Forum: Modern Military Aircraft

IT STARTED as one of the dozens of military exercises the Pentagon conducts with friendly governments each year - operations that are as much about bilateral diplomacy as about testing military capabilities.

However, the exercise carried out in February, involving mock combat between the United States and Indian air forces over the skies of Madhya Pradesh in central India, has taken on a life of its own. The reason? The US lost.

Not only did the US aircraft lose, but they lost repeatedly. According to one member of Congress briefed on the exercise, the US Air Force's top fighter, the F-15 Eagle, was defeated more than 90 per cent of the time in simulated dogfights with Indian pilots.

As a result, reports on the exercise have not only reached the highest levels of the Pentagon and Capitol Hill but have travelled around the world to military procurement agencies in Singapore and South Korea. As details gradually leaked out, the exercise has become one of the prime topics of gossip at global air shows and arms fairs.

It has also opened a rare window into the overlapping loyalties and increasingly cut-throat competition that mark military procurement in an age of shrinking defence budgets.

The exercise, known as Cope India, was conceived almost two years ago as part of thawing relations between New Delhi and Washington. Some Pentagon officials saw improved diplomatic ties with democratic India as a way to balance the growing strength of communist China. It was the first combat training exercise between the two air forces in more than 40 years.

However, Pentagon planners also had an important military goal: US air force pilots had never gone up against the Su-30 Flanker, the latest Russian-built fighter designed by Sukhoi, which India began to acquire in 1997.

UNDERLYING MESSAGE

MANY Cope India details remain classified. Accounts conflict: Some say the F-15s lacked the US Air Force's most sophisticated radar, others that the Indians used special helmet-mounted targeting systems unavailable to US pilots, and yet others that the Americans were outnumbered at least two to one.

Whatever the reasons, the US Air Force might normally be expected to keep such a defeat under wraps. But in recent weeks, senior officers have begun leaking information about the exercise, freely admitting their technical inferiority. 'We may not be as far ahead of the rest of the world as we once thought we were,' said General Hal Hornburg, head of the US Air Combat Command.

The reason for the sudden candour has little to do with the F-15, and much more to do with another high-performance aircraft: the US$72 billion (S$125 billion) F/A-22 Raptor, a new stealthy combat jet the US Air Force is desperate to save from congressional and Pentagon budget cutters.

The craft has come under fire from those who say the US no longer needs a fighter originally designed to fight the next generation of Soviet MiGs. So senior officers have decided the risks of revealing the inadequacies of the F-15 are outweighed by the opportunity to convince the government to keep buying the higher-priced fighter.

'Something like Cope India, when we find some of our advantages aren't as great as we thought they might be, leads me to remind people we need to modernise our air-to-air capability,' said Gen Hornburg.

Lockheed Martin, the prime contractor on the F/A-22 Raptor, has been more than happy to play along. In recent briefings, senior executives have made thinly veiled references to Cope India.

'The bottom line is, the US no longer has a technological combat advantage, based on aircraft versus aircraft,' said Mr Ralph Heath, the Lockheed executive overseeing the F/A-22 Raptor.

It would seem only natural that the F/A-22 Raptor's largest sub-contractor, Boeing, would play along too - except for one problem: Boeing makes the F-15. The company recently won a competition to produce F-15s for South Korea and is engaged in a heated contest to build 20 for the Republic of Singapore Air Force.

'We were concerned,' said Mr George Muellner, head of Boeing's air force business.

In an effort to save the F-15 from the Pentagon's self-inflicted wounds, General John Jumper, the air force chief of staff, recently briefed Singapore officials on the Indian exercise.

Caught in between is Sukhoi itself, which does not seem to know what to make of the mixed American messages.

'We feel part of a game,' protested Mr Alexander Klementiev, Sukhoi's deputy director-general. 'But we are not participants in that game.'

The F-15Cs were the ones deployed right?
What different radar are they talking about?
But the thing is that the Americans from the way I see it didn't take this exercise too seriously enough, they thought that the Eagle would anything anytime including defeating a Su-30 Flanker, so even though it's the first time, but bringing your nose up will only lead to your downfall.
But that's just my opinion!