Home page Army |
The Pentagon has rolled out its “stealth” aircraft, tasked with breaching enemy anti-air defenses on day one of a potential war.
Axar.az reports citing Sputnik that, the US military recently conducted drills in the Pacific Ocean, rolling out "stealth" aircraft including the discontinued F-22s, the troubled F-35s and even the B-2 Spirit strategic bombers built near the end of the Cold War, Business Insider reported Friday.
The drills were conducted with the assistance of the USS Wasp, a cross between an aircraft carrier and an amphibious assault vessel.
Interestingly, the F-35s participated with their weapons stored externally. This method increases the jet's payload, as compared to internal storage, but also significantly increases plane's radar visibility. According to the plane's maker, Lockheed Martin, the external payload model switches the airplane into "beast mode," which is expected to be utilized on day three of a war, after enemy anti-air defenses have been suppressed.
The F-22 Raptors, however, reportedly trained for day one operations, which might indicate the F-35's stealth capabilities have turned out to be not so perfect as hoped.
The B-2s are capable of carrying gravity nuclear bombs, as well as "massive ordnance penetrators," or GBU-57s, believed to be the largest non-nuclear bomb in the US arsenal (they are actually almost 1.5 times heavier than the infamous "Mother of All Bombs," the GBU-43/B).
The F-22s and the B-2s are viewed as "door kickers," aircraft tasked with breaching enemy defences on the first day of a war, paving the way for the less stealthy fighters, Insider writes.
Recently, China has come up with a technological solution intended to nullify US airplanes' low visibility advantage by deploying a networked system of radars, capable of creating composite radar pictures from signals received by many stations at the same time, Insider reports.
The dispute over the South China Sea sparked after Beijing claimed most of the waters for itself; Chinese claims are contested by several regional countries, and the US has since repeatedly interfered in the dispute, saying it's conducting "freedom of navigation" operations in the waters.
Date
2019.02.16 / 10:39
|
Author
Axar.az
|