The War Zone
After shooting down so many Iranian drones headed toward Israel that their F-15E Strike Eagle ran out of air-to-air missiles, the jet’s crew decided they would go after one more. Ordered to use any weapon available, pilot Maj. Benjamin “Irish” Coffey and weapons systems officer (WSO) Capt. Lacie “Sonic” Hester dropped altitude and speed to approach the low and slow-flying drone. Though Coffey and Hester could barely see it, they unleashed a volley from the Strike Eagle’s 20mm Gatling Gun, which can fire upwards of 6,000 rounds per minute.
Despite the rapid rate of fire, the Gatling gun missed the drone, Coffey told CNN. More
Now Do The Math
Air-to-Air Missiles carried by an F-15 in the field are most likely AIM 12O Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile, estimated cost per missile $1.09 million.
Iran, on the other hand is proudly becoming a premier drone producer in the Middle East if not the world with a wide variety to choose from. Let’s say they used their top-of-the-line Sheded-129 at an estimated cost of $375,000 for this particular situation.
I’m sure you see where I’m going with this. We’re shooting $1.09 million missiles to take down drones worth $375,000 or less. That’s a loss of roughly $715,000 per exchange. Only the Pentagon would see this as a “win.”
Heck, these two probably fired off more rounds of 20mm at that drone than the drone was worth in the first place. I’m not concern about the inability to gun kill a slow flying Iranian drone headed for Israel, I’m more concern about our ability to afford to destroy these relatively low-cost killers on a regular basis. more
Maybe the first question should be why are they flying F15s? Why aren’t they flying our state of the art 4th gen F35s with their new trick firing solution software? Because they were all grounded due to an engine problem. Again. The Air force just ordered 35 new F15s because they can’t count on F35s. It cost $87k an hour to keep an F35 in the air. It costs $29K an hour for an F15E. But our biggest problem with our military right now is that the industrial material complex has basically been put on hold for the last 4 years as far as development or improvement on any weapons system. Why? because they’re sending all the money to some guy that like to play the piano with his organ. If shit were to go sideways right now we’d be in a really bad spot.
They need to build some short range interceptor drones to take out the long range drones.
industrial military complex
Take out the source.
Try a Cessna with a detachable net…
A-10 Warthog could probably take them out.
Piper Cub and a 12ga shotgun. Cost: about $35 per drone kill.
Maybe I am missing something, but some obvious questions come to mind;
why are American pilots flying American aircraft using American missiles and american-made gatlin gun ammo flying over Israel? Don’t the IDF have their own pilots flying their own jets and using their own missiles? Why does it fall on the American taxpayer to fit the bill for protecting a foreign country? and what happens if, God forbid, one of our pilots are shut down and killed, or captured, or a fired munition goes astray and kills a civilian?
I understand the need for cooperation with our allies in trading intelligence and providing military hardware for a fee but I don’t understand why we are defending Israel when they are perfectly capable of defending themselves.
Do the “wing tip” as the RAF did to V-1s.
Also, they were probably AIM 9X not AMRAAMS. They’re still $300K a pop. Either way Raytheon is very happy.
All those rocket propelled things that go boom do have a shelf life. If you don’t use them after a specified period of time they get shipped back to the manufacturer to be gone through and then returned. I’m sure Israel is most grateful. Now can you hurry up with that foreign aid check please.
If I had to guess, the Pentagon would probably justify the F-15 flying CAP for Iranian drones by declaring they’re actually protecting OUR bases in the region, not Israel. That Israel benefits from the protection.
@Bad Brad, thanks for the cost of aircraft operations, I was wondering how much more it’s costing to put up aerial protection from cheap Iranian drones.
I was thinking we need fly inexpensive aircraft with radar pointing the ground to see the low and slow flying drones then have those aircraft linked real time to a counter drone system that downloads intercept data into our low-cost response drones to go out and knock down the Iranian intruders. Avoid flying expensive fighter aircraft for a mission they were never designed for and try to beat the Iranians at the financial war of robotic warfare.
Otherwise we’re going to exhaust our resources over the long run the more of these missions launch.
Dr. Tar
Most peeps don’t understand the 4th gen fighter concept. You have your F22s that fly high cover. Think of it as the “server”. Then you have a shit load of F35s that are the little individual “work stations”. All the data they compile is accumulated or sent to the F22. The F22 in turn send the real time data to a super computer either on an AWACS or transmitted through one. So you end up with a complete 3 dimensional representation of the dog fight, battle field, etc. You can see where they were headed with this. You can see where they were headed with this. An autonomous aerial battle field. Expensive? Yes but piece through we’ll kill yo ass. But like I say the powers to be have not funded any continuing innovation for four years.
oops, honestly I don’t stutter. Multi tasking.
I read that last week the US test launched a “hypersonic nuclear missile, capable of going 15,000 mph”. Turns out it was a 1970s-era Minuteman III. Of course they are going 15,000 mph…in space.
The MIC is shining us on. We are running on depleted stocks of obsolete gear, with no meaningful replenishment of even that junk in sight. That missile test was probably just to see if the antique rocket would still work.
Meanwhile, the Houthis are slinging some serious stuff which pretty much drove our Navy out of harm’s way. And Iran is launching swarms of drones to soak up all the air-to air we can fire, while the Iron Dome is turned into a colander by Iran’s real missiles. Don’t believe the swagger and the stiff upper lip of Israel. They can be hammered at will by Iran, and they know it. Even with the Iron Dome, David’s Sling, THAAD, Patriot, whatever. We are living in the past, and we’ll be there for a long time.
What would happen if they started a war and nobody showed up??
A better evaluation might consider calculating the cost of NOT shooting them down. But I like the Piper Cub and a 12-gauge method.
Dust off the old A1 Skyraiders.
That’s precisely why the Air Force needs to examine its purpose. Part of the AF’s mission should be close air support, but the high command believes that’s beneath them. But not every combat task needs to be the ultimate in technology. Apply technology to fit the task, not the other way ’round.
Not enough missiles, eh? Check out the new F-15s Portland and Fresno are getting. Israel is getting them too.
Billy TwoKnives
Damn Injuns. LOL. I’m no military strategist. I just build the shit they tell me and listen to them jibber jabber. But that makes damn good sense to me brother.
Thirdtwin
“I read that last week the US test launched a “hypersonic nuclear missile, capable of going 15,000 mph”. Turns out it was a 1970s-era Minuteman III.”
We were still doing work for the primes when the Hypersonic craze hit. And I can’t remember under what admin this happened. But they contracted the big three military primes to offer their opinions on the Hypersoncic missile craze. All three, Raytheon, Lockheed, Boing (as I now call them) offered the same opinion. Waste of money. Low, slow, and undetectable is still the winner. Part of their reasoning was that we were a short while away from being able to shoot these things down. However, I’m sure they didn’t anticipate the total bull shit of the last four years. You can find those opinions if you have a couple hours to waste on the internet.
I’m with Irate Nate on this one.
The solution to shooting down inexpensive drones and other such things is not hardware… It’s lasers. At a 10-20 dollar a shot cost it’s a massively cheaper alternative. And the DoD along with DARPA need to be focused on perfecting these…focused like a laser.
And Billy Two Knives.
Dan, the man.
I know just enough about this to get me in trouble. Correct me when I run astray. The problem with lasers has always been the weight of the power supply. Batteries. We actually have Laser Defensive Measures installed on most aircraft carriers. Is this viable for land based missile defense. You bet your ass. Is it viable to install on fighter aircraft? They’d never get off the ground. But here’s what is important to know. That program has not taken a single step forward since brain dead Joe took office. And obviously Joe wasn’t calling the shots. Maybe Anthony Blinken. But bottom line is we’ve lost four years of development on that weapons system. We need to throw money at our military. In my opinion.
Imagine the light show if the MIC was able to deploy enough lasers to knock down all the drones Iran could send and they launched them at night.
high power microwaves can cripple and destroy drones.
Bad_Brad, we have gone around about this before, but I’m still of the opinion that “low & slow” is just MIC “hope & cope”. We’ve got nothing in the pipeline, so it’s easy to dismiss what the other guys are fielding, as long as we’re not parrying in a hot war. Except for the fact that, tangentially, we are, and we are getting our asses handed to us, in spite of what we hear—or don’t hear—in the media. The only reason it’s not a four-alarm fire here is that other guys are flinging our stuff in earnest.
I love Skyraiders and Warthogs as much as anybody, but their day has come and gone. Both planes were built to fight in conflicts where our air superiority was assumed, and that assumption is no longer valid, especially in current peer-to-peer conflicts. Even our current, cutting-edge aircraft and weaponry are struggling—very expensively—to keep up.
And it’s not just the stuff the war-fighting industry slowly and expensively cranks out; It’s the people in the Pentagon charged with deploying it strategically and tactically. None of them know what they’re doing, because they’re all educated in political science, or history, or international relations. None of them are engineering or physics majors who understand and develop their tactics and strategy based on the hard science which is necessary today. We are a generation behind on the mental side of war, as well as the material side.
I’m not trying to spread FUD here, only trying to warn people that we cannot afford to let the war-hawks drag our military into hot war right now. We are dangerously unprepared for it. Of course, one could say that we’ve always been behind the curve in any conflict we’ve entered, and we’ve always caught up and surpassed our enemies, but just for once, can we try to hold off until we’re better prepared, and not go off half-cocked?
The truth is out there about our weapons and tactics, and it is hopefully not as bad as I present it, but it’s probably not as good as you say. We have to believe that those who build our weapons and those who field them are close to the truth and acting on that knowledge.