Indian Air Force, in war games, gives US a run

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1128/p01s04-wosc.html?s=u2

Foreign fighter jets performed well against F-16s in recent exercises.

By Scott Baldauf | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

NEW DELHI – Mingling over a few rounds of golf, dogfighting a bit over the jungles of West Bengal - this month's Cope India 2005 war games were billed as a standard two-week exercise between Indian and American top guns.

But in website chat rooms devoted to the arcania of fighter aircraft, there was a buzz. Arre, wa! Oh, wow! Had the Indian Air Force beat the Americans?

Not exactly, according to observers and participants. The exercises had mixed teams of Indian and American pilots on both sides, which means that both the Americans and the Indians won, and lost. Yet, observers say that in a surprising number of encounters - particularly between the American F-16s and the Indian Sukhoi-30 MKIs - the Indian pilots came out the winners.

"Since the cold war, there has been the general assumption that India is a third-world country with Soviet technology, and wherever the Soviet-supported equipment went, it didn't perform well," says Jasjit Singh, a retired air commodore and now director of the Center for Air Power Studies in New Delhi. "That myth has been blown out by the results" of these air exercises.

of the U.S. Air Force in order to gain public support for the F-22 :eyes:

yes, I'm aware it's the csmonitor

IIRC, the Indians kicked our tails a number of times in Cope India 2004, too.

Here:
http://www.afa.org/magazine/july2004/0704watch.asp

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. John P. Jumper has said for years that USAF pilots flying the latest Russian-made fighters can beat USAF pilots flying the service’s F-15. Now, it seems that Indian Air Force pilots can, too.

That was one of the eye-opening outcomes of Cope India 2004, held earlier this year. It showed that a current Russian fighter flown by well-trained Indian pilots can best a front-line USAF fighter.

Those Sukhois are nifty. Apparently.

MiG-29s are great planes with really crappy avionics. When the Germans put western avionics in the MiG-29s, they ended up being capable of routinely shooting down American F-16s.

Problem solved.

:evilgrin:

And have some E-5 in a trailer who grew up on video games do the heavy lifting! Think of the money saved! Your only limiter is your fuel--if the "pilot" needs to go take a dump, he hands the joystick to a back-up...

I think they should do variations of this, but they can't rely entirely on it.

Think of how more efficient a plane could be without worrying about keepin a human alive. Think g forces as just a beginning.

the person they are speaking to.

not an expert but I assume this was more of a "top gun" close encounter kind of setup?

Russian fighters have always been more agile than ours.

Where we've been better has been at long range radar and missiles, hit them before they even see us kinda thing.

So not surprised that we may have not done so well against roughly equal pilots flying aerodynamically superior aircraft.

In a real war, with AWACS, ECM, and our advanced radar and missiles, I dont think there is an air force in the world that could beat us.

"Hey, them Indians is shootin' back!"

Think about the last country we hit with an air force.
Iraq in Gulf1? a joke with outmoded aircraft
VietNam? where "Duke" became an ace shooting slow-moving targets

Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm a Navy guy- no air expert. But these are my impressions.

from California? So much bullshit, so many lies, so little time.

Well, according to some TV show I saw once. I think it was under some particular circumstances though, as the U.S. airforce had superiority most of the time.

From what I remember reading elsewhere, the Soviet-built MiG-15 was a better aircraft than the US F-86. The MiG-15 was certainly better than the US F-80.

I suspect that some of DU's US Air Force veterans know this subject a lot better than I do.

The Mig-17-19-21 fighters were maneuverable with decent armament, only deficient in range and some avionics. India had good luck with Mig-21s against F-104s in one of their Pakistan wars. The basic Russian fighters have always been good, tactics, training, logistics and add-ons being our enemy's weak points. Duke was a great pilot whose situation-awareness went to mush from believing too much RW propaganda.

As in...Ba Babui?

:rofl:

:shrug:

WTF? Getting your ass kicked by MIG 21's is a very bad sign. I'm not one of those, "...the F-22 is the answer to all our problems..." type, what I'm more worried about is that almost all of our U.S. fighter jets, except for the F-18 Super Hornet, are jet that were engineered and built in the 1970's and early 1980's.

And since the cost of F-22 has gotten so high, they keep cutting the planed number of F-22 they are going to produce, where does that leave us? Is the F-18 Super Hornet and the F-35 JSF going to be able to fill that gap, I really have my doubts.

This and the "Cope India 2004" should be a wake up call for the Pentagon, but knowing the current Civilian leadership, I bet they will ignore it.

The basic platform of the MiG 21 was pretty good and the Indian's evolved and modernized out many of the weakness's of the platform as well as upgrading the avionics.

But we've already got that don't we?
And it's killing people.

i was looking for on this thread. thank you.

I'm a little bemused by some of the posts here that seem so offended by such a report. Fact is, a LOT of foreign airforce pilots perform very well against the US. An RAAF friend of mine told me a couple of years ago that Australian pilots have won trophies at Top Gun.

A major reason for this is the size of the US air force. In smaller nations, the pilots spend WAY MORE time in the air than Americans do. It's like having a class size of 10 vs a class size of 200. Obviously the smaller class will get more attention and better access to the quality instruction.

The same sort of stories come out of the RIMPAC exercises, with the clapped out (now decommissioned) O-boats wreaking havoc with carriers.

I think it basically comes down to money. Small nations can't afford to match the US with numbers or 'the latest and greatest' bit of technology so they have to find other ways. Their tools get pushed far beyond what Jane's or the manufacturer says, because they need that little extra performance to give them an edge. This can be quite a shock when a 'obsolete piece of junk' does things which 'wasn't in the manual'.

The other is availability of equipment. Smaller nations can't afford several hundred aircraft, perhaps even only a few dozen. This makes the 'fight to the top' even more competitive.

"So you're the Best of the Best eh?"
"Yup. Gimme a plane"
"Well sunshine, we have two hundred of the 'best of the best' and only fifty planes. You're going to have to do better than that".

eom

like all Soviet and post-Soviet Russian military equipment, they are designed to be simple to use, easy to maintain and dependably durable. Think of aircraft designed in compliance with the same principles that produced the T-34 tank, the SKS carbine, the AK-47 and even the ancient M1896 Mosin-Nagant rifle (Soviet, Finnish and Chinese variants of which are still used by snipers and target shooters throughout the world).

By contrast, all U.S. military equipment is designed with the secondary purpose of providing maximum profits to the corporations that build and design it, which means not only planned obsolescence, but deliberately foreshortened durability and maximum-intensity maintence that can only be performed by corporate tech reps (thereby further multiplying already obscene profits). Again, think in terms of small arms: the U.S. M-16 -- extremely high-maintenance (a quality deliberately built in to eliminate its usefulness to any enemies that might capture it), proven unreliability (despite the fact it is the most expensive military rifle in human history), limited effectiveness (thereby creating the "sales opportunity" to peddle other weapons systems to make up for its ineffectiveness). Our aircraft have precisely the same qualities for precisely the same reasons.

This is nothing new or startling. Back in the halcyon days of minimal censorship, it was extensively reported here in the U.S. maybe 35 years ago, when the Indian government first opted for Soviet weapons, that it created the ironic and sometimes comical situation of U.S. and British military assistance advisers teaching the Indian Armed Forces to use "enemy" (i.e., Soviet) weapons: small arms, artillery, aircraft. If memory serves me, the only exceptions were that the Indian General Staff decided U.S. and British tanks -- in those days the M-60 and the Centurion Mark-something (IX, I believe) were superior to the Soviet T-54: this on the basis not of their relative general excellence (at which the Soviet tanks won hands down) but because the British and American cooling systems functioned more reliably in the extreme heat of the Indian subcontinent.

As to the Soviet opinion of made-for-profit American military hardware, I have heard it said Mikhail Kalashnikov himself once commented that the M-16's battlefield performance is so awful (and because so many U.S. soldiers have died due to its failures), if the weapon had been produced by the Soviet Union, everybody associated with it's design and manufacture would have been shot.

Russians license the technology for production in India whereas US manufacturers don't.

This creates advantages to the Indians with transfer of technology and ability to modify the hardware for precise suitability not to mention reduction in cost and creation of local jobs.

I know I've seen and read about the MIG 29 and SU-27 (a pair of EXCELLENT fighter jets that don't cost a quarter billion each), but the SU-30 MKI? :shrug: Just last week one of the local papers (Daily Press) had ana rticle about how the all dancing F-22 waxed some F-15s in a dogfight exercise... BUt it's kind of hard to take anything from the Pentagon seriously these days with a grain of salt :eyes:

of tax dollars. maybe it's time?

become the weapon of choice among all U.S. combat troops in Iraq, just as it (and the SKS) became weapons of choice among U.S. troops in Vietnam. Whether in Vietnam or Iraq, the M-16 (and its modern variant the M-4) will malfunction and get you killed; the AK (like the SKS before it) will function reliably even if its action is filled with grit -- an endemic problem in the sort of desert warfare typical of the Middle East. This country could save billions of dollars if it merely recognized the AK's innate superiority and adopted it accordingly -- alas, something that the combination corporate greed and kickback-hungry politicians will never allow.

It looks like good pilots and good training can make a difference, even in inferior aircraft. If Hugo Chavez's air force is at least as well-trained as the Indian Air Force, Gee Dubya Bush Pentagon jingoists' notions that an invasion of Venezuela would be a cakewalk ought to be squelched NOW.

The US military would ultimately sweep Venezuelan airspace, but at what cost?

From the ground up, it was designed as a dogfighter. Every "upgrade" added more weight, more complexity. Add to the fact that actual air training is on the decline, no wonder we get our but kicked.

Here's an article from the Chief Designer on the F-16, about the Father of the F-16, John Boyd: http://www.codeonemagazine.com/archives/1997/articles/jul_97/july2a_97.html

And visit http://www.d-n-i.net

Pretty nifty, since it doesn't have the thrust vectoring ability if the F22.