Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!wuarchive!sdd.hp.com!think.com!mintaka!olivea!oliveb!veritas!amdcad!amdcad!military From: prentice%triton.unm.edu@ariel.unm.edu (John Prentice) Newsgroups: sci.military Subject: Re: How effective was the Stealth fighter? Message-ID: <1991Apr12.055301.14403@amd.com> Date: 11 Apr 91 16:30:12 GMT References: <1991Apr9.025945.1283@amd.com> <1991Apr11.033856.5300@amd.com> Sender: military@amd.com Organization: University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM Lines: 76 Approved: military@amd.com From: prentice%triton.unm.edu@ariel.unm.edu (John Prentice) In article <1991Apr11.033856.5300@amd.com> wb9omc@ecn.purdue.edu (Duane P Mantick) writes: >I might take some exception to that statement in the sense >that as far as the other aircraft go, we DID lose some. I phrased my question incorrectly and I am sorry for the confusion. I am well aware that there were losses of other aircraft. What I meant to convey was that the loses were very, very low, certainly not what one expects in a war (these loses were more on par with a training exercise). >I might say that in light of your comment that our weapons >were better, perhaps then the Stealth fighter-bomber helped achieve >an important goal - air superiority. But this is precisely the point. Perhaps. I am not trying to criticize the Stealth fighter or the technology. But there continue to be many scientists both in and outside the defense establishment that question how effective Stealth really is. My question is really very simple. One would have hoped that the use of this technology in a war would settle the question for good. However, the statistics from this war would appear to not tell us anything, simply because the losses of Stealth versus non-Stealth are statistically insignificant. All I am asking is whether anyone knows of other measures that can be used to quantify how well Stealth worked in this war. > The stated mission of the F117a is to strike strategically >significant targets while evading enemy radar, and to do so at night. >Since this mission was accomplished, according to the USAF, one could >assume that the aircraft as a system does work. > [deletions...] > To sum up, we have aircraft that can cover what the F117a does, >but not stealthily and probably not as well at night. Why night? >What could be more demoralizing, surprising and frightening than >bombs falling that you can't see from an aircraft that you can't see or >target? None of this addresses the question however. I am not arguing with the mission of the F117, I am asking for some decent data that supports the fact that it can accomplish this mission. Nobody can really question that fact that this was a bit of a non-war. The Iraqi air defenses either ran away or proved ineffective. The Iraqi ground troops were easily routed. Total allied loses in this conflict were about the same as when that battleship gun turret blew up a few years ago in a training exercise. This is not a criticism in any way of our performance there, far from it. But it does cast in doubt many lessons one would hope to draw from this war and use to determine how well things would go against a more sophisticated or determined enemy. So my question is not meant to be rhetorical or provocative. It is meant to get past all the hype and attempts to dress up our systems which inevitably occurs in the wake of an easy victory and ask a question which is rather important in preparing for the next war. If in fact Stealth technology worked well and paved the way for our air victory, then all I am asking for is a discussion of what evidence there is to say that this was the only technology that could have done this job. Just saying that it accomplished its mission isn't enough in this case since Stealth does not clearly stand out from the crowd in survivability. It is possible that Stealth also showed up on the Iraqi radar (it has been suggested that it is less valuable against less sophisticated radar. There are some basic physical principals for example that say it shouldn't work that well against longer wavelength radar. None of those sleek shapes and abrupt corners matter much against long wavelength radar.) and there were other reasons that the Iraqi's were unable to knock these aircraft out. I would hope and at least suspect that there are reasons to discount this argument and all I am asking is to hear them if in fact this is something anyone on the Net is in a position to know about. John -- John K. Prentice john@unmfys.unm.edu (Internet) Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA Computational Physics Group, Amparo Corporation, Albuquerque, NM, USA