Jensy wrote:I've been curious about this too. It's not like the 80s when 'the front' was slap bang in the middle of Germany. How long do they honestly think a fleet of 30 Super Hornets is going to give them any kind of effective strike capability? I'd even have questions over whether the F-35 could safely deliver a nuclear gravity bomb to anywhere 300 miles near an S400 battery.
It also means that those 30 F/A-18E/F (probably mostly F's) will be unavailable for other taskings. They'll purely be on the nuclear mission and nothing else. When you've only got 30 nuclear capable aircraft thats all you can use them for. They have to be preserved. Its a dreadful use of resources.
S400 doesn't really have a 300 or 400 mile range. The missiles for that have yet to arrive. And if you're flying a NoE profile the radar is restricted by terrain features. And thats about 30 miles...
SW1 wrote:Or the opposite. In the future they may want the growler capability on the same aircraft that drops the bomb.
Which makes the decision to buy EA-18G even more odd. They're essentially losing a lot of work in their own, well respected, EW industry by buying from the US. You'd have thought they'd want that work in Germany in preparation for FCAS.
Lord Jim wrote:As for the ECM/SEAD role, again accept the Eurofighter proposal but put major cost and timescale constraints on them as the precondition. The EW upgrade in the pipeline for the Typhoons would be a good place to start, with effort concentrating on offensive EW capabilities. You never know they could look at the SPEAR-EW as part of the package.
The Typhoon EW work is for the self protection system. Not a full offensive jamming capability. That was in the proposed Typhoon ECR version from Airbus which was a different thing entirely. Spear-EW was in that proposal from Airbus, there were 6 hung on the wings of the image they released.
abc123 wrote:About nuclear B61 toss-bombing, I think that's at least 40 yeas obsolete. If Germany want's some somewhat effective option, then ASMP is a must.
The B-61/12 includes GPS and INS guidance for accuracy, similar to a JDAM. But why on earth it also doesn't include at the least a gliding wing kit to extend range or a JDAM-ER style wing kit and turbine to get it past 120km range is a real mystery. Given how common those developments are on US precision weapons its a strange omission. The reason probably lies within one of the nuclear treaties.
seaspear wrote:Is there a reason that a seads type version of the Eurofighter has not been developed
Money and lack of demand. Both Italy and Germany have the ECR Tornado and both were planning to retain until 2025 or in Germany's case, 2035. The ECR Tornado's were the youngest airframes around. The UK has never gone down the jamming route, primarily due to doctrine and cash. Instead we used low level flight and ALARM to open a corridor (and we also tacitly depended on US support).
Jensy wrote:Certainly the Rafale isn't compatible with the majority of weapons in use by Germany (I don't believe the Luftwaffe has introduced Meteor to service yet).
Don't think they share any air weapons at all, with the exception of Meteor (and possibly a Paveway variant that the French use in limited numbers). Meteor has only recently gone operational with the Luftwaffe.
seaspear wrote:This is an old article discussing developments of building Eurofighter with SEADS capabilities it may have been posted before but I had not seen this configuration of the fighter with those antenna at the front I was wondering if this is the type of Eurofighter Germany could build or has this been cancelled in favour of the S/H Growler
https://www.defenseworld.net/news/25838 ... qfwregzaUk
The best write up of the proposed ECR Typhoon is below:
https://www.edrmagazine.eu/the-eurofigh ... ck-concept
The key design choices to note are:
- 2 seater is believed necessary for ECR mission
- This means reduced fuel load...it won't have enough fuel to escort other Typhoon to range...conformal tank effort has failed so...
- Need a centreline tank...Which means no space for targeting pod...so
- Put the targeting pod on the left-front Meteor/Amraam station. A sensible move, no-one really needs 4 Meteor...RAF could benefit from that...but still need more fuel...so
- Carry 2 more wing tanks....but...the existing 2 'wet' wing pylons are required for the 2 jamming pods for clearance and weight issues...so
- Re-engineer the wing so that the innermost wing pylons are now 'wet'..now hang two new tanks on it.
- Now undertake a large scale trials programme for all of these changes..
Thats a lot of work...it would be so much easier if the conformals had worked...But add in AMK, Captor-E radar 2, updated defensive EW suite, Britecloud, towed decoy, AARGM / ER, Spear and Spear-EW with IRIS-T and Meteor (which could also have a SEAD role) and it would be a very, very impressive capability. More than equal to the E/A-18G but at quite a cost.
If I'm honest its not all bad news with the additional Typhoon production run (which is good for the UK as well). But I can't help feeling that its another opportunity lost. AMK, up-rated engines, thrust vectoring (more for reduced fuel consumption than manoeuvrability), CAPTOR-E, updated EW suite, updated PIRATE, revised pylons and a renewed effort to get conformals onboard would leave Typhoon at or near the top for years to come. And most of these things have been developed, are being worked on or are easily possible with a comparatively small outlay of funds and some political will from the users.