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The venerable Boeing F-15C Eagle has long been hailed as the world’s greatest air superiority fighter given its lopsided combat record of 104 kills to zero losses, however, the aging jet is likely near the end of its operational life. Nonetheless, it remains a potent fighter even as it likely heads toward retirement.
The U.S. Air Force is deferring planned upgrades to the Eagle—such as the addition of new electronic warfare systems—until it decides if it wants to keep the increasingly aged airframe. Indeed, as the Air Force has discovered, the F-15C will need an extensive airframe overhaul and structural modifications to remain in service past the mid-2020s. In all likelihood, given that the Congress has refused to allow the service to retire the A-10 Warthog, the Air Force will have little choice but to divest itself of the F-15C to free up funding for more pressing projects. The F-15E Strike Eagle interdictor aircraft, though, will remain in service indefinitely.
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MiG, any member of a family of Soviet military fighter aircraft produced by a design bureau founded in 1939 by Artem Mikoyan (M) and Mikhail Gurevich (G). (The i in MiG is the Russian word meaning “and.”) The early MiG aircraft were propeller-driven fighters produced in moderate numbers during. Jul 10, 2019 Jaelyn: Doesn’t it sound like a dystopian name with a young fighter and survivor as the heroine? Baby Girl Names That Mean Fighter: Caden: The name that comes from American can be used for a girl as well as for a boy. Evin: It may sound sweet and short, but this powerful and classic name from England means a strong and feminine fighter.
Often called the '190s of the Russian tree', the I185 melds excellent x3 20mm armament with a light and agile airframe that rolls incredibly well. Both suffer from the characteristic poor high-alt performance of most Russian planes, though the M71 has the raw engine capability to make up for it.
However, for the time being, the F-15C makes up about half of the Air Force’s air superiority fleet because the service received less than half of the Lockheed Martin F-22A Raptors that it required. Eventually, the Air Force hopes to develop a new Penetrating Counter Air platform to supersede both the F-15C and the F-22 in the 2030s as Russia and China increasingly field new fifth generation fighters such as the Sukhoi Su-57 PAK-FA.
The Su-57—especially once it receives its new second stage engines—will be a handful for any fourth generation fighter given its combination of speed, maneuverability, stealth and electronic warfare capability. However, the U.S. Air Force does have a plan to defeat enemy stealth aircraft and a counter is already in the works.
The answer lies in the long-wave infrared spectrum, which the current generation of stealth aircraft are not designed to suppress. Nor does any countermeasure currently exist to suppress detection at long range by a long-wave infrared sensor that could be retrofitted to existing airframes. It is likely that engineers could in the future devise measures to hide from a long wave infrared sensor, but the airframe would likely have to be designed from the outset to incorporate those technologies.
Lockheed Martin is currently developing the Legion pod, which will afford the F-15C a long wave Infrared Search and Track (IRST) capability. Lockheed Martin expects to produce more than 130 Legion pods, which are equipped with the company's IRST21 infrared sensor and advanced data processing capabilities to provide long-range detection and tracking of airborne threats in “radar-denied environments.” Boeing, which serves as the U.S. Air Force's prime contractor, is expected to award Lockheed Martin an engineering, manufacturing, development and production contract for the Legion pod sometime this year.
'With a rapid delivery schedule and unmatched sensing capabilities, Legion Pod will immediately enhance our warfighters' operations and address a passive attack capability gap,' Paul Lemmo, vice president of Fire Control/Special Operations Forces Contractor Logistics Support Services at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, said last year. 'Our proven partnerships with Boeing, including on our U.S. Navy F/A-18E/F IRST21 and international F-15 IRST products, will ensure successful execution of the F-15C Legion Pod program for the U.S. Air Force.'
The U.S. Navy and industry officials have previously told The National Interest that long-wave IRST–especially when combined with high-speed data networking—could generate a weapons quality track against a stealth aircraft. That track would only get more precise with multiple IRST-equipped aircraft sharing data amongst themselves. “It’s the Navy’s primary counter-stealth capability,” one industry official had said.
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Equipped with the Legion pod, the F-15C would easily negate any stealth advantage that the Su-57 offers. Once the Eagle has spotted the Su-57, it would also be able to bring to bear its immensely powerful Raytheon AN/APG-63(v)3 active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar with a focused scan—and likely acquire the Russian jet that way too. Either way, the F-15C would be able to generate a weapons quality track on the Su-57 and engage it with its long-range Raytheon AIM-120D AMRAAM missiles.
Close in at the merge, if the Su-57s survive the initial AMRAAM volley, the surviving F-15Cs would be at somewhat of disadvantage against the extraordinarily maneuverable Russian fighters. However, the F-15C community has a lot of practice flying against the extremely maneuverable F-22s, and while they are disadvantaged, Eagle pilots do win dogfights against the Raptor on some occasions. Moreover, with the addition of the Joint Helmet Mounted Cueing System and the Raytheon AIM-9X Sidewinder, the F-15C has excellent high off boresight capability—the ability for the pilot to shoot in the direction his head is pointed—as does the Su-57, which more often than not results in a mutual kill as numerous training exercises have shown.
At the end of the day, if it were not for the maintenance and sustainment costs coupled with the need to pay from structural repairs, it would likely be worth it to keep the F-15C in service. However, given the age of the airframe and the continually evolving threat, it is more prudent for the Air Force to invest in next generation capabilities such as the PCA—especially since Congress will not let the service rid itself of the A-10. Something has to give and it looks like the F-15C’s time has come.
Dave Majumdar is the defense editor for the National Interest. You can follow him on Twitter: @davemajumdar.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Key point: New Dehli may still decide it doesn't want the F-21.
Lockheed Martin is developing a new variant of its iconic F-16 single-engine fighter in order to compete in India’s 2019 tender for 110 new warplanes.
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(This first appeared in May 2019.)
But don’t count on the American firm’s “F-21” to win the contract.
According to journalist Angad Singh, the likely winner is French company Dassault’s Rafale twin-engine fighter.
Singh explains his rationale in the May 2019 issue of Combat Aircraft magazine. India previously ordered 36 Rafales as part of an earlier fighter tender. “With 36 aircraft already on order and the infrastructure in place for an additional 36, a case could certainly be made that training, basing and sustainment costs for additional aircraft would not be an impossible burden.”
Other candidates for the Indian tender are the Saab Gripen from Sweden, the European Eurofighter Typhoon, the MiG-35 from Russia and the Boeing Super Hornet from the United States. Whichever fighter New Delhi selects, it needs the new jets now, according to Singh.
“The government-approved strength of the Indian Air Force, given the country’s well-publicized security scenario and the possibility of a ‘two-front’ threat of combined Pakistani and Chinese air action to the west and northeast, is 42 fighter squadrons,” Singh writes.
“There is little clarity on how this exact number was arrived at, but nonetheless, the IAF hasn’t come close to this strength for two decades, and has never approached anything near a force entirely equipped with modern aircraft.”
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In 2019 the Indian air force maintains just 30 fighters squadrons. The units operate, among other plane types, 244 1960s-vintage MiG-21s and 84 MiG-27s that are only slightly younger. The MiG-21s, in particular, are accident-prone. Since the first of 874 MiG-21s entered Indian service in 1963, around 490 have crashed, killing around 200 pilots.
But the MiG-21s remain active. On Feb. 26, 2019 Indian planes crossed the line of control at India's border with Pakistan and bombed what New Dehli described as a terrorist training camp near Balakot.
Several days of aerial fighting followed the bombing raid. On Feb. 27, 2019, Pakistani F-16s and other planes crossed the line of control to attack Indian forces, New Delhi claimed. Indian MiG-21s and other fighters intercepted the Pakistanis and shot down one plane, according to the Indian government.
The U.S. government reportedly counted Pakistan’s F-16s after the battle and concluded that none was missing, casting doubt on New Delhi’s claim.
Islamabad stated its forces shot down two Indian MiG-21s, but New Delhi copped to losing just one jet. Pakistani forces captured the MiG-21 pilot, Wing Commander Abhinandan Varthaman, and held him for two days before handing him over to Indian officials.
Now New Delhi wants to spend around $18 billion acquiring 110 new fighters to replace the old MiGs. The new planes would fly alongside European-designed Jaguars, French Mirage 2000s and Rafales, Russian MiG-29s and Su-30s and India's own indigenous Tejas fighter in what Lockheed described as 'the world’s largest fighter aircraft ecosystem.'
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For the purposes of Lockheed's marketing campaign, the F-21 is a new fighter, although it shares many of its major features with the F-16V the company has sold to Bahrain, Greece, Slovakia, South Korea and Taiwan. Lockheed can build new F-16Vs or upgrade older F-16s to the V-standard.
Still, renaming the F-16V isn't only semantic. An F-16V or F-21 is a radically different warplane compared to the F-16A that first flew in 1978. The F-16A is a nimble, eight-ton fighter with an unsophisticated radar and short-range weapons. The F-16V weighs 10 tons, boasts a cutting-edge radar and other sensors and carries a wide array of long-range weaponry, all at the cost of maneuverability.
Lockheed initially implied India could follow an acquisition of F-21s with a separate purchase of the company's F-35 stealth fighters.
'The F-21 has common components and learning from Lockheed Martin’s fifth-generation F-22 and F-35 and will share a common supply chain on a variety of components,' Lockheed stated on its website on the morning of Feb. 20, 2019.
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A few hours later, that claim disappeared from the site. Despite Lockheed’s stealth tease, the French Rafale might be the frontrunner in the Indian fighter contest.
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David Axe serves as Defense Editor of the National Interest. He is the author of the graphic novels War Fix, War Is Boringand Machete Squad. This first appeared earlier in 2019.
Image: Reuters.
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