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http://wisemanswisdoms.blogspot.com/2014/09/gastinlagg-gripen-e-vs-jsf.html
Mikael Grev
Former Gripen pilot in the Swedish Armed Forces
"I currently have no connection to Saab, FMV or FOI".
There are sometimes questions about how well the Gripen stands against, for example, the F-35 JSF or Su-35. Most people already know that the latter have significantly better specifications. Often there is no time to explain the difference between specification and combat effect. In a brief attempt to pinpoint the concepts a bit and why it is not so easy to compare aircraft. The text also aims to be a counterpoint to all articles comparing specifications on aircraft implying that the specifications is the final word about how good the aircraft is in combat.
Note that this is not a tribute to Gripen but is an overall explanation and, in addition, my interpretation of how air combat works on a techno-psychological level. At the same time, it is only a scratch on a very complex surface. Details have been left out because they are either secret or too complex to explain in a reasonable time.
Battle effect or specificity masturbation?
In recent decades, Sweden has been able to beat itself on the chest by having a indigenous and cost-effective fighter aircraft in Gripen. This is great for a country that has fewer residents than Los Angeles. So amazing that many JAS opponents can't take it. Sometimes the aversion resides in a superstition on economies of scale and COTS, sometimes it is completely ideological. The considerably more expensive foreign aircraft (eg Rafale, Eurofighter and F-35 JSF) are not always better, although they are more expensive to buy and considerably more expensive to own. The reason is we - humans - sit inside and control to the best of our ability. Still. But what is meant by better?
We Nordics have a different mentality than large parts of the rest of the world. I do not think I am putting my foot into it, if I say that a little softer priorities such as effect per dollar, synergy and the person at the center are key words for us. When many others build fighter planes, it is instead hard priorities such as maximized specifications, projected power and the hardware in the center that applies. There is nothing right and wrong here, just different pros and cons.
What complicates many discussions about what is best - efficiency or power - is that so many things are interconnected and the answers will be different depending on the circumstances.
Specification vs combat effect
Actually, it is quite simple to define these concepts, but it is difficult to conclude that there is a difference when the gut feels that they are intimately connected. High combat efficiency is desirable when the aircraft is to be used in hot war, while impressive specifications can be more advantageous for a restraining purpose as the combat power is unknown or difficult to measure. But a proven combat effect is in itself an impressive and important specification!
Measuring combat power is surprisingly difficult while the benefit of knowing it is high, almost invaluable. Knowing that "0.7 Gripen is used for each Su-27 in a typical BVR battle" - which is an example of a combat effect - would be very valuable information to be able to make responsible defense planning. Many simulations are done to measure this important combat effect. Few succeed. More on that below.
The man in the system
If you are not a combat pilot, the risk is that you have a wrong picture of what a pilot does in an air battle. Unfortunately, it is about as difficult to explain air combat as it is to explain cricket, you have to see it to understand. Again and again. It was a long time since the flight of the aircraft - the stick - was in the center. Since the weapons range went beyond visible range, the air battle for the pilot is mainly about processing information and balancing. It's like a mix of fast chess and ice hockey where failure means the ultimate consequence. There is always more information available than a human being can take, where perhaps the most important thing is to perceive and compensate for the information that you lack or that is incorrect.
It is irrelevant for the end of the battle, for example, how many sensors an aircraft has (a typical hard specification), how far they see or what generation they are. The only thing that matters is the quality of the information that is ultimately perceived by the pilot. Often good sensors - which are expensive - are a good basis for a good presentation, but it is not uncommon for the quality of the presentation to be the biggest factor. The same reasoning applies to varying degrees to other systems. Shooting far is good. Shooting right is better. Solving the task without having to shoot at all is best. Choosing the right path requires the right information.
Winnie the Pooh
The pilot has only 100 percent of his brain capacity available, and I can promise that every precentage is used in air combat. This is further complicated by the fact that different presentation systems (eg sensor data, flight mode and resource availability) compete with the pilot's attention.
Thus, more information is not always better but can, on the contrary, reduce the pilot's efficiency if it is less important for the end of the battle than the one put out. The right information at the right time is the goal but it is something that is very difficult to achieve in practice. Both because it is different for different pilots (you treat information differently) and because it is difficult to measure what is right. In addition, you get confusion effects if you are too context-driven in your presentation, but now it is starting to get complex…
Foreign aircraft differ from Gripen in that they - and this includes JSF - often present much more information, preferably in numerical form. How come? If we take the US as an example, they basically have a slightly different philosophy. Their air battle is more authoritatively controlled and doctrinal, "fly there, at x feet altitude, shoot at xx miles at z speed". There are "right" distances to shoot, etc. If we look east, they are even more so, at least historically. If you measure efficiency in such a system, it is easy to evaluate against the factors you control. It is difficult to measure new while the pilot is acting old. A "good" presentation under these conditions helps the pilot to shoot accurately at the ordered distance, with the ordered speed and altitude. There, numbers work best.
Sweden has gone a different route. Here, the pilot has the opportunity to use his personal skill to optimize his and his group's air combat. Those who have proved competent teach this to their younger colleagues and you get a knowledge that lives and is automatically adapted by and in the organization. In such a type of battle, figures are of less interest. What the pilot is measured is his ability to survive and carry out his mission; its combat effectiveness. Most distances then become relative and balances between different action alternatives become an assessment issue. Here, another, considerably more computational and graphic presentation, becomes optimal.
In metaphorical terms, the Swedish model means constantly reading the chessboard and acting on the conditions. The second model involves learning a number of well-functioning standard features and using them as much as possible. Optimal presentation for these two models is completely different.
To create a good presentation system - usually called decision system - for the Swedish pilot, one does not start from what sensors and computers can present, but from what the pilot poses for questions in different situations and answers them as effectively as possible. E.g. so it is not really interesting to show how much fuel there is in the mind but the question the pilot asks is what do I do with the fuel that is there.
This is a fundamental difference and somewhat resembles the paradigm shift for mobile phones that happened when the iPhone came. You had to understand how the user thinks in order to be able to build the optimal decision system / phone, which often started by scaling away all unnecessary information. But if one succeeds, a huge efficiency comes without increased complexity, and eternal fame (Jobs).
Measure and evaluate
Measuring combat power is difficult and resource-consuming. Maybe not as much if you do specification simulations, which is the most common. The doctrinal nations are happy to do so called Monte Carlo simulations. They take place without pilots in the aircraft and can therefore be run in an accelerated time. The strength lies in the number of simulations, which can be done with different and well-distributed parameters. However, they miss the whole important component of the decision-making system. In these simulations, the quality of the decision systems cannot be taken into account because there is no pilot in the loop that can utilize them. One therefore completely misses the human factor and it becomes a specification-based simulation that does not favor Gripen.
In Sweden, however, we are well equipped with an Air Combat Simulation Center (FOI / FLSC) where we can simulate relevant air battles with more aircraft than we can physically bring up and that measure most of the factors that exist in real air combat. Pilots are physically in the simulators and the battle takes place in real time, just like in the air, with typical hardware. To a certain extent, the simulated world is better than the real one because simulated robots can be calculated all the way to the hit and give the correct outcome. In normal flight, robotic shots can only be evaluated after landing and allowed to be estimated in the air by the pilot, which gives an error rate that adversely affects exercise performance. Here there is a great potential for development, but unfortunately a a low interest. This type of pilot-centered simulation is better when measuring the more relevant combat effect. They are also advantageous to Gripen as its relatively good decision system
Few nations have as good and flexible a simulation center as Sweden has, although some countries are beginning to catch the significant advantage we had ten years ago. It will undoubtedly give - and has already yielded - an impact in the combat effect Gripen has, which is difficult to explain when conducting three-minute specification comparisons on an online forum. This will provide a decisive advantage over the next few years, provided FLSC is given the required priority and can avoid a new-moderate investment.
The hardware in the center
What is so seductive about specifications is its simplicity. 100 km is always more than 90 km, just like 12 megapixels must be better than 8, right? There is a lot of research in psychology in this area. In short you can say that the brain is lazy. If it can pull one off without thinking, it generally does. If necessary, the brain makes an attempt to deepen, but this is largely done to confirm its initial thesis in order not to create dissonance. Unfortunately, we all work that way. Specification masturbation is a major drawback for Gripen, especially in sales. It is a known sales ploy to use low-digest values that sound better than they are. Gripen has relatively poor hard specifications. Small traction, small radar, short range, etc. But a high combat effect! Something that I would advise Saab to use to a greater extent in its marketing.
A poodle
Now we are starting to get to the core of the poodle. I mentioned earlier that a large part of Gripen's excellence has historically been the decision system and how much - and correct - information the aircraft conveyed to the pilot. It is not incredible, but rather very likely, that one can influence the battle effect tenfold between a bad decision system and a really good one during BVR combat and with Swedish tactics. 10 times! If we were to increase the combat effect on a Gripen - which already has a fairly good decision system - by more realistic 3 times, our 60 Gripen would correspond to the combat effect of 180, or an added value of several tens of billions, at a cost of one.
However, one should not be fooled that combat power can replace numerically. To some extent this is possible, especially if you already have overcapacity in the number of airframes. But even the best airplane in the host can not be found in several places at once. The effect can only be used in battle contact and then one must be in place. In addition, aircraft need to be serviced, used for training, testing, demonstration, HVA protection, special transport, flight and return flights and a lot of other things. The numbering requirement also applies to pilots. Available aircraft can be used much harder than pilots over time, around the clock for example. The pilot's brain is a significant part of the combat effect and is expected to increase.
60 aircraft are already well below the limit for a country of our size. But, on the other hand, only a limited area should be protected with the organization we reach in a few years, if money is transferred and everything goes as intended.
High quality decision-making systems are the future and why I believe in Gripen rather than the more specification but suboptimal future that JSF represents. Both should exist for 30+ years so there will be a lot of time for software updates, which is now perhaps the most important specification of them all, but difficult to quantify. Effects per krona can be obtained in cunning decision systems rather than in expensive specialized hardware, although the latter cannot be completely overlooked.
There is, thankfully, a general understanding in Sweden that it is the combat effect that is most interesting, at least more than in other countries. Swedes rarely build bragging buildings. The problem with combat power is that it is abstract and complicated to discuss, it requires specific knowledge. But now that the specifications become increasingly difficult to surpass - partly because the physical limitations become more expensive to surpass, but also because they affect the combat effect to a lesser extent - then the combat effect will grow as a concept. In addition, if we end up in the unfortunate future where the aircraft must be used, then combat effect everything and specifications is not worth its weight in cotton.
Other aircraft manufacturers are gladly building new more expensive Nokia phones as there are still speculation-crazed buyers. Gripen has a higher chance of becoming an iPhone / Android with higher combat power for the user, and is to some extent already there. This is what is difficult to explain in three minutes.
Mikael Grev
Former Gripen pilot in the Swedish Armed Forces
"I currently have no connection to Saab, FMV or FOI".
There are sometimes questions about how well the Gripen stands against, for example, the F-35 JSF or Su-35. Most people already know that the latter have significantly better specifications. Often there is no time to explain the difference between specification and combat effect. In a brief attempt to pinpoint the concepts a bit and why it is not so easy to compare aircraft. The text also aims to be a counterpoint to all articles comparing specifications on aircraft implying that the specifications is the final word about how good the aircraft is in combat.
Note that this is not a tribute to Gripen but is an overall explanation and, in addition, my interpretation of how air combat works on a techno-psychological level. At the same time, it is only a scratch on a very complex surface. Details have been left out because they are either secret or too complex to explain in a reasonable time.
Battle effect or specificity masturbation?
In recent decades, Sweden has been able to beat itself on the chest by having a indigenous and cost-effective fighter aircraft in Gripen. This is great for a country that has fewer residents than Los Angeles. So amazing that many JAS opponents can't take it. Sometimes the aversion resides in a superstition on economies of scale and COTS, sometimes it is completely ideological. The considerably more expensive foreign aircraft (eg Rafale, Eurofighter and F-35 JSF) are not always better, although they are more expensive to buy and considerably more expensive to own. The reason is we - humans - sit inside and control to the best of our ability. Still. But what is meant by better?
We Nordics have a different mentality than large parts of the rest of the world. I do not think I am putting my foot into it, if I say that a little softer priorities such as effect per dollar, synergy and the person at the center are key words for us. When many others build fighter planes, it is instead hard priorities such as maximized specifications, projected power and the hardware in the center that applies. There is nothing right and wrong here, just different pros and cons.
What complicates many discussions about what is best - efficiency or power - is that so many things are interconnected and the answers will be different depending on the circumstances.
Specification vs combat effect
Actually, it is quite simple to define these concepts, but it is difficult to conclude that there is a difference when the gut feels that they are intimately connected. High combat efficiency is desirable when the aircraft is to be used in hot war, while impressive specifications can be more advantageous for a restraining purpose as the combat power is unknown or difficult to measure. But a proven combat effect is in itself an impressive and important specification!
Measuring combat power is surprisingly difficult while the benefit of knowing it is high, almost invaluable. Knowing that "0.7 Gripen is used for each Su-27 in a typical BVR battle" - which is an example of a combat effect - would be very valuable information to be able to make responsible defense planning. Many simulations are done to measure this important combat effect. Few succeed. More on that below.
The man in the system
If you are not a combat pilot, the risk is that you have a wrong picture of what a pilot does in an air battle. Unfortunately, it is about as difficult to explain air combat as it is to explain cricket, you have to see it to understand. Again and again. It was a long time since the flight of the aircraft - the stick - was in the center. Since the weapons range went beyond visible range, the air battle for the pilot is mainly about processing information and balancing. It's like a mix of fast chess and ice hockey where failure means the ultimate consequence. There is always more information available than a human being can take, where perhaps the most important thing is to perceive and compensate for the information that you lack or that is incorrect.
It is irrelevant for the end of the battle, for example, how many sensors an aircraft has (a typical hard specification), how far they see or what generation they are. The only thing that matters is the quality of the information that is ultimately perceived by the pilot. Often good sensors - which are expensive - are a good basis for a good presentation, but it is not uncommon for the quality of the presentation to be the biggest factor. The same reasoning applies to varying degrees to other systems. Shooting far is good. Shooting right is better. Solving the task without having to shoot at all is best. Choosing the right path requires the right information.
Winnie the Pooh
The pilot has only 100 percent of his brain capacity available, and I can promise that every precentage is used in air combat. This is further complicated by the fact that different presentation systems (eg sensor data, flight mode and resource availability) compete with the pilot's attention.
Thus, more information is not always better but can, on the contrary, reduce the pilot's efficiency if it is less important for the end of the battle than the one put out. The right information at the right time is the goal but it is something that is very difficult to achieve in practice. Both because it is different for different pilots (you treat information differently) and because it is difficult to measure what is right. In addition, you get confusion effects if you are too context-driven in your presentation, but now it is starting to get complex…
Foreign aircraft differ from Gripen in that they - and this includes JSF - often present much more information, preferably in numerical form. How come? If we take the US as an example, they basically have a slightly different philosophy. Their air battle is more authoritatively controlled and doctrinal, "fly there, at x feet altitude, shoot at xx miles at z speed". There are "right" distances to shoot, etc. If we look east, they are even more so, at least historically. If you measure efficiency in such a system, it is easy to evaluate against the factors you control. It is difficult to measure new while the pilot is acting old. A "good" presentation under these conditions helps the pilot to shoot accurately at the ordered distance, with the ordered speed and altitude. There, numbers work best.
Sweden has gone a different route. Here, the pilot has the opportunity to use his personal skill to optimize his and his group's air combat. Those who have proved competent teach this to their younger colleagues and you get a knowledge that lives and is automatically adapted by and in the organization. In such a type of battle, figures are of less interest. What the pilot is measured is his ability to survive and carry out his mission; its combat effectiveness. Most distances then become relative and balances between different action alternatives become an assessment issue. Here, another, considerably more computational and graphic presentation, becomes optimal.
In metaphorical terms, the Swedish model means constantly reading the chessboard and acting on the conditions. The second model involves learning a number of well-functioning standard features and using them as much as possible. Optimal presentation for these two models is completely different.
To create a good presentation system - usually called decision system - for the Swedish pilot, one does not start from what sensors and computers can present, but from what the pilot poses for questions in different situations and answers them as effectively as possible. E.g. so it is not really interesting to show how much fuel there is in the mind but the question the pilot asks is what do I do with the fuel that is there.
This is a fundamental difference and somewhat resembles the paradigm shift for mobile phones that happened when the iPhone came. You had to understand how the user thinks in order to be able to build the optimal decision system / phone, which often started by scaling away all unnecessary information. But if one succeeds, a huge efficiency comes without increased complexity, and eternal fame (Jobs).
Measure and evaluate
Measuring combat power is difficult and resource-consuming. Maybe not as much if you do specification simulations, which is the most common. The doctrinal nations are happy to do so called Monte Carlo simulations. They take place without pilots in the aircraft and can therefore be run in an accelerated time. The strength lies in the number of simulations, which can be done with different and well-distributed parameters. However, they miss the whole important component of the decision-making system. In these simulations, the quality of the decision systems cannot be taken into account because there is no pilot in the loop that can utilize them. One therefore completely misses the human factor and it becomes a specification-based simulation that does not favor Gripen.
In Sweden, however, we are well equipped with an Air Combat Simulation Center (FOI / FLSC) where we can simulate relevant air battles with more aircraft than we can physically bring up and that measure most of the factors that exist in real air combat. Pilots are physically in the simulators and the battle takes place in real time, just like in the air, with typical hardware. To a certain extent, the simulated world is better than the real one because simulated robots can be calculated all the way to the hit and give the correct outcome. In normal flight, robotic shots can only be evaluated after landing and allowed to be estimated in the air by the pilot, which gives an error rate that adversely affects exercise performance. Here there is a great potential for development, but unfortunately a a low interest. This type of pilot-centered simulation is better when measuring the more relevant combat effect. They are also advantageous to Gripen as its relatively good decision system
Few nations have as good and flexible a simulation center as Sweden has, although some countries are beginning to catch the significant advantage we had ten years ago. It will undoubtedly give - and has already yielded - an impact in the combat effect Gripen has, which is difficult to explain when conducting three-minute specification comparisons on an online forum. This will provide a decisive advantage over the next few years, provided FLSC is given the required priority and can avoid a new-moderate investment.
The hardware in the center
What is so seductive about specifications is its simplicity. 100 km is always more than 90 km, just like 12 megapixels must be better than 8, right? There is a lot of research in psychology in this area. In short you can say that the brain is lazy. If it can pull one off without thinking, it generally does. If necessary, the brain makes an attempt to deepen, but this is largely done to confirm its initial thesis in order not to create dissonance. Unfortunately, we all work that way. Specification masturbation is a major drawback for Gripen, especially in sales. It is a known sales ploy to use low-digest values that sound better than they are. Gripen has relatively poor hard specifications. Small traction, small radar, short range, etc. But a high combat effect! Something that I would advise Saab to use to a greater extent in its marketing.
A poodle
Now we are starting to get to the core of the poodle. I mentioned earlier that a large part of Gripen's excellence has historically been the decision system and how much - and correct - information the aircraft conveyed to the pilot. It is not incredible, but rather very likely, that one can influence the battle effect tenfold between a bad decision system and a really good one during BVR combat and with Swedish tactics. 10 times! If we were to increase the combat effect on a Gripen - which already has a fairly good decision system - by more realistic 3 times, our 60 Gripen would correspond to the combat effect of 180, or an added value of several tens of billions, at a cost of one.
However, one should not be fooled that combat power can replace numerically. To some extent this is possible, especially if you already have overcapacity in the number of airframes. But even the best airplane in the host can not be found in several places at once. The effect can only be used in battle contact and then one must be in place. In addition, aircraft need to be serviced, used for training, testing, demonstration, HVA protection, special transport, flight and return flights and a lot of other things. The numbering requirement also applies to pilots. Available aircraft can be used much harder than pilots over time, around the clock for example. The pilot's brain is a significant part of the combat effect and is expected to increase.
60 aircraft are already well below the limit for a country of our size. But, on the other hand, only a limited area should be protected with the organization we reach in a few years, if money is transferred and everything goes as intended.
High quality decision-making systems are the future and why I believe in Gripen rather than the more specification but suboptimal future that JSF represents. Both should exist for 30+ years so there will be a lot of time for software updates, which is now perhaps the most important specification of them all, but difficult to quantify. Effects per krona can be obtained in cunning decision systems rather than in expensive specialized hardware, although the latter cannot be completely overlooked.
There is, thankfully, a general understanding in Sweden that it is the combat effect that is most interesting, at least more than in other countries. Swedes rarely build bragging buildings. The problem with combat power is that it is abstract and complicated to discuss, it requires specific knowledge. But now that the specifications become increasingly difficult to surpass - partly because the physical limitations become more expensive to surpass, but also because they affect the combat effect to a lesser extent - then the combat effect will grow as a concept. In addition, if we end up in the unfortunate future where the aircraft must be used, then combat effect everything and specifications is not worth its weight in cotton.
Other aircraft manufacturers are gladly building new more expensive Nokia phones as there are still speculation-crazed buyers. Gripen has a higher chance of becoming an iPhone / Android with higher combat power for the user, and is to some extent already there. This is what is difficult to explain in three minutes.
) will attempt such a comparison without the necessary background. Wiseman's wisdom....indeed.
