by Mark Bowden
Today the fight has moved beyond visual range, into the realm of electromagnetic waves, and involves what fighter pilots call “look-down, shoot-down” capability. The air war is a contest between radar systems, countermeasures, and missiles. American pilots have long enjoyed the advantages of seeing an enemy first and of having missiles with the range and speed to hit the enemy from beyond the WEZ. But those advantages have gradually eroded. A fighter jet’s theoretical “kill ratio” is based on projections of how many enemy fighters it could shoot down before getting shot down itself when faced with an unlimited number of attackers at once. The F-15’s eight-to-one kill ratio—which is what it enjoyed throughout most of its history and which reflected more than anything else the finite capability to carry munitions—is now closer to three to one. “If the enemy has radar-guided missiles, now we’re shooting at each other,” Lieutenant Colonel Chuck “Corky” Corcoran told me last year at Elmendorf. Corcoran is a former F-15 pilot who now commands the 525th Fighter Squadron, the Bulldogs, one of the three F-22 squadrons just now getting planes. “If those enemy weapons have similar capabilities to ours, I’ve got to employ some sort of tactic to gain an advantage, whether it’s getting higher and faster so I can shoot first, or checking away [shifting slightly off course] to increase his missile’s time of flight.”
Drawing out that time, even by a split second, can mean everything, because it allows your missile to strike first. Once the enemy’s plane is destroyed, its radar can no longer steer his missile.
“His missile is looking for reflected radar energy that he’s pointing at you, so if your missile gets to him and blows him up and kills his radar before his missile gets to you, then you are going to live,” Corcoran explained.
An AMRAAM missile like the one Rodriguez used over Kosovo was a major step forward because it frees the attacking plane from having to keep its radar pointed at the target. The American plane can launch a missile from outside the WEZ, turn, and kick on its afterburners before the target has a chance to even shoot.
These tools rely, of course, on radar, which can be jammed.
“If you can’t match your enemy’s technology, you can always subtract from it,” says Wayne Waller, a Virginia contractor who designs radar systems for the F-15. “You may invent something that gives you an advantage, but you can’t hang on to it for very long. Our radar used to be difficult to jam, but the capability to do that has improved geometrically. That knowledge is out there. And the jamming advances cost a lot less than improving the radar.”
Countries that cannot afford to build fleets of the most advanced supersonic fighters can afford to build pods with clever software to mount on older airframes. This was brought home dramatically in Cope India 2004, a large aerial-combat training exercise that pitted F-15 pilots from Elmendorf against India’s air force, which is made up of the MiG-21 and MiG-29, and the newer Mirage 2000 and Russian-built Su-30. The exercises were conducted high over north-central India, near the city of Gwalior.
“We came rolling in, like, ‘Beep-beep, superpower coming through,’” Colonel Fornof told me. “And we had our eyes opened. We learned a lot. By the third week, we were facing a threat that we weren’t prepared to face, because we had underestimated them. They had figured out how to take Russian-built equipment and improve on it.”
A small country can buy a MiG-21 on the world weapons market for about $100,000, put in a better engine, add radar and jamming systems that are more sophisticated, improve the cockpit design, and outfit it with “launch and leave” missiles comparable to the AMRAAM. These hybrid threats are more dangerous than any rival fighters America has seen in generations, and they cost much less than building a competitive fourth-generation fighter from scratch. The lower expense enables rival air forces to put more of them in the air, and because the F-15 can carry only so many munitions, American pilots found themselves overwhelmed by both technology and sheer numbers during the exercises over India.
Today the average age of the F-15s in use is twenty-four years, which in the world of modern electronics means they were born several geological ages ago. When the F-15 started flying missions, Jimmy Carter was president and the Cold War was shaping geopolitics. Most Americans didn’t own a home computer. People were still buying music on vinyl albums and cassette tapes. The first F-15s had roughly the computer capability of the video game Pong. If anything, the pace of innovation is even faster in the military than in the civilian world, and as better look-down, shoot-down capabilities have come on line, they have been systematically layered and squeezed into the aging airframe of the F-15. This has led to the dizzying complexity of the fighter’s cockpit. But no matter how many gizmos the wizards can squeeze into the F-15, it remains an old fighter.
“If you take a Pinto and put really nice tires on it, it’s still a Pinto,” Colonel Corcoran says. His choice of the unlovely, pedestrian Ford sedan as a metaphor is telling: pilots like Corcoran see the F-22 as a Formula One racer by comparison. “You can put a bigger engine in the Pinto, but the frame is not built to handle the higher speeds,” he said. “To build a fifth-generation fighter, you have to start from the ground up.”
Some of the pilots I spoke to described the F-22 as such a huge leap in capability that it ought to be considered not a fifth-generation fighter, one step up from the F-15, but sixth-generation.
“It is really two big steps ahead of anything else out there,” Corcoran told me. “All of the data from all the different sensors in the aircraft are fused. The F-22 has one big display in the middle of the cockpit, so you are kind of sitting in the middle of that display, and all of the sensors run on their own. And tracks show up all around you, 360 degrees, and all of it in color. So the red guys are bad, the green guys are good, and the yellow guys—we don’t know who the yellow guys are yet. So without the pilot doing anything, you have this 360-degree picture of the battle space around you. With the F-15, after a couple of years of training, you might be able to achieve that level of awareness.”
Major Derek Routt and Lieutenant Colonel Murray Nance have a unique perspective on the new fighter. They both fly for the air force’s Sixty-Fifth Aggressor Squadron, mimicking the tactics and capabilities of enemy air forces in war games. I met them last summer at Elmendorf, where they were in the middle of Red Flag exercises—realistic war games carried out every few years—featuring “battling” F-15s and F-22s.
“I saw a Raptor just yesterday,” Routt said. “It was way above me. I was just being called dead at the time. You usually don’t see it until it’s done with you, flying overhead, rocking its wings, saying, ‘Thanks for playing, fellows.’
“I flew in a comparison test with both the F-15 and the F-22,” he continued. “You flew against the F-22 one day, and the next day we took the same profile and flew against the F-15. I fought both of those, and there was absolutely no comparison. This is not a paid advertisement for the F-22. You talk to any aviators in the world, ask what they would like to fly, and if they don’t say the F-22, then they are lying. I would kill to fly it.”
“It is hard to kill what you can’t see,” Nance said. “It’s eye-watering, the kind of turning it can do.”
“Eye-watering?” I asked.
“Makes you cry. I mean, you realize, ‘How did he just do that?”‘
Last summer at Elmendorf, Corcoran sat me down in the cockpits of both an F-15 and an F-22 to show me just how different they are. As the F-22 is to a modern point-and-click laptop—user-friendly—the F-15 is to the first clunky personal computers, the ones where you had to type instructions in basic computer language to perform the simplest of tasks. All of the avionics on the F-22 were designed from the ground up, and are fully integrated. The big central screen makes situational awareness intuitive. Better still, it is linked with all the other Raptors in its formation, and with the AWACS command. There is now only one page, and everyone is on it.
“It’s all there in front of you,” General Tinsley explained. “Where am I? Wh
ere are you? Who is out there? Who is locking on to me? It gives you a God’s-eye view that is simply a thing of beauty. I have sensors in the F-22 that don’t just look out the front of the airplane; they are spread all over the aircraft. I can see somebody anywhere. It is easier on the pilot, which makes him a more efficient killing machine.”
The improvement is so great that some of the older F-15 pilots tend to look down their noses at the youngsters flying the F-22.
“To be good in the F-15, you have to work at it,” Corcoran told me. “It’s easier to separate the men from the boys and identify the real talent. But the way I see it, the less time my F-22 pilots have to spend sorting out all the data, the more time they have to think tactically and react to what is happening around them. That means our entire force, from top to bottom, is more effective.”
The F-22’s most remarkable quality is that it is “combat-coated,” which means it is painted with material that absorbs rather than deflects the signals beamed out by the enemy’s defense systems, making it virtually invisible to radar. Talking about it, Tinsley grew gruffly animated.
“Now I have stealth!” he said. “The F-15 is a big airplane; you can see that thing outside of ten nautical miles. The F-16 is a little bit better in a dogfight, visually, because it’s a smaller aircraft. I might not be able to see it turning until about seven or eight nautical miles. The F-22, the bad guys can’t even see me on their radar, and even in visual range the Raptor is small. My missiles hit them before they even know I am there. And I’m not just talking about air-to-air; I’m talking about air-to-ground.”
The biggest threat to American fighters during the first wave of an assault is from surface-to-air missiles. They are much cheaper to build and maintain than a fleet of supersonic fighters, so smaller countries such as Iran have invested heavily in them. Attacking SAM sites in an F-15 is risky work. But with the F-22, pilots are back to shooting fish in a barrel. “The F-22 avionics allow me to be a better battle-space manager and efficient killer,” Tinsley explained. “I have stealth, so I have the surprise piece. And then on top of all that, I can do it at supercruise. I can climb higher than other fighters, I can go faster with lower fuel consumption, so I can cover a larger space. And no one can see me. Now we’re getting that eight-to-one kill ratio I need to maintain superiority.”
The Return of the Fair Fight
The air force fears that the dominance of U.S. airpower has been so complete for so long that it is taken for granted. The ability of the United States to own the skies over any battlefield has transformed the way we fight. The last American soldier killed on the ground by an enemy air attack died in Korea, on April 15, 1953.
Russia, China, Iran, India, North Korea, Pakistan, and others are now flying fourth-generation fighters with avionics that match or exceed the F-15’s. Ideally, from the standpoint of the U.S. Air Force, the F-22 would gradually replace most of the F-15s in the U.S. fleet over the next fifteen years, and two or three more generations of American pilots, soldiers, and marines would fight without worrying about attacks from the sky. But that isn’t going to happen.
“It means a step down from air dominance,” said Richard Aboulafia, an air-warfare analyst for the Teal Group, which conducts assessments for the defense industry. “The decision not to replace the F-15 fleet with the F-22 ultimately means that we will accept air casualties. We will lose more pilots. We will still achieve air superiority, but we will get hurt achieving it.” General Tinsley suggested that there will be a deeper consequence: other countries will be more tempted to challenge us in the air. The dominance of the F-15 had already begun to erode before the Soviet Union collapsed, in 1991. The last fighter the Soviets produced, the MiG-29, had similar aeronautic capabilities, and its radar and weapons systems gave it look-down, shoot-down tools on a par with the F-15’s. Today, Russia is equipping its air force with Su-35s, and has offered them for sale. Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela is a customer of the plane’s close cousin, the Su-30. These fighters are every bit the match of the F-15. Combine that with the hybrid threat posed by revamped older fighters, and the fight in the air begins to look fair for the first time in a half century.
It was fashionable in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union to argue that the threat of conventional warfare was no longer relevant, because no other nation could compete with the United States on conventional terms. The attacks of September 11, 2001, underlined that argument; the new threat was “asymmetrical”—small cells of sophisticated terrorists against whom our huge arsenals were useless.
Conventional weaponry may be useless against terrorists, but that doesn’t mean the old threats have disappeared. Russia’s incursion into Georgia and threatening gestures against the Baltic states; Iran’s persistence in pursuing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles; North Korea’s decision to ignore its agreement to cease building nuclear weapons—all are reminders that the threat posed by belligerent nation-states is still real. If Georgia is admitted to NATO, the United States and other member nations will be obliged by treaty to defend it from Russia. China continues to rapidly expand its air force. Conflict with these nations isn’t inevitable or even necessarily probable, but as we become more vulnerable in the air, it may well become more likely.
“What happens when we no longer own that advantage in the air?” Tinsley asked me. “Are our enemies going to feel a little froggy and push the limits? Why haven’t we fought that many wars? If America hadn’t built the F-15, would it have been the same story? How much did our fleet of F-15s keep other countries at bay? If we had been stuck with the F-4 and someone had come along with a MiG-29, would he have stepped out and done some damage? We have to replace all the F-15s with F-22s.”
This is the position you would expect from an air force general, whose job was to make sure America continues its unquestioned ownership of the sky. One might just as easily argue that lack of such complete superiority will act as a healthy restraint on American military aggression. After all, the latest big war, in Iraq, was one we started. If we are more likely to bleed, perhaps we will be slower to fight.
But fights will come. The squadron Colonel Corcoran is pulling together at Elmendorf will consist of an elite few. The 525th Bulldogs have a tradition reaching back to World War II, when their pilots flew P-51 Mustangs and P-47 Thunderbolts over Europe. Such squadrons are small, close-knit clubs and, especially when based in such remote outposts as Elmendorf, define their pilots’ personal, social, and professional lives. Their members sit at the pinnacle of their profession, every bit as much an elite as (perhaps more so than) professional athletes, though without the athletes’ pay or celebrity. Photos of the Bulldogs’ exploits and decorated heroes line the walls of the squadron’s bar—or, as one happy pilot told me with a shot glass in one hand and a beer in the other, “Not a bar, a ‘Heritage Room’!”—where pilots gather for ritualized bouts of drinking, roasting, and storytelling. There are already two operational F-22 squadrons at Langley Air Force Base, in Virginia, and eventually Corcoran’s will be one of two in Alaska. If and when a conflict arises, they will be stretched wide and far.
The good news is that the air force has had some success integrating the newer fighter with its older ones. Part of its argument for the F-22s was that they were too sophisticated to be teamed with older, lesser planes. But early results in Red Flag competitions suggest otherwise. “When the F-15s are up doing their tactics, we’re kind of back behind them a little bit and helping them out if they have trouble,” Colonel Jim Hecker, the operations group commander at Elmendorf, told me. “If an F-15 is having some trouble dealing with electronic countermeasures where he can’t shoot, that’s when we’ll go in and get rid of that guy for him. I think the synergistic effect of having a couple of F-22s in with those fourth-generation fighters is great. Based on the buy, I think we’re going to have to do that if we stay at the same number of F-22s. We simply don’t have enough, so we have to find ways to integrate like this to optimize our capability.”<
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So America’s fighter fleet is likely to remain F-15–based, backed up by the F-22 and F-35, a fifth-generation fighter that resembles the Raptor but without the same maneuverability and speed. It means that the days when the air force’s leading “ace” has only three kills may be coming to an end. If more vulnerability means more challenges—and it usually does—then more fighters will be seeing action. If the cost of air supremacy is not paid in dollars, it may be paid in blood.
* * *
After twenty-six years of flying, Rodriguez is no longer in the fight. Pushing fifty, he now works for Raytheon. One of his responsibilities is to sell the AMRAAM, an assignment that puts to good use the story of his killer sortie over Pristina, when he lit up the snowy night with that MiG. He hasn’t flown an airplane since 2004. After all his years of going acro in the F-15, it’s hard for him to get a thrill in the cockpit of anything else.
“I’ve relinquished myself to business class,” he said.
