Suddenly I'm reminded of The Final Countdown dogfight between F-14s and Zeroes (well, they were T-6s, but you get the idea).  Great scene, though there is one heart-stopping moment--not planned--where one of the F-14s stalls out and nearly goes into the drink while trying to turn with a T-6.  Supposedly when the movie was screened at NAS Oceana every pilot in the theater said "Oh shit" when the stall happened.

 

That would be the WWII fighters only advantage in this scenario.

and thats the thrust of all my previous.  this is a battlespace managment issue before its a platform issue.

control and direct the battlespace and you manage the fight.  systems vs platforms

Everyone seem to reduce this scenario to its smallest scale. Thats fine, but if you do so, keep the proportion.

 

modern USAF have 1,667 fighters and 290

WW2 USAAF have 16,799 fighters and 22393 bombers of all kind

 

so a ratio of  ~1/10 of fighter and ~1/77 for bomber

If you reduce it to the minimum,its could look like that:

Modern side have :

1 bomber

1 Fighter

1 airfield

 

WW2 side have:

77 bomber

10 fighter

1 airfield

 

If whe say that modern airplane cannot be destroyed at all when flying, thats mean nothing will prevent the modern bomber to destroy the enemy airfield. But even with infinite superiority,  one modern fighter cant destroy 87 plane. Its mean that destruction of the 2 airfield is inevitable.

 

While modern plane cant operate from improvised airstrip, WW2 can. Technically WW2 side won

Sorry - I should have acknowledged that post - I enjoy reading your stuff and often learn interesting things from them - it was probably my frustration at seeing the posts about dealing with waves of bombers when I'm thinking "They're NOT getting airborne without a hall pass, dude!"

 

 

Ian

 

we had that one out on another board and the big question, what do you do was interesting. Being British and both self interested and cynical, I stated the best thing to do was let them launch the first wave, make sure they were about half way there and then sink the carrier force. You'd still have US entry to the war at the right time, with that heavy weight of outrage but the IJN would be down a hefty chunk of it's strike force from the get go.

 

You'd lose the Arizona still but the follow up strike wouldn't happen and the Japanese would be right on the back foot when their sleeping dragon came back with such a decisive counter stroke.

My only worry was that if the first strike wasn't convincing enough, Hitler might not have declared war on the US - and it wasn't certain that Congress would declare against Germany as well as Japan at the time.

 

Ian

 

 

< grin >  any discussion like this which is focussed about platform capabilities and is geared around those concepts at the expense of discussing the critical vectors of battlespace management and logistics, is just an exercise in loading the bases for someones perspective/bias.

you can't run scenarios in isolation of real world vectors.

eg its like saying what if the British had metalstorm PC weapons, AI 50 cal sniper rifles, 5 gigawatt generators, mobile desalination plants  and 100,000 extra rounds at Rorkes Drift?  What if the zulus all had Barrets and AI's and decided to plink the redcoats from 2km away and never close the gap?  They would have won because they had the heights, had the range and would never be exposed to short range weapons etc....

its a nonsense if its meant to be serious.  if its meant to be "fun"  then its so one sided to be fundamentally worthless.

Again, you're completely ignoring the human element. The aircraft themselves are flown by pilots. It's very easy to just post arithmetic here on Strategypage from the comfort of a desk (in much the same way as Falkenhayn practiced his arithmetic in 1916), but it is a very different matter to actually carry out the attack and be in the cockpit.

 

Remember, the Second World War pilot has absolutely no concept of BVR combat, nor does he have RWRs/MAWS to let him know that an attack is underway. The first indication he would have is when a few Sparrows slam into a bomber formation. With aircraft flying so close together, there is a very real risk of collision, so one missile could cause terrible destruction. However, the Mustang jock wouldn't know that his mates had been hit by a BVR missile, only that the aircraft had burst into flames. Now consider this happening about a hundred times in the space of a minute or so. And the Mustang jock, while knowing he is under attack, doesn't know by what kind of threat or how to defend himself.

 

The attack would disperse pretty quickly.

 

Also, while you're playing arithmetic, you might want to factor A-10s into your equation. They're perfectly capapble of carrying Sidewinders, have a deadly gun, and roughly equal performance to a Mustang or Thunderbolt. They'd be very nasty against bombers and, unlike the F-15/16, they have admirable rough-field handling.

RP, that's ridiculous.  You've set the bare minimum for the 1991 force while still allowing the 1944 force to have a significant amount.  Can a single fighter destroy 87 bombers? No, but the entire scenario is completely unrealistic anyway.  If we're talking 1991 USAF, you have to include everything.  Otherwise, you're just altering the data to get the conclusion you already desire, which is poor research. 

 

But fine, let's take your scenario.  The F-15 has a ten-kill capability (four Sparrows, four Sidewinders, assume two kills with the gun); barring a lucky hit, the P-51 escorts aren't going to get a shot off and neither are the B-17s.  Okay, the bombers get through and destroy the base--or do they?  High-level bombing rarely wrecked an airfield in WWII because bombing accuracy was abysmal.  The only way to put an airfield out of action in WWII was low-level attack, like what the B-25s of the New Guinea Strafers made an art form out of--but even then, Kenney's Kids only destroyed aircraft, flak guns, and what fuel facilities they could find.  Not the runways, because WWII aircraft lacked a runway-cratering bomb.  The fear in the Battle of Britain was never that the RAF would lose their runways; it was that the RAF would run out of pilots.

 

So our F-15 pilot isn't completely out of the fight (unless fuel stores have been destroyed), and since it will take, say, three hours for the bombers to reach their target (based on the distance from England bases to German targets), the F-15 has time to get to the attacking force, shoot down ten aircraft, land, rearm, take off, shoot down ten more, and then RTB and possibly do it a third time.  Not even the USAAF could trade 30 aircraft a day for dubious results, not on a long-term basis.

 

It's a gross mismatch, and that's the only thing you can say for this scenario.

 

Hello again Sentinel28a

 

The whole point about this scenario is the mismatch, Modern USAF have an almost absolute technological superiority, and WW2 USAAF  have an almost absolute numeric superiority. At the end its only about number VS quality.

 

I must say that current fighter are not adapted to face large number of enemy. perhaps replacing missile by Gun pod could probably fix that. At some extent, we could almost compare that to evolution. I know... this example is a out of subject, but still: A specie that is perfectly adapted to his environment have a advantage over a specie that is not. But if the environment change the role are inverced.

 

I noted that none have elaborate any plan for the WW2 side, or speculate the posiblility for them to win.