INDIA 1, USAF 0

The whole world knows that if you mess with U.S. Air Force pilots, you’re going down. Hard.
Except, some­one for­got to send the memo to India, appar­ently. Because, in recent exer­cises, Indian fly­boys in low-​​tech Russian and French jets defeated American F-​​15C pilots more than 90 per­cent of the time.
Now, granted, the Indians had the Americans out­num­bered: usu­ally 10 or 12 to 4, dur­ing the Cope India air com­bat exer­cise held last February around the Gwalior Air Force Station. But American offi­cials also cred­ited Indian pilots with being “very pro­fi­cient in [their] aircraft[s] and smart on tac­tics. That com­bi­na­tion was tough for us to over­come,” USAF Col. Greg Neubeck told Inside the Air Force. (The arti­cle is off-​​limits to those who don’t sub­scribe. But The Times of India is run­ning major excerpts.)
“The adver­saries are bet­ter than we thought,” Col. Mike Snodgrass added. “And in the case of the Indian Air Force both their train­ing and some of their equip­ment was bet­ter than we antic­i­pated.“
According to the mag­a­zine, “The Indians flew a num­ber of dif­fer­ent fight­ers, includ­ing the French-​​made Mirage 2000 and the Russian-​​made MIG-​​27 and MIG-​​29, but the two most for­mi­da­ble IAF air­craft proved to be the MIG-​​21 Bison, an upgraded ver­sion of the Russian-​​made base­line MIG-​​21, and the SU-​​30K Flanker, also made in Russia.“
The abil­ity of these planes to “repeat­edly defeat America’s best fighter is a trou­bling devel­op­ment. So trou­bling, in fact, that it calls into ques­tion a core assump­tion of the Bush Administration’s plans for mil­i­tary trans­for­ma­tion,” says Loren Thompson, a defense ana­lyst with the Lexington Institute.

That assump­tion, widely repeated by mil­i­tary reform­ers since the mid-1990’s, is that U.S. mil­i­tary power is so over­whelm­ing the Pentagon can afford to take risks by delay­ing mod­ern­iza­tion of Cold War weapons while it pur­sues devel­op­ment of leap-​​ahead tech­nolo­gies. Examples cited by pol­i­cy­mak­ers of areas where the U.S. lead is unas­sail­able in the near term include heavy armor (tanks) and air supe­ri­or­ity (fight­ers). We already know from the expe­ri­ence of the Iraq war that heavy tanks have proven far more impor­tant to occu­pa­tion and counter-​​insurgency oper­a­tions than any­one expected. Now comes news that third-​​world coun­tries may be able to chal­lenge U.S. com­mand of the skies.
The Pentagon’s ini­tial take on lessons learned from the Iraq war was so dis­mis­sive of tra­di­tional warfight­ing com­pe­ten­cies that it barely men­tioned air supe­ri­or­ity. But even a cur­sory exam­i­na­tion of how U.S. strat­egy for the con­flict unfolded reveals a heavy reliance on air power to com­pen­sate for numer­i­cal defi­cien­cies on the ground. The pos­si­bil­ity of hav­ing to con­quer some future Baghdad with­out air supe­ri­or­ity should make every gen­eral in the Army pause and reflect on what vic­tory might require in the way of casu­al­ties and resources.

“The actual story is not nearly as bad as it may seem,” Chirstopher Coglianese coun­ters on the National Security Roundtable (NSRT) dis­cus­sion group. “Remember that the Indians have two hos­tile nations on their bor­der, both with cred­i­ble air forces. Indian pilots actu­ally fly almost twice as many hours a month as ours and much of it is under oper­a­tional con­di­tions. Even though equipped with Russian-​​designed air­craft, as the Air said to me, they ain’t the Russians (noto­ri­ous for being under­trained).“
THERE’S MORE: The Cope India could actu­ally work to pro­mote a much-​​maligned Air Force project, now in devel­op­ment, one Defense Tech pal in the USAF notes.
Opponents of the F/​A-​​22 stealth fighter plane say the jet is designed only for Cold War-​​era, mid-​​air dog­fights. That’s a waste of bil­lions, the logic goes, because “the USAF has (and would not have) no peer com­peti­tor in air supe­ri­or­ity.“
“But the F-​​15 is the rep­re­sen­ta­tive of that “air supe­ri­or­ity,’” our pal points out. So “its poor out­ing against a coun­try with improv­ing tech­nol­ogy and good tac­tics would seem to do dam­age to the argu­ment that there is no need for a mod­ern air supe­ri­or­ity fighter.
But back over on the NSRT list, one poster responds: “At my age I’m enti­tled to be cyn­i­cal so let me sug­gest this whole episode smells like Delhi on a hot day…What bet­ter way to keep an aer­ial boon­dog­gle like the F-​​22 pro­gram healthy and suck­ing up funds needed to pay for light infantry­men than to let a bunch of INDIANS fly­ing planes bought from the RUSSIANS win some aer­ial engage­ments over India.“
AND MORE: On the eDodo mes­sage board — often pop­u­lated by Air Force types — some are say­ing that the results of Cope India are not quite what they seem.
USAF pilots were fly­ing “Red Air” — mean­ing they were sim­u­lat­ing the (pre­sum­ably worse) tac­tics and (pre­sum­ably lower) capa­bil­i­ties of enemy flyers.

That means they walked into the fight with their arms tied behind their backs. It makes for a good media coup in India… But in a full-​​up fight, I’d put ALL my money on the Alaska F-15C’s over the Indian Air Force…
They may have ‘lost the war’ in the excer­cise. But it was an excer­cise. In the real thing, our boys won’t be fly­ing as ‘Red Air.’

AND MORE: “I have a hard time get­ting a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for the F-​​22 from our planes los­ing to refur­bished Mig-​​21s,” says Defense Tech reader MB. “What I get from that is look at how to upgrade the planes we have and take some of the money saved over F-​​22s to buy some more jet fuel so our guys can get some more flight time.”

June 24th, 2004 | Planes, Copters, Blimps | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.