1 If you open this post on its own page you can see the full pictures. On the main page they're seriously cut off on the right.

2

At least for the anime, the weapon used by the squaddie against the flame dragon appears to be the Panzerfaust 3 (And not the Carl Gustav that I initially thought.), which the JGSDF uses a licensed-made Japanese version of.

The fan translator may or may not have known it, but the production studio did depict it pretty well....And the link button does not seem to be working for me....

3

Re links, see this.

Re "Panzerfaust 3", I stand corrected. I think you're right about that.

4 I might have to track down the manga.  I'm looking forward to seeing where these characters go.

5 I've been reading it here.

6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_modern_equipment_of_the_Japan_Ground_Self-Defense_Force

If you compare the pictures and follow their links, you can see that the expeditionary force really is using older gear from the '60s-'80s, rather than the newer stuff from this century.

Still, I think that they should have sent some Type 01 LMAT ATGMs over, their rough equivalent to the Javelin or Spike; we've used lots of javelins against unarmored targets for their range and accuracy. One of those might have hit the flame dragon dead on rather than just tearing off an arm.

I would also be shocked if they *didn't* send any Type 96 AGLs through--AGLs were more or less first put into service as a result of Chinese human-wave attacks, and 100K medieval troops certainly counts as that.

7 Err, sorry, I was being lazy and just pasted the link without thinking like this was a message board.

8

Thanks.

I notice that the scene in the manga where they constructed the refugee camp had a larger variety of equipment and personnel (including surveyors), and looked like they were clearing and grubbing, instead of digging random holes.  I suppose it helps that the artist didn't need to animate a variety of equipment.

9

The backhoe in the anime is rendered. If they found an existing model (likely) then animating it cost virtually nothing. I'm sure they could have found models of other kinds of construction equipment.

I suspect the reason they only used the backhoe is because there wasn't really any need for the scene to be any more complex than that. It got the message across, and that's good enough.

10

Yeah, I'm noticing a lot of things where the manga artist both knows his business and takes care to show it.

I note they did have a dry moat around the fort in the manga, and the size and layout of the facility is much more realistic--including K-spans they're using for hangars.  The star shape is probably still more rule of cool than realistic, but you've got to show some cool stuff from time to time in fiction.  The scale of the walls and ECPs is probably bigger than you could reasonably contract for in the time provided, but again, rule of cool.

11

I've been trying to figure out what aircraft they're flying in the manga, since they haven't shown up yet in the anime.

I'm pretty sure they're Phantoms. The JASDF does fly Phantoms. In fact, they're listed as current inventory for the 5th and 7th Air Wings.

Which is really strange; I didn't think anyone flew those any more. That design is more than 50 years old. (Of course, the US is still flying B-52's, which are more than 60 years old, so...)

12 Japan, Turkey, and Iran are the last remaining users. Turkey is formally in indefinite safety stand-down, IIRC, so they are pretty much finished this year. They were racking up losses recently. Germany retired the last F-4s they had just recently, possibly within the time frame of the manga.

13

When did South Korea and Greece retire their F-4s?

And I was trying to follow the explanatory page regarding putting links when I commented about the Panzerfaust 3, but the box that appeared to insert links, was remarkably non-responsive for me.

14 If you have a javascript blocker, that may be the problem.

15

Pretty sure it was not JavaScript blocker - JavaScript works in other circumstances.

Re: F-4: I am reminded of two pieces, supposedly by a professor at West Point, who declared that 1) the F-4 was one of the worst 5 combat aircraft in history, and 2) the MiG-21 was one of the best 5 combat aircraft in history, specifically citing Indian's usage of the -21 as part of the proof for his hypothesis.  The Indians seem to disagree with that...

The fact that the professor put the F-35 into his '5 worst' article should say volumes about his criteria...

16 Javascript blockers are usually not all-or-nothing. Usually they are set to block "dangerous" javascript commands only. I have one in Proxomitron which doesn't interfere with most things (for instance, it doesn't affect this comment entry box) but which makes it so I can't look at news articles on the NBC News web site. So when I want to read one of those I have to disable it temporarily.

17 The JASDF does fly Phantoms. In fact, they're listed as current inventory for the 5th and 7th Air Wings.

A good chunk of those Phantoms are the RF-4EJ variant, recon birds.  They've made an appearance in anime before... specifically, Ep04 of High School of the Dead.  At the time, they would have been based at Okinawa, part of the Southwestern Composite Air Division.

18 After having read Clashes: Air Combat over North Vietnam, 1965-1972 by Marshall L. Michell III I think the good professor's comments need to be taken with a particularly large grain of salt.
 
First thing to note is that the MiG-21's utility cannot be separated from the whole system it was built for, specifically total control over its missions from the ground, which the North Vietnamese had for the north.  The plane has terrible visibility restrictions, and is intended for one pass hit and run attacks vs. dogfighting, in which it was often successful against fighter-bombers (F-105 and F-4) because they had to be clumped together to successfully jam AAA and SA-2 radars.  Also, in Operation Linebacker "I" they needed to leverage a very small number of the laser designater pods they had available.

Not sure about the F-4 being among the "worst".  It certainly had a big problem of smokey engines, which didn't get solved for a long time.  It originally had no gun, and it took a while for that to get properly solved; this was particularly bad over North Vietnam because visual identification was all but required, since almost all the planes in the air were ours.  Early missiles, especially in the field, were not very reliable, but the Navy's were better and after they realized the rough handling issue they were much more careful with them.

It's also hard to separate the history of the Phantom in air combat from the then brain dead Air Force bomber centric bureaucracy, which supplied the Vietnam forces with inadequately trained replacement pilots (the Navy had a mandatory floor of being able to land on a carrier, but they also set up their Top Gun school to address this), a WWII era flying formation that resulted in 1/4 the combat power of the modern Navy one, the noted much worse missile issues, and a general unwillingness to institutionally learn from hard experience.

With these various problems addressed and a good relationship between the pilot and guy in back (the Air Force also might have had a problem there as well) I gather it was pretty good.  It certainly had enough to deal with adversaries like the Mig-17, -19 and -21, if properly employed, e.g. using boom and zoom, a tactic which goes back to WWII and how we dealt with planes like the Zero.

19 Hmmm, as for the F-35, the analogous TFX '60s development program is worth examining, especially in how it resulted in the much less modern F-4 Phantom being used for so long.

Ah, I forgot that the early models of the Phantom had an adverse yaw issue, where turning at high speed required non-standard, non-"intuitive" use of the controls.  That was deadly when combined with inadequately trained (Air Force replacement) pilots and air combat, and was fixed in late series versions of the Air Force F-4E model, and the Navy F-4J.  As I recall these weren't available for Rolling Thunder.

Back to the TFX/F-35: essentially the same thing, a multi-mission jack of all trades and master of none devised in quasi-peacetime, with the F-35 trading off air superiority for S/VTOL.  Similarly, the '50s M14 Rifle was supposed to replace the M3 "Grease Gun" submachine gun, the M1 Carbine, the M1 (battle) Rifle, and the BAR light machine gun, and failed in every role but the battle rifle, and for that it was bad compared to contemporary alternatives, and many argue the M1 Rifle.  The complete failure of the TFX in all of its roles but one, as the FB-111, meant the Air Force and the Navy had to keep using the previous generation F-4 much longer than they should have, until replaced by the F-14/F-15 and F-16/F-18.  So, yeah, I'm sure it was subpar when long in the tooth, although the Mig-21 was a contemporaneous plane.

The best treatment of the TFX debacle I've come across is in The Strategy of Technology by Possny, Pournelle and Kane, now available as shareware.

20

Oh yes, I agree about the F-4's worth versus what the good professor is arguing.  And even some of the technical problems took a long time to fix because of bureaucracy more than anything else - the smoking problem from the F-4's engines was something the USAF both knew about, and also knew how to fix, years before they actually did so.

It also was not only the US that had technical problems with the F-4 - the 'Speyed' version used by the British would have been a very nice improvement over the vanilla F-4s they started as.  The problems and issues the British faced, however, meant that while ultimately the Speys were a capable aircraft, they never meant any of the specifications they were suppose to.

It is also funny that one of the professor's points regarding the MiG-21 is that the Indians have found it to be a reliable and safe aircraft - right before the Indians suffered so many fatal accidents in type, that they grounded their fleet.

I am no admirer of the F-35.  But it is clear a lot of the opposition is based on nonsense and emotion (Especially coming from the Fighter Mafia gang.) and less on facts.  The key fact being that since O-bummer canceled the F-22, the US does not have a choice if it does not want to buy the Eurofighter.

Second about Marshall L. Michel - if you ever get a copy of his The Eleven Days of Christmas, it is well worth reading.  One of the guys he interviewed for the book was a regular of UseNet at the time I was reading it.  RIP Ed Rasimus.

21 cxt217: Yeah, The Eleven Days of Christmas: America's Last Vietnam Battle (about Linebacker II) is on my list, even tried to buy a used copy but the Amazon Merchant flaked out.  Not in too much of a hurry since its such a depressing story, and also the first specific battle in the Vietnam war that I remember from when it happened.  It was very obvious from the losses how badly the first missions were directed (we now know from Omaha: the wrong models of the B-52, with insane flight tracks, and no doubt a lot more).

Hmmm, prior to some quality time on the net just now, the most I knew about U.K. Phantoms was that Prince Charles flew them, evidently not operationally due at least in part to how totally screwed up U.K. military procurement was during the relative period, where somewhat like in the US they adopted the F-4 (with of course major $$$ changes) due to cancellations of what they originally planned on.  And very few flew on the Ark Royal, which was the only carrier modified to fly them.

The F-35 ... I'm getting too old to really want to follow such anymore.  On general principles (e.g. TFX) and the raw specs (e.g. they will at best carry very very few cannon rounds; granted, compared to the 20 mm Vulcan they're larger at 25 mm and fired at half the rate, but...) it looks iffy, but you are of course right that much of the whining is by the usual suspects, many of whom I'll note are always willing to trash the plane currently in production in favor of the next one, in this case canceling the F-22 ludicrously early in favor of the F-35.

I'd be a bit surprised if it works out well, and not at all surprised if we don't end up buying a bunch of Super Hornets, assuming production doesn't get shut down before that decision might be made.

22 One of the saddest impressions from the F-35 treatment in the MSM&SM for me is the unholy union between the old retirees and armchair experts pushing for the endless extensions of A-10. It's hideous. The worthless Internet people are the masses of it, sharing all the junk on the Facebook, but the oldtimers give it credibility who suffered a danger, survived, and think that everyone serving now and in the future ought to suffer too, or else it's unfair.

The funniest story of F-35 that I made not about was the landing hook of the C version. When it failed initial trials, all the mighty priests of Internet aerospace priesthood rushed to explain how the whole design was fatally flawed and can never, never, never be made to work. You see, the boom is too short and attaches at an angle not seen in previous designs etc. etc. Then in 3 months Lockheed turned the design around by reprofiling the hook's claw a little bit and replacing the hydraulic damper. The problem has disappeared and the haters slinked away, only to return with another fatal flaw (like the fuel leaks -- the "can't dogfight" meme was still a year ahead). It was hi-la-ri-ous.

23

Yes, one of the more predictable things was how the critics would call any problems with a developmental system like the F-35 to render it complete and total failure for all time, no matter what the version.  So when problems appeared for the USMC version, it immediately rendered both the USAF and USN versions 'total failures' as well, despite both of those proceeding to schedule.

Keep in the mind that the Fighter Mafia critics who cite how inferior the F-35 is to the F-16, would be horrified with the current version of the F-16 compared to what it was originally proposed as (Hint: The original proposal did NOT have a radar.).  We also heard the same thing from the same people against the F-22.

Getting back to Gate, the JSDF was actually being nice in the lead-up to the Second Battle of Arnus Hill.  It would have been entirely within their capabilities to bombard the allied armies' line of march with proximity fused airburst HE rounds (Destroying the allied armies before they even got to camp.) or hit the camp with a barrage,.  Or if you want to be REALLY evil, bring in a few M270 MLRS units...

24

My objection to the F-22 is the same as my objection to the Seawolf: I don't care how good it is; it's too damned expensive. Not even the United States can afford to spend that much on individual weapons. Sometimes you have to make compromises with reality.

The projected cost for 12 Seawolfs was going to be $33.6 billion, but those programs always overrun. So after 3 had been built, Congress told the Navy to go design something less expensive, and the Navy came up with the Virginias, which cost $1.8 billion each instead of $2.8 billion.

That's still astounding but probably the best deal we're going to get, so I'm glad they made the switch. The Virginias are good boats and I'm sure we won't regret it.

Likewise, the F-22 program was cancelled after 195 airframes because the damned things cost $150 million each. An F-16 costs about $15 million. Which would you rather have, 10 F-22's or 100 F-16's? It simply wasn't going to be possible to buy an adequate number of F-22's at that kind of price (especially with the inevitable cost overruns), so Congress said, "Do it again. Do it cheaper."

The main problems with the F-35 program has been the insistence that a single design be used by all the services (and that's Congress's blame), combined with the Air Force's insane infatuation with "stealth". There are times when stealth is valuable, even times when it's essential, but most of the time it's just dead weight. A "stealthy" airframe has to make all kinds of concessions which damage its performance in other ways.

For instance, you have to stow all missiles and bombs inside a closed bomb bay. You can't hang them from the wings. That means you can't carry very many.

And the F-35 is cheaper than the F-22 but not all that damned much: the projected cost is $85 million.

The problem here is one that's been identified long since: when the unit cost is stratospheric there's a tendency to invest in survivability, which increases the cost and means you can't acquire as many, so you become even more concerned with survivability. It's a vicious spiral which leads to drastic increases in cost and drastic reductions in numbers.

As Uncle Joe Stalin is reputed to have said, "Quantity has a quality all its own." Sometimes the important thing is to have lots of airframes in the air -- and you can only do that if you own lots of airframes.

With this kind of prices, we won't. And someday that's going to come back and bite us.

The F-16 is a very fine jet, even by modern standards, and it's still in production. In addition to all this other stuff we're buying, why aren't we acquiring more of them as well? The cost of acquiring 30 F-16's per year for the next few years is in the noise compared to the total Air Force budget.

Why not? Because it isn't stealthy and the Air Force refuses to acquire anything that isn't stealthy, that's why. Bah.

25

Likewise, the F-22 program was cancelled after 195 airframes because the damned things cost $150 million each. An F-16 costs about $15 million.

The F-16 is a very fine jet, even by modern standards, and it's still in production. In addition to all this other stuff we're buying, why aren't we acquiring more of them as well? The cost of acquiring 30 F-16's per year for the next few years is in the noise compared to the total Air Force budget.

It may be a fine jet, but the basic design is arguably approaching obsolescence and while there are things you do to improve the basic designs and keep it competitive (For example, just look at some of the redesign concepts that the F-15 had, when Boeing was shopping it to the South Koreans.), at some point you have to go do a new design, otherwise you will be outmatched.  That is especially true of the likely opposition is introducing better aircraft than the F-16 - which given the European proclivity to flog the Eurofighter to anyone with cash, is likely.  The F-16 does have some potential to grow and improve more, but not a lot, not without redesigning the thing until you get a completely different plane with the same name.

That is not say that the F-22 was not overly expensive, but that was not the main reason why Rumsfeld disliked it, nor why Obama killed it, nor exclusively the fault of the program itself (The whole US military procurement system is broken, but that is a whole different can of worms.).  The problem with killing the F-22 is that that left the F-35 as the only game in town, unless we buy the Eurofighter - which I actually would not have a problem with that - to compete with the latest generation fighters.

Given what the likely oppositions will be flying within the immediate future, I would not want to be a pilot in a F-16 facing them unless I had no choice.

26 Unfortunately, you can't buy a F-16 for $15M anymore, even one with no radar, AIM-9+dumb bombs only.  With the timeframes that we're dealing with these days, inflation becomes a *major* headache when trying to compare platforms.  Add in modern technology, and UAE just bought 80 F-16s for $80M apiece (counting some level of spare parts that isn't split out from the base price).

And, Pierre Sprey aside, a complete inability to carry smart bombs today is pretty much a waste of logistics and training money (which is where the worst costs are--the F-35A is below $100M flyaway now, which equates to <$300B for the entire fleet... against an estimated $1.5T "best guess" for total costs over 50 years of service, which is a number that critics love to mistake for just the procurement price).

I was a big opponent of the F-35 in the early days, because of all of the obvious mismanagement and messed-up procurement process (something we've seen with the scout helicopter fiasco, FCS, LCS, DDG-1000, EFV, Netfires, etc.).  But, at this point, that disaster is all sunk costs that we can't get back, and going ahead, buying a couple thousand F-35s, with their currently-expected price and performance (the hardest, slowest part is actually the sensor fusion software, since it didn't have years of existing R&D like the stealth or engine to draw from), is not just the best choice, but really the only one that makes sense.

I wish we had bought twice as many F-22s, but at this point, we're better off waiting for the next-gen design than trying to re-open the line.  I do get a chuckle out of the thought of F-22s escorting F-15 *bombers* to target...

cxt, back to your MLRS comment--do you know if the JGSDF still uses M-26 (cluster) rockets, or if they've converted them over to unitary warheads as a result of all the cluster bomb brouhaha?  I couldn't find anything on the subject.  I know that we caved on the issue, in part because GPS guidance made the unitary warhead useful given what we needed after 2003.

27

Given what the likely oppositions will be flying within the immediate future, I would not want to be a pilot in a F-16 facing them unless I had no choice.

That's exactly the point. The likely opposition isn't going to be flying anything at all. Or at least many of the likely oppositions.

You're fighting the last war! We shouldn't be putting all our preparation into fighting Russia and China. We should be putting a lot of our preparation into fighting ISIS and Somalia. That's why the Air Force's obsession with stealth is so misguided: a lot of the time it simply isn't needed.

Sometimes it is, and some of your aircraft need to be stealthy. But a lot of the time it isn't, and making everything stealthy just makes your airforce too small and too expensive.

28

You're fighting the last war! We shouldn't be putting all our preparation into fighting Russia and China. We should be putting a lot of our preparation into fighting ISIS and Somalia. That's why the Air Force's obsession with stealth is so misguided: a lot of the time it simply isn't needed.

Given the PRC's increasing aggressiveness, this is not a 'last' war, it is 'quite possible' war, especially for an Air Force and Navy.  Given the time frame we are talking about, concentrating solely on ISIS and the like is not a good idea for those two services, and especially so if you crippling other parts of the service to do so (ASW, anyone?).

In addition, good radar and air defense systems are readily available for anyone with the cash.  Are we going to assume that even ISIS or Shahaab or the Taliban are just going to stay guerilla armies forever?  At some point, even ISIS will wise up and realize the best way to protect themselves against air strikes is a good air defense system.  Given how Turkey is acting, they can get it when they decide too.

Air superiority and air supremacy are not mere Cold War concept that disappeared with the Soviet Union.  And while the benefits of stealth can be overstated, neither are insubstantial.

29 I didn't say we should solely concentrate on ISIS et. al. What I'm saying is that we shouldn't solely concentrate on the Chinese.

30

What I'm saying is that we shouldn't solely concentrate on the Chinese.

Which was not my point either.  Rather (And this is one thing I dislike Ace of Spades, whenever they mention it.), we do not have the ability to forego air superiority/air supremacy and the force of capable fighters to maintain it, simply because one enemy that we are fighting or oppose to will or can not dispute it.  The expeditionary nature of the post-Cold War conflicts means that instead of One Big Leviathan and its' satellites, our enemies will run the gamut of capabilities, from guerilla fighters in the bush, to full size militaries with capable air forces of their own equipped with the latest fighters.  Trying to obtain the latest gen fighter is not a waste of resources, it is dealing with how warfare and the threat of warfare is right now.  And that is assuming things remain static - which is unlikely, to say the least.

Likewise, some of the potential enemies will not require the benefits of stealth, while others will.  That too, will not remain static.  What will remain static is that the American way of war will depend heavily on air superiority as part of the formula, if for no other reason than to keep the opposition away from our shores.

31 If you're going for quantity as quality, go all the way. Why put a person in the thing in the first place? For the cost of one super-expensive air superiority fighter, how many drones can you put up? You wouldn't have to have each one of them as a full-capability platform. A couple radar platforms, a few dumb bomb-luggers, a couple target designation platforms, some with nothing but ECM, a couple lugging anti-radiation homers for those unfortunate bastards who light up their SAM radar, and a few lugging an AMRAAM or equivalent.

Aerial combat is not mostly about dogfighting these days, it's about putting a missile up the other guy's pipe. A distributed drone "cloud" has a lot of advantages in such a fight, most importantly resilience; you can't kill the drone cloud with one missile, assuming you've got redundant command/control capability. One missile into a drone cloud only degrades its capabilities slightly (and costs bloody less to replace too). And even if things get into close quarters, a cloud can scatter and come around; the other guy has to point his butt SOMEWHERE, meaning one or another drone can run right up his six.

Of course, the real fun happens when you get drone cloud versus drone cloud - you'd need an entirely different sort of anti-air platform to handle that kind of threat. And thus the race would begin again, but at least it would be plenty favorable to us.

That said, the big problem with that approach is political; the Air Force can't buy in to that and still insist that everything that flies needs an officer at the controls...

32

UAVs have some key applications where they can currently replace human crews, like maritime patrol and airborne ASW, but I just do not see them replacing manned aircraft in all applications, especially air combat.  The critical factor being remotely controlled, which requires nearly totally reliable and secured communications and control all the time.  Even assuming that can be done (Which I doubt.), there is the delay factor in time sensitive situations - you might not be dogfighting, but more often then not, you will not be conducting BVR air combats.  I rather have a pilot at the controls who can react immediately, rather than someone on ground station.

Also, you do not need to be a full capability platform before the UAV starts getting into the size and weight and expense of a manned aircraft.  If you need an UAV to go both fast and have long legs AND carried a decent weapons load and fire control and radar too (Because unlike Aegis, we are not at the point of the one fighter shooting at a target being designated by another.) - you are at the point where you almost completely replicated a manned aircraft.  Not much savings in cost there, as oppose to putting an UAV as your replacement for a maritime patrol aircraft...

33 But they do have a pretty strong motive for going to UAV fighter craft; The present performance of fighter craft is limited by the acceleration the pilot can survive, even with a G suit. An unmanned fighter could perform much more extreme maneuvers.
Unmanned doesn't necessarily mean remotely piloted. If a computer can drive a car on a busy road, it can probably fly a fighter.

34 Brett Bellmore: True, but that human computer still might do better unless you make the UAV autonomous in dog fighting.

But if you find yourself in a dog fight, you and the whole system behind you has already failed twice over, first in not attacking from afar with long range missiles, second in not using boom and zoom tactics to quickly engage the target and then leave, at least for the moment.  This is not to say that you shouldn't be good in dog fights, "failures" of this sort will happen, just that they're not the end all and be all of ACM.

And then there's the issue that we've fielded very few pure air superiority fighters; maybe lots of differently specialized UAVs is an option, but even if we're willing to make the bombing process autonomous, like a whole bunch of our missiles, it's hard to imagine our not keeping a man in the loop of target selection.

35 Eh, new doctrine is tough. It's hard to tell what the best method might be. Maybe it's a single manned vehicle and an entourage. Maybe it's a few manned vehicles and a small army of drones. Maybe it's a bunch of drones operating semi-independently. But it probably isn't a small number of manned vehicles, each one worth the GDP of a small African nation, where every one lost in training accidents or mechanical failures is a disaster on the scale of the Enron bankruptcy.

It's also probably worth noting that the only difference between "autonomous drone with a bomb" and "Tomahawk cruise missile", when it comes to "human decision-making in the loop", is that the drone will come back and land afterward. That Rubicon is in our rear-view mirror...