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Bad ideas in war

Dogfighting. Not at the start, but since then... It's a waste of energy.

We all know how it started. Primitive aircraft bombing ground targets*, as god intended. Soon enough they start running into each other up there, and start taking pot shots at each other. Soon enough, specialist aircraft are developed, to sweep enemy air power from the sky. And soon enough the specialized fighters start fighting with each other. And thus the art and science of aerial dogfighting was born.

But this activity is ultimately a waste of energy. It's a distraction from the real work of air defense: Intercepting enemy bombers. It's all this rigamarole, burning ridiculous amounts of fuel to gain energy, and then trading that energy for position. Position against another plane that's just trying to do the same thing against you.

Every modern dogfight means your air force is distracting its resources from intercepting bombers. Every enemy fighter is a distraction of resources away from fielding more bombers instead. The acme of air combat is to leave the enemy fighters with nothing to do but waste fuel and occupy good pilots, while you go directly after their bombers. Ideally with missiles. Ideally from the ground. If from the air, ideally from beyond visual range.

The ideal air superiority aircraft is a stealthy loitering missile truck. The most hair-raising, g-pulling maneuvers it does are the supercruise sprint to its launch point, and its hard bank to starboard to line up its return to base after launching.

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*And doing reconnaissance, also as god intended, but I'm not going to bother typing that out every time. Please take it as given and move on.
 
Wudang said:
Isn't it better to destroy enemy fighters as far away from your bombers as possible?
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How do you get them in to the air and come to you?

Using bombers bring them up and the bombers destroy things. It's a double blow.
 
Or maybe it's still useful against stuff like cruise missiles, strafing ground targets, and whatnot.
 
HansMustermann said:
Or maybe it's still useful against stuff like cruise missiles, strafing ground targets, and whatnot.
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"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a cruise missile in possession of a good target, must be in need of a SAM."

- Jane Austen, probably

Dogfighting isn't useful against cruise missiles, which do not dogfight. Nor is it useful for strafing ground targets, which also do not dogfight.
 
Wudang said:
I'm sorry, but are you saying dogfighting is now obsolete? I think I misunderstood you so far maybe.
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I'm saying it's a bad idea in war. It consumes a lot of energy for lots of risk and little reward. You shouldn't optimize for it. You shouldn't develop doctrines that prioritize it. If you can deal with enemy fighters and get to their bombers without it, you should do that as much as possible.

I'm not saying dogfighters are truly obsolete, any more than interceptors were truly obsolete. I'm saying I think the pendulum is swinging back to interception in a big way, and anyone still married to the fighter paradigm is under the influence of a bad idea in war. The fighter mafia was on the wrong side of history.
 
theprestige said:
I'm saying it's a bad idea in war. It consumes a lot of energy for lots of risk and little reward. You shouldn't optimize for it. You shouldn't develop doctrines that prioritize it. If you can deal with enemy fighters and get to their bombers without it, you should do that as much as possible.

I'm not saying dogfighters are truly obsolete, any more than interceptors were truly obsolete. I'm saying I think the pendulum is swinging back to interception in a big way, and anyone still married to the fighter paradigm is under the influence of a bad idea in war. The fighter mafia was on the wrong side of history.
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It might be obsolete now, but it wasn't even into the 1970s in Vietnam, or 1982 in the South Atlantic, at least.

You might as well say that muskets are a bad idea in war. They would be now.
 
It was always a bad idea. Just for a long time it was the only practical idea. And even then...

I mean, look: It's two degrees removed from the actual strategic application of air power. You're not bombing. You're not intercepting bombers. You're having a slapfight with another plane that also isn't bombing or intercepting bombers. At great expense and risk. It's a much better idea to incur that expense and risk for bombing. If you must incur it for air combat, you should focus on intercepting bombers. If you simply must deal with enemy fighters, the best idea is to deal with them the same way you deal with bombers: Summarily, from a distance.

Your air defense plan shouldn't depend on winning dogfights, but on obviating them. Your strategic bombing plan shouldn't depend on fighting through enemy interceptors, but on giving them the slip.
 
theprestige said:
It was always a bad idea. Just for a long time it was the only practical idea. And even then...
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That was Hitler’s idea of air power. He would rather have bombers than fighters, and when he got jet engines, he wanted them for bombers. It didn’t work out well.

Could you explain why you think dogfighting was a bad idea during the Battle of Britain? The British certainly did not see dogfighting as a goal, and when possible, they only used some of their force to keep German fighters away while the rest attacked the bombers. The Germans wanted to eliminate the British bombers that could threaten their invasion fleet when they invaded Britain, but knew that it would not be possible without attacking the British fighters. (The Luftwaffe planners have often been accused of stupidity when they bombed Bomber Command airfields instead of Fighter Command airfields, but they really were thinking of their ultimate goal).

None of the combatants in the Battle of Britain saw dogfighting as a goal. Both tried to attack the the other party by surprise (called “jumping”), but dogfighting was often a result.

This is because the opposing planes were vey equal. In the Pacific theatre the Japanese built their planes for dogfighting, but were outmanoeuvred by American planes that had stronger engines that could climb their planes out of the dogfighting area after a diving attack.

So you could say that everybody except the Japanese thought that dogfighting was a bad idea. But for approximately equal capabilities dogfighting was a necessary skill in the age of machine guns and cannons.
 
theprestige said:
It was always a bad idea. Just for a long time it was the only practical idea. And even then...

I mean, look: It's two degrees removed from the actual strategic application of air power. You're not bombing. You're not intercepting bombers. You're having a slapfight with another plane that also isn't bombing or intercepting bombers. At great expense and risk. It's a much better idea to incur that expense and risk for bombing. If you must incur it for air combat, you should focus on intercepting bombers. If you simply must deal with enemy fighters, the best idea is to deal with them the same way you deal with bombers: Summarily, from a distance.

Your air defense plan shouldn't depend on winning dogfights, but on obviating them. Your strategic bombing plan shouldn't depend on fighting through enemy interceptors, but on giving them the slip.
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That is a silly analysis. For the reasons steenkh said.

Attempts to negate dangerous threats from one's enemy has been a feature of war for as long as there has been war, as have efforts to counter these attempts.
 
jimbob said:
That is a silly analysis. For the reasons steenkh said.

Attempts to negate dangerous threats from one's enemy has been a feature of war for as long as there has been war, as have efforts to counter these attempts.
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Interception is not a bad idea.

Fighters are not a dangerous threat from one's enemy; or rather, they are a significant dilution of the threat posed by enemy air power. The concentrated threat is from bombing. Bombing is what matters. Bombers are the most important thing to negate. If you have limited air defense resources, you should focus those resources on intercepting bombers, not getting into dogfights with interceptors-of-interceptors.

Before the advent of guided missiles, the only effective way to intercept anything was to send up a plane of your own, get into gun range, and intercept it. Of course these interceptors were going to clash with each other. And of course the effect of these interceptors could not be ignored.

But it takes a lot of fuel to generate momentum to convert into position in a dogfight. It's the least-optimal thing you could be doing with that fuel. If you have to, you have to. But the trend has always been towards more efficient air defense solutions, ones that don't pour additional resources into super-intense delta-V slapfights between your top pilots.

Bombers can be intercepted with missiles. Interceptors can be intercepted with missiles. Eschewing missiles and missile-carrying interceptors in favor of dogfighters is regressive and wasteful.

You want to stay as close as possible to what really matters, and as far as possible from secondary and tertiary efforts.
 
theprestige said:
It was always a bad idea. Just for a long time it was the only practical idea.
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So, it was a bad idea. But if it hadn't been done then the enemy bomber formations would have acted with impunity?

Er... Doesn't it make it a good idea? Or, at least, not a bad idea.


I don't think your position holds water.
 
3point14 said:
So, it was a bad idea. But if it hadn't been done then the enemy bomber formations would have acted with impunity?

Er... Doesn't it make it a good idea? Or, at least, not a bad idea.


I don't think your position holds water.
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I think the position of dogfighting for the sake of dogfighting doesn't hold water. BVR missile interception will always be the superior solution. Bombing and logistics are the real glory of an air force. Interception is a noble endeavor. Fighter combat is a sideshow. A necessary evil, sometimes, but always an evil in terms of optimal use of resources.
 
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theprestige said:
I think the position of dogfighting for the sake of dogfighting doesn't hold water.
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Absolutely.

BVR missile interception will always be the superior solution.
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Agreed. Unless such missiles aren't available. In which case you move to the next best thing which is interception by other aircraft, which leads to dogfighting.

Bombing and logistics are the real glory of an air force. Interception is a noble endeavor. Fighter combat is a sideshow. A necessary evil, sometimes, but always an evil in terms of optimal use of resources.
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Not at all. If it's the only way to do a necessary job then, by definition, it's not a bad idea.

You may as well say that BVR missiles are sub-optimal as you should use dragons instead.
 
To elaborate on that, I would argue that something is only a bad idea if at a reasonable analysis, it should be obviously worse than doing something else, or even doing nothing at all.

(Insert my usual rant about the difference between Chess and Go. In Chess you HAVE to do SOMETHING or concede the game, while in Go if all moves you could take would worsen your situation, you can, and should, just pass the turn and do nothing at all. Or as modern gaming vernacular goes, you shouldn't try to "win harder":p)

That's why I qualify such Rommel stunts as forgetting to tell his logistics companies to actually stockpile and bring fuel in his advance from Mersa Brega in Africa, or his forgetting to bring half his infantry along during his Ghost Division stunt in France, as bad ideas: because they're obviously worse than the obvious alternative. That's what makes them bad ideas.

Back to dogfighting during the Blitz.... so what would be the better alternative? I mean, there are alternatives. At that time, the UK had actually tried other approaches than dogfighting, such as the Boulton Paul Defiant turret fighter. Hell, in WW1 they even tried -- and actually were very successful in -- BOMBING the bombers from above. (Meaning the Zeppelins in that time.) And a few more. None really worked that well in WW2.

If there isn't a better alternative, then how is it a bad idea?
 
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3point14 said:
Absolutely.



Agreed. Unless such missiles aren't available. In which case you move to the next best thing which is interception by other aircraft, which leads to dogfighting.



Not at all. If it's the only way to do a necessary job then, by definition, it's not a bad idea.

You may as well say that BVR missiles are sub-optimal as you should use dragons instead.
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I guess what I'm saying is the bad idea is thinking of it as anything other than an evil, sometimes necessary, but never desirable over other options. Your enemy launches a fighter, invite it to dogfight a SAM.
 
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