gas into the air…just say’n
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These guys are all nuts…I say we go with the new F/A-3 +++ Surely we can modify those hard points to carry AMRAAMs.
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I see Cessna’s, Cessna’s everywhere, dropping little 100KG bombs from the sky on the prolé whilst we seize the means of production!
Aw man your post was a good read, and that’s a pretty great example from Allied Force.
Earlier in the thread (and elsewhere in the forums) I tend to be quite the Viper advocate- admittedly some of that is tongue-in-cheek in response to certain Navy fanboys / Viper haters. 
Back to reality:
It’s interesting (and not surprising) there’s an F-16 mafia in the USAF, especially considering the cult around its creation, which makes it a bit disturbing, since the original vision of the F-16 was a no-BS fighter/interceptor meant to be vicious and cheap- It’s speed, fuel fraction, and cost were supposed to fuel roving packs of these things en-masse zipping around Europe taking down Soviet fighters like a bunch of supersonic ninjas. While your enemy’s back at base refueling his massive gas-tanks your 3rd redundant flight is in the air and the other two are being quickly refit thanks to the aircraft’s simplicity. I’m not sure where the “We can/should do literally any mission” dogma comes from, but it’s not exactly in family with the plane’s original intent.
Not to say a vehicle should be bound in scope to its original design (F-15C → F-15E, F-16 Blk. 40, F-4 → F-4G), but a lack of respect to the bounds of your original intent will cause problems, as demonstrated by your stories.
@klarsnow bound the problem really well a few posts up- replace your F-15’s with F-16’s and now you don’t have nearly the same weight behind your claims of air superiority. The conversation really gets interesting when the crux becomes, “If the United States replaces its Eagles for upgraded Falcons for a few years to save money, will the strategic detriment be bad enough that the US could not make up for lost ground when they are in turn replaced with more capable aircraft (Raptors, JSF’s)?”
Unfortunately I don’t think you can do that analysis without diving deep into both politics and sources of information not available to the public.
Certain Navy Fanboys / Dart Realists exist only to counter the Dart Mafia…
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So, how about that Electric Lightning! Two engines, fuel pods on all sides, and you can go super duper sonic!
It was never a great ASW platform but with it’s radar, it was an awesome SSC bird.
I had the sad honor of watching the last operational S-3 cat-shot in 2004 (From USS JOHN C STENNIS CVN-74 off the coast of southern California).
Note all the flight deck crew saluting.
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Yes it was!
The first country outside of the US to buy the F-16 was Norway. This was back in the Cold War. The USN strategy was to get a couple of carriers into Vestfjord on the Norwegian coast where we could (conceivably) :
a) interdict the inevitable Soviet amphibious invasion of northern Norway
b) threaten the Soviet northern flank, i.e. their “Red Banner Northern Fleet” bases on the Kola Peninsula.
So we throw a couple of carrier battle groups into Vestfjord and “mine ourselves in” to keep the pesky VICTOR SSNs out. There we hide behind the Lofotens island chain blocking the threat axis from the north-northwest–meaning that the Soviet SAGs and BACKFIREs (with AS-4s) will have to come much farther south to get a shot back up (NE) into Vestfjord - all the while they are coming south, our TOMCATs are attriting the BACKFIREs (Shoot the Archer not the Arrow" doctrine) while our subs are hitting the SAGs…helped by a few A-6Es when they are not running Alpha-Strikes on the Kola. What fun that would have been! (Not)
What does this have to do with F-16As? I hear you ask.
The Achilles Heel in this whole plan was the SU-24 FENCERs and other tactical aircraft with tactical ASMs that would come at us directly from the east (violating Sweden neutrality… sure to draw a strongly worded objection by the non-NATO Swedes!)
Enter the Norwegian F-16s in a purely air-to-air role. Those pilots have the Viking Warrior spirit in their genes. They would fly high-speed, low (LOW) level, twisting and turning through steep Norwegian mountain valleys–completely off anybody’s radar–pop-up to bag the bad guys–scoot away as fast as they came. I never saw it in the practice (exercises) but the stories from the guys that had said it was incredible.
“vicious” is certainly the word to use to describe the Norwegian F-16s
Ahhh…those were the days.
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I didn’t know that the USN flirted with the Naval Bastion concept, at least not to the extent that the Soviets did. Nice insight.
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While probably really cool to experience in a simulation or a movie I’m so glad nothing of that ever happened.
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