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In the same theme as the topic I posted related to reestablishment of manufacturing competence, I think reestablishment of national defense competence is of equal importance. As strange as this concept may seem to some people, a credible national defense procurement and force structure strategy for a nation with limited defense funding does not automatically mean that their military forces are significantly less combat capable than a nation such as the United States of America, which has a functionally unlimited ability to spend money on its national defense. In many ways, unlimited budgets invite highly questionable procurement strategies because one functional knowledge domain which has consistently proven to be a weak point across virtually all military services is development and refinement of realistic Concept of Operations (CONOPS) for execution of fighting doctrine and usage of defense assets and personnel.
Bright shining examples of this include employment of autonomous systems and beyond visual range (BVR) guided missile intercepts of enemy bombers, fighters, and missiles, many decades before any technology was mostly ready to do this with a better that 50/50 chance of success when all training and operational procedures were followed. An entire fighting doctrine was built around the false belief that all air combat would be conducted at extended ranges and dogfighting was therefore irrelevant because it would never happen. At the start, appropriate training to employ this then-new fighting doctrine in a realistic manner was never provided. The problem was so acute that fighter weapon schools were established to teach employment of weapon systems to both air and ground crews. The first missiles using tube-based electronics were so delicate that normal handling caused operational issues, to the point that a pilot squeezing the trigger was not even guaranteed to see the missile leap off the launch rail, much less guide to the target, or the warhead detonate when passing within lethal distance. Initial work began in the 1940s, but until the solid state electronics and improved seekers of the 1980s, merely having a chance at a successful engagement was almost entirely a result of the pilot positioning his aircraft and only taking missile shots from a near-ideal positions for the missiles to execute the intercept.
Needless to say, all these significant limitations did not describe typical positional advantage achievable during mock fighting, much less actual combat. In real air combat, prior to the improved generation of weapons fielded in the 1980s, all BVR missile shots had less than a 10% chance of intercepting their targets. All military forces which employed BVR radar-guided missiles in air combat quickly learned that it was a very expensive luxury capability, truly fantastic when it worked, which was not very often, but in no way could it assure the outcome of air combat engagements. An aware target would generally defeat BVR missiles fired at them, whether from the ground or other aircraft. Hundreds of billions of dollars were devoted to this technology across dozens of nations using fighter jets and air defense systems using air search radars and radar-guided BVR missiles. It took 40 years of development work before the odds of a successful intercept were better than a coin toss, because the tech simply wasn't ready to meet conceptual expectations of how it would be used. Worse than that, far too little realistic training and testing was conducted to "know" that what the military wanted to achieve wasn't even possible, let alone practical, absent dramatic improvements to computers, sensors, and institutionalized knowledge from continuous training for development and refinement of air combat fighting doctrine. There was either a refusal to accept the limitations or a lack of general awareness amongst people in development and procurement regarding realistic expectations for the weapon systems they were purchasing, with the anticipation of acquiring all-weather BVR radar-guided air intercept capabilities. In other words, everyone was heavily relying upon something to "just work as intended" that was in no way ready to do so.
We see AI-enhanced combat drones showing the same technological readiness limitations today. They look brilliant for a few moments, then do something completely ridiculous that requires human operator intervention, else they crash or otherwise fail to complete their assigned missions. While everyone is breathlessly proclaiming that combat drones are "the future of all warfare", we should probably use all historical military experience with development and employment of BVR radar-guided missiles as a very pointed "warning order" related to how relevant and effectual these AI-enhanced combat drones truly would be, if any nation relies upon them to "deliver victory" in the short term. In another 10 to 20 years, they'll probably complete missions successfully more often than not. Everything I've seen indicates they're a very promising future technology, but in no way ready for combat against a peer level adversary. A shrewd national defense strategist with a budget to adhere to would continue earnest AI combat drone and weapons development while refraining from making any large purchase orders for technologies that simply are not ready for combat.
Any budget-limited nation which wants to retain competitive military capabilities must be very shrewd about when and where it chooses to purchase or outsource procurement of systems with substantial acquisition and sustainment costs. There's no faster way to handicap your military than to spend large sums of money on doctrinally-disconnected "new capabilities" that you cannot capitalize on. The US military has proven highly susceptible to this problem. Most people would view purchase of a BVR radar guided missile without airframes equipped with powerful air search radars as a pointless waste of money, for example. AI-enhanced combat drones using today's tech would be similarly encumbered.
We'll first highlight what I consider to be non-negotiable defense systems, then explain how the associated core combat capabilities represented by those systems, or functionally equivalent capabilities, can be acquired without bankrupting a modern industrialized nation.
I. Artillery
This can include anything from 105mm or 155mm gun-launched shells, to artillery rockets, to ballistic missiles, to long range loitering munitions like the Iranian Shahed-136 drones. Modern 155mm gun-based artillery systems have become so expensive to purchase and maintain that it might be cheaper to build drones to carry those 155mm artillery shell-sized warheads to their targets. The difference is in marginal cost per successful engagement, which will be higher with a drone or rocket-based artillery systems than it is with gun-based artillery systems. The support infrastructure for drones vs cannons is also different, not eliminated. Drones and rockets / missile artillery require physically larger and more expensive vehicles to deploy and maintain them.
M777 towed howitzers have an initial purchase price of about $5M. The cost to fire the unguided / unassisted shells is fairly low, at around $3K per shell. If your loitering munitions cost around $25K per weapon to mass produce, then you can procure around 200 munitions for the same cost as the howitzer itself. Howitzer crews don't materialize out of thin air, either, which means an entire training and logistics pipeline is required to continue to have trained artillery operators and serviceable guns. As of today, drones still require operators and maintainers. If the total number of required attacks is low and the chance of success is high, there will be some kind of inflection point where beyond a certain number of munitions fired off to attack the enemy, conventional artillery makes more economic sense than drones / loitering munitions or artillery rockets / guided missiles. At the same time, long range drones like Shahed can provide the range to conduct deep strikes that far more expensive missile-based artillery systems would otherwise be required to execute. Shaheds are much slower than missile-based systems, but the number of attack opportunities is much greater because per-unit cost is far lower than that of ballistic weapons.
II. Integrated Air Defense Systems
The core of any modern integrated air defense system is a networked system of surveillance / tracking / missile mid-course guidance radars. These long range / high power radars are inevitably expensive, but vital to air defense. If there is no awareness of threats posed by incoming enemy missiles and aircraft, then there is no possibility of intercepting them.
There are 4 categories of air defense interceptor missiles:
hypersonic / ballistic missile and nuclear warhead threats - THAAD / SM3
long range high capability radar guided interceptors - Patriot / SM6
medium range radar guided - ESSM / NASAMS
short range infrared guided - Sidewinder / IRIS / MICA derivatives
man portable air defense systems - Stinger / Starstreak / Mistral
There are 3 categories of air defense guns:
35-76mm autocannons (some of these now have data-linked self-guided shells as ammo options)
20-30mm caliber autocannons (close-in weapon systems used to put a "Wall of Lead" in front of missiles or drones)
12.7-15mm heavy machine guns (typically used to kill drones and helicopters)
It's unreasonable to expect most nations to have the resources to locally design and produce their own version of THAAD or Patriot. As sophisticated as medium range radar guided missiles have become, even those may be a bridge too far. If you cannot produce your own IR guided missiles and autocannons, then you need to fix that.
The inability to purchase the components to create active radar guided missiles does not mean BVR radar-directed intercepts are impossible to effect. A missile's mid-course guidance is still provided by its launching platform, which means greatly improved modern IR seekers can still be used for terminal guidance to targets without indigenous or even acquired miniaturized onboard missile radars and guidance computers. Against stealthy targets, IR seekers typically out-range onboard missile radars, often by a considerable margin. The radar and guidance computer technology items represent a disproportionate percentage of a BVR radar-guided missile's total cost. A drastically lower cost option is use of modern IR seekers, which are also nearly impossible to distract or confuse because they cannot as easily be "jammed", unlike radar-based systems.
III. Off-Road Mobile Armored Transport Vehicles
The ability to effectively transport soldiers, food, water, equipment, fuel, and weapon systems around the battlefield has been a military requirement since armies existed. While the means of transport have varied greatly over time, all modern armies use motorized vehicles. Parts of civil vehicles can be adapted to battlefield use, or at least benefit from a domestic automotive industry that nominally makes vehicles for civil on-road and off-road use. Significant procurement cost increases tend to be driven by bespoke vs off-the-shelf solutions where the technology item in question is not shared with any civil motorized vehicle.
Tank engines used to be then-common automotive engines with bespoke transmissions / gearboxes. When there was no difference at all between a tank engine and a semi truck engine, the cost of the engine development and procurement was nominal. It's not written in stone anywhere that a tank absolutely requires a bespoke engine design which is not shared with any other civil vehicle. Unsustainable weight increases created the requirement for specialized tank engines. Advanced armor materials and uncrewed turrets with autoloaders will help return armored vehicle weights to the realm of sanity, as will resisting the temptation to load up every armored vehicle with "some of everything". A tank was originally intended to provide direct fire support to infantry assaults using a large caliber highly mobile cannon. We've since added anti-tank missiles, surface-to-air missiles, anti-drone machine guns or light cannons, active protection systems, lasers, and an array of sensors that would make Cold War era fighter pilots jealous.
It's still possible to cap vehicle weights at 40t (the GVWR of a fully loaded semi-truck) by using single crew compartment tank designs (uncrewed turrets) with adequate 360 degree protection to assure crew survival while accepting vehicle losses from modern anti-tank weapons. Even if all those other systems are added to armored vehicles, increasing their weight and cost to impractical figures, losses to enemy anti-tank weapons remain inevitable. There is still no active protection system against anti-tank mines, for example. That doesn't mean we should attempt to add one to the tank, either. There's no point to "gold plating" a direct fire artillery piece which immediately becomes the target of choice for everyone else on the battlefield. Save the crew and sacrifice the vehicle. You're going to do that irrespective of how many additional expensive protection systems you burden the tank with. If losing a tank or other armored fighting vehicle was not a multi-million dollar loss involving a collection of difficult-to-replace systems-based capabilities, then your military can afford to "eat" the vehicle loss and make more replacement vehicles. If you still require those other weapons and sensors, then put them in separate specialist vehicles instead of attempting to transform every armored vehicle into the land-based equivalent of a tactical fighter jet.
Combined arms maneuver warfare provides complementary protection of disparate forces by mixing the capabilities of tanks, artillery, other armored fighting vehicles armed with autocannons and missiles, infantry, air defense systems, and aircraft to achieve outcomes not possible using any specific type of weapon system alone. As important as establishing air superiority is to successful combat operations, aircraft alone cannot take ground from the enemy and hold it. Coordination of movements and sharing of positional data is far more effective than trying to use singular assets to operate in a vacuum.
Armored off-road capable motorized vehicles is the one category with the widest possible array of affordable, practical, and survivable solutions. It's also not clear that one vehicle type provides any kind of insurmountable technological advantage over another type. There is such a thing as appropriateness to task, but that's as far as it goes.
IV. Air Forces and Air Assault Vehicles
There's a persistent yet false interpretation of what turbine engines actually permitted military aircraft to do. Achieving faster flight speeds is the colloquially stated reason for their development, and turbine powered aircraft typically fly faster than piston engine aircraft. It seems obvious, and is in fact used that way by most aircraft designers, but that explanation is wrong from an engineering perspective. Simply put, turbine engines offered aircraft designers greater payload-to-distance by reducing the engine mass to deliver a given amount of thrust. Delivering more power per unit of engine weight allowed aircraft designers to design aircraft to choose between faster flight speeds or pushing more payload through the air. For military purposes, this significant design advantage was most frequently used to make aircraft fly faster.
Unfortunately, the instant you demand that an aircraft to fly at high subsonic speeds or faster, you run into a basic flight physics challenge. There's a very steep rise in aerodynamic drag which dictates airframe shaping and minimum wing loading to minimize lift-induced drag at higher flight speeds. In turn, wing loading dictates minimum takeoff and landing speeds. There's a very narrow range of reasonably efficient cruise flight speeds for turbofan and turbojet engines, coupled with an extreme cost increase.
It would be fair to say that manufacturing and maintaining turboprop and turboshaft engines, which are the least expensive types of turbine aircraft engines, are at least ten times more costly than equivalently powerful piston engines. Turbofan and turbojet engines are significantly more costly to make and operate than equivalently powerful turboprop engines. If you're not flying at high subsonic speeds at altitudes above 20,000ft or so, then even high-bypass turbofan engines tend to be horrendously inefficient, relative to piston engines, for the power generated. Propellers are more efficient "wings" than the much smaller fan blade "wings" in a turbofan or turbojet engine, until you reach a certain speed at higher altitudes. You're not "free" to travel at higher speeds and altitudes, you're effectively limited to exclusively operating in that narrowly defined flight regime because any deviation severely affects range, speed, and acceleration performance.
A modern computer-controlled 550hp spark-ignited and liquid-cooled automotive piston engine will cost about $25,000. A 550hp PT-6A turboprop engine costs around $1M, so it's 40 times more expensive for the same power generated. The PT-6A is about half the weight of the automotive engine, but it's fuel burn rate is significantly greater than the piston engine, especially at lower altitudes. Inside of 4 hours of flight time using onboard fuel, and perhaps as little as 2 hours at lower altitudes, the turbine engine's apparent weight advantage over the piston engine is gone. It does not matter to flight physics at all whether an airframe must carry additional fuel weight or engine weight to remain airborne. However, a significant change in fuel burn rate will at least partially dictate cost per flight hour. At 33,000ft, the PT-6A is only generating roughly 1/3rd of its sea level power output because its compressor section operates on ambient atmospheric pressure and must be driven by hot gas expansion through the expansion section. An appropriately turbocharged and intercooled piston engine, on the other hand, can maintain 100% of sea level power output at altitudes up to 36,000ft, which was achieved during WWII.
Early avionics, sensors, and weapons were very large and heavy because their electronics were large and heavy. 2025 electronics have been miniaturized to the point that a smart phone has more than sufficient computing power to operate every system and sensor aboard combat aircraft. The precision of modern missiles almost entirely negates the requirement for a massive warhead to eliminate a target. Modern composite airframe materials are meaningfully lighter than Aluminum or steel for the same strength and stiffness provided. The net effect has been to dramatically reduce the mass of sensors and weapons required to find, fix, and eliminate a target, thus the airframe they're attached to. It would be fair to say that piston engine aircraft could carry most of the sensors and weapon systems in a practical manner, at greatly reduced cost relative to any turbine engine aircraft, while flying at the same speeds that are typical of "best maneuvering speeds" for fighter jets.
Whenever fighter jets slow down to turn well enough to evade incoming missiles, best maneuvering speeds range between 350 and 550mph, with most tactical fighter jets exhibiting best maneuvering characteristics between 400 and 500mph. Oddly enough, we developed piston engine aircraft that could cruise between 400 and 450mph, at the same altitudes where modern fighter jets typically operate at (25,000 to 35,000ft), during WWII. The significant increase in cruising speeds of fighter jets does not alter flight physics to enable them to turn better at high subsonic or supersonic speeds, nor "get away with" cruising at high subsonic speeds without burning fuel at a much faster rate. The closest approximation to how modern tactical fighter jets actually operate is by economically cruising at speeds functionally unattainable by piston engine fighters, only to revert back to WWII flight speeds during evasive maneuvers. Even if some fighter jets are technically or functionally capable of out-running a missile, in actual practice air intercept missiles are at least twice as fast as the fighter jets they're fired at. In simple terms, you're never out-running a rocket engine missile in either a turbine or piston engine fighter, but if you can maneuver well, then you can use their speed against them by turning inside of them with a correctly timed evasive maneuver.
If you no longer require enormous carrying capacity provided by more powerful but drastically more expensive and difficult to produce turbine engines, per unit of engine weight, and you'll always need to evade inbound missiles and occasionally dogfight with other fighter type aircraft at flight speeds functionally identical to WWII era piston engine aircraft, is there still an insurmountable advantage offered by turbine engine aircraft and higher flight speeds?
If your air force can affordably field multiple squadrons of piston engine aircraft with identical sensor and weapons capabilities as any other modern tactical fighter jet, can a military that exclusively operates far fewer numbers of turbine engine fighter jets ever win a war of attrition, or do they get to shoot down a handful of your far less costly piston engine fighters, and then still lose the war on the first day after your remaining piston engine fighters bomb all of their much fancier fighter jets on the ground?
The F-15 is a fine flying and fighting machine, clearly much more capable than the P-51s that came before it, but it's also a $100M machine that cannot physically be in 100 different places at the same time. If we pit 100 P-51s against 1 F-15, then the P-51s still win every time, even if they loose 100% of their dogfights against F-15s. The F-15 still requires weapons, which means it still has to land somewhere to rearm. Let's assert that our lone F-15 can shoot down an entire squadron of P-51s. He'll be an "ace" for every bit of a half day, because the remaining 7 squadrons of P-51s will then proceed to strafe or bomb his F-15 on the ground. It no longer matters how individually capable the F-15 is. The problem it's run into is purely a numbers game, and the F-15 loses that fight every single time.
The US Air Force ran an entire series of war games under the moniker "Project J-CATCH" during the 1970s and 1980s using F-4s / F-15s / A-7s / A-10s to intercept helicopter gunships which could fly no faster than 200mph. Using BVR missile shots, the kill ratio in favor of the F-15s was 2.9:1. F-4s attempted to merge with and dogfight the gunships, using Sidewinders and Vulcan autocannons. At that point, both the F-4s and later the F-15s were killed as often or more often than they killed the gunships. WVR dogfights managed 0.7:1 to as high as 1:1 kill ratios in some instances. More maneuverable A-10s carrying minimal air-to-ground ordnance only achieved 1.3:1. The gunships were vulnerable to BVR missile shots because they initially had no radar warning receivers to let them know when they were being attacked. The most frequent problem reported by the fighter pilots who flew against the gunships was that gunships were difficult to find on radar and EO / IR sensors due to ground clutter. They were also much smaller than fighter jets, especially Huey Cobras, therefore difficult to visually acquire. The recommendation regarding combat tactics was that fighter jets should never attempt to dogfight a slower but more maneuverable opponents, because all the thrust and speed their engines could provide was insufficient to avoid 1:1 kill ratios, and to only engage them using BVR missiles when absolutely necessary. The conclusion reached was that fighter jets should use superior speed to avoid them altogether. This only works to a point. When those same opponents resolve to attack your airfield, then what?
MiG-19s are very maneuverable as fighter jets go, and able to turn inside a F-16 in a rate-fight, which is not easy to do. Several MiG-19s were lost attempting to shoot down A-1 Skyraiders during the Viet Nam War using IR guided missiles and cannon fire. The A-1s involved were laden with ordnance for use against ground targets, but had little difficulty turning inside the MiG-19s and hosing them down with 20mm cannon fire. The Vietnamese pilots attempted both high speed passes and maneuvering for positional advantage. Neither tactic proved effective against the A-1s when they were aware that they were being attacked. If A-1s were fabricated from composites to further reduce weight and increase maneuvering limits, and equipped with modern miniaturized air search radars, radar warning receivers, plus Sidewinder or Peregrine missiles, then attacking them using F-15s or F-16s or similar tactical fighter jets would most likely result in 1:1 kill/loss ratios at best. The problem, of course, is that a single F-15 or F-16 costs more than a squadron of A-1s, and a F-15 burns about as much fuel per hour as a squadron of A-1s.
During WWII, several nations made more piston engine fighters per month than the total number of modern fighter jets in existence. Fighter jets are awesome, and the little boy inside me still loves them to pieces, but my more rational adult brain tells me that they still cannot be in more places than we have flyable physical copies of them to fight with. Most of the time half of any given fighter jet squadron is down for maintenance. We don't have 100+ maintainers who work on 4-12 jets in a squadron because they work perfectly all of the time. You fly a fighter jet, something on it inevitably breaks, and then the rest of the day is spent diagnosing and fixing it. This is understood and accepted by people who have actually served in fighter squadrons in any capacity. If the jets are on the ground, then the maintainers are fixing whatever broke the last time they flew. There's also a major difference between flyable vs fully mission capable.
Many people remain completely convinced that speed alone confers an insurmountable technical advantage to turbojet / turbofan engine aircraft, despite all evidence to the contrary from actual and mock air combat engagements. The conclusion I reached is the one supported by my personal knowledge of flight physics from actually flying piston engine aircraft, my time spent supporting a carrier based squadron and air wing that flew combat missions over Afghanistan, and all available evidence collected over the decades on air combat tactics development to evaluate the limitations of jet powered tactical fighters flown against dissimilar adversaries. Speed matters when getting to a target area. Maneuverability then determines whether or not you come home alive. There are no free lunches in aeronautical engineering, so if you design an airframe and engine combination to deliver fantastic speed then you necessarily give up some maneuverability. Balance is what we should strive for. If you already know that all real world fighting will occur at flight speeds readily achievable using piston engines, then truck loads of money can be saved on engines and airframes, then redirected towards more capable sensors and weapons. The sensors do the finding and the weapons do the killing, not the aircraft itself, unless we're talking about kamikazes.
You can spend unlimited money on faster airframes and more powerful engines, but doing so doesn't change fundamental flight physics related to economical cruise flight speeds nor the ability to maneuver well enough to evade incoming missiles or gain positional advantage. You can't engage a turbine powered aircraft in a vertical fight using a piston powered aircraft but that's about it. In the real world you still fight using the strengths of your aircraft. If you pair modern lightweight / compact sensors and weapons with modern high-output automotive piston engines and composite materials for airframes, then you'll be able to manufacture and maintain several squadrons worth of aircraft for the same cost as a single tactical fighter jet. You do not need to bankrupt your nation's air forces with bespoke turbine power plants and functionally unusable speed due to fuel burn rates.
The individual piston engine aircraft are less capable than a singular turbofan powered aircraft, but collectively they deliver vastly more usable combat capability by virtue of at least some of them being fully mission capable and by sheer numbers allowing them to overwhelm enemy air defenses.
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