Monday, November 05, 2018

Multi-Domain Air Defense

Could a single F-35 defend any location from air and missile attack on its own?

It strikes me that the ability of the F-35 to essentially fire ground-based weapons could extend to long-range air defense missiles, too.

An F-35 with this ability flying over a location in a combat air patrol could have the ability to fire every air defense missile on the ground or afloat within range and every long-range air-to-air missile carried on some missile "truck" flying deeper in friendly air space in addition to the F-35s own payload.

For a lot of the targets the F-35 wouldn't need to expose its own location firing organic missiles and keep them for self defense if spotted.

Really, this gives the Air Force a reason to have its own long-range air defense systems to provide a remote payload to the F-35A for the air superiority mission.

Now that's multi-domain synergy I can get behind.