IAF vs US Navy in war games

[boscoman]

A number of years ago the IAF conducted war games with the US 6th Fleet & the US Air Force. The results were rather embarrassing to the US as I recall. Does anyone have any links or articles on this? Would be grateful for anything that can be supplied.

[joejd12]

A number of years ago the IAF conducted war games with the US 6th Fleet & the US Air Force. The results were rather embarrassing to the US as I recall. Does anyone have any links or articles on this? Would be grateful for anything that can be supplied.


i would aslo be ionterested in a link...

i haev read that the kill ratio in dogfighting was 220 kills for iaf/20 for us navy....

so israel won 220/240 dogfights... however you should probably know that these matchups are usually more political than practical, so i would highly doubt those results, especially since the us navy pilots who fly the f-18 hornet are the elite of the american airforce, there are only about a 1000 of them...

[boscoman]

Finally found the info.

From Janes, May 2001:
According to one source, US Marine Corps F/A-18 Hornets from the Balkans theater recently engaged in mock combat with Israeli Air Force fighters. The Hornets were armed with AIM-9s, and the Israeli fighters carried Python 3 and Python 4 missiles and Elbit DASH helmet sights. IDR's source describes the results as "more than ugly", the Israelis prevailing in 220 out of 240 engagements.

"Is the US Navy Overrated?" a study from Kightsbridge Univ:
The Israeli Air Force, perhaps the best-trained and most experienced in the world, has outshined the US Navy, and they have done so more than once. A joint USN-IAF air combat exercise in 1999 underlines and highlights the thesis that the US Navy is overrated. On September 14, 1999, The Jerusalem Post announced that the Israelis soundly dispatched the air wing from the USS Theodore Roosevelt (which, incidentally, was the same carrier the Dutch destroyed in 1999). Israeli F-16s squared off against American F-14s and F-18s. The final results were astonishing. The Israelis shot down a whopping 220 US aircraft while losing only 20 themselves. The 10:1 kill ratio was so embarrassing that the results were not “officially published ‘to save the reputations of the US Navy pilots.’� The magazine article on which the article was based, however, reported the kill ratio to be about 20:1.
This incident was not the first time the US Navy has found itself running behind the Israelis in air combat. Back in 1983, significant qualitative differences between the Israeli Air Force and US naval aviation became obvious when the US Navy botched a raid over Lebanon to suppress Syrian forces there. Aircrews from the USS John F. Kennedy were not properly briefed, launched with the wrong weapons, used outdated tactics, lost twenty percent of their aircraft, and in return, did very little damage to the Syrian positions. The Israelis, conversely, had enjoyed great success during hundreds of missions over the Bekaa Valley with negligible losses. Yes, the Israelis had far more experience flying over the region, and thus a major advantage, but even Secretary Lehman, himself a Naval Reserve aviator, granted that the Israelis were simply more organized, more creative, and had far better planning and tactics than the Americans did.

From World Daily Net, 2005:
WorldNetDaily (WND) reported February 14 that the Israeli air force had trounced a U.S. fighter force from the USS Theodore Roosevelt in a mock battle. During this training exercise in the Negev desert between Israeli air force F-16 pilots and U.S. Navy pilots from the USS Theodore Roosevelt, Israeli air force pilots, according to the Jerusalem Post, "shot down" 220 Navy F-14s and F-18s while only "losing" 20 F-16s. In one exercise, the paper said, the reported kill ratio was 40:1 in the Israelis' favor, an outcome so stunning, according to an Israeli officer quoted by the Post, the results weren't made public to "save the reputations of U.S. Navy pilots."

Also:
Report: Israel beats German navy in sub war game
Jerusalem Post ^ | Aug. 28, 2004 | ARIEH O'SULLIVAN

Posted on 29 August, 2004 10:38:00 by yonif

In a rare revelation of war games between Israel and one of its allies, a newspaper reported over the weekend that an Israeli submarine engaged in a mock underwater battle with a German rival and won.
According to Yediot Ahronot, the war game took place last week, lasted "a few hours" and involved depths of hundreds of meters. The Dolphin-class submarine "Tekuma" succeeded in tailing the German vessel. She followed the German submarine at a safe distance without being detected until the end of the exercise, the report said.
"The fact that we are surrounded by enemy countries and are in a constant state of operational action and not just engaged in exercises, has made our underwater operational capabilities some of the highest in the world," Col. Eyal, the outgoing commander of the submarine flotilla was quoted as saying.
It was the first time since the three German-made Dolphin class submarines arrived in the country that the navy accepted a sub-to-sub challenge with a foreign navy, the report said.
With a crew of 33 and a captain who is only 31 years old, the Dolphins are the most expensive piece of weaponry in the IDF's arsenal the diesel-electric submarines, manufactured by Kiel-based Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft AG, were mostly paid for by the Germans. Israel has reportedly sought to purchase two more of the sophisticated submarines.

[haamimhagolan]

No one should be surprised by this outcome. This was basically a contest between an air force armed with helmet-mounted sights and high off-boresight missiles, and one that was not.

For those individuals who are not familiar with the history of the helmet-mounted sight, high off-boresight (HOBS) missile combination, the first practical application of this technology was by the Soviet Union during the mid-1980s. The US had experimented with helmet mounted sights during the 1970s with the VTAS system, but the technology was unreliable at the time, and the US was too enamoured with the theory of the radar-guided, beyond visual range (BVR) intercept to truly explore the visual range ramifications of this technology. It was left to the Russians to first make the helmet-mounted sight, heat-seeking missile combination a practical reality, beginning with the R-73 (AA-11 "Archer") missile, that was introduced on the MiG-29 in 1985, and later when on to equip Russia's Su-27 fighters as well. Israeli tacticians quickly realized the gravity of this helmet-mounted sight, HOBS missile combination, and set about a crash program to field Israel's first DASH helmet-mounted sights and Python 4 air-to-air missiles beginning in 1990. The US, in contrast, failed to react to this development until after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when former East German Luftwaffe fighters were tested in simulated combat with US F-16's in 1991. The results were so lopsided in favor of the MiG, that the US finally authorized the development of the AIM-9X HOBS version of the Sidewinder, and launched a development program to convert the Israeli DASH system into a helmet-mounted sight suitable to equip US fighters (which resulted in the Joint Helmet Mounted Cueing System or JHMCS). The first JHMCS, however, was not deployed by the US Navy until 2003, deployed first by US Navy F/A-18E/F Super Hornets. The AIM-9X similarly did not enter service until 2003.

Israel's stunning victory over US Navy pilots in 1998 was therefore as much a product of superior Israeli avionics (and weapons planning), as it was of pilot skill. The Luftwaffe reportedly had a similar kill-to-loss rate when facing US Air Force F-16s in 1991, and the US Navy likewise was reported to have delivered some enbarrassing defeats to the RAF in recent air combat exercises between the US Navy's latest F/A-18E/F fighters, and the RAF's much vaunted Eurofighter Typhoon (which won't deploy an equivalent helmet mounted sight until later this year).

Don't get me wrong. I still believe that the Heyl HaAvir deploys the best fighter pilots in the world. But we should all be aware that part of the Israeli edge comes from years of planning that puts the Israeli pilots one step ahead of their adversaries. While the US finally deployed a helmet-mounted sight and HOBS missile combination in 2003, the Israelis have been developing the Python 5 with even better resistence to countermeasures and a lock-after-launch feature that makes it possible to launch true "over-the-shoulder" missile intercepts. The Python 5 is widely reported to have a kill envelope that far exceeds any other heat seeking missile, whether US, European, or Russian. As for the beyond visual range (BVR) arena on which the US has put so much emphasis, the Israelis have never agreed to engage the US in simulated engagements with all of their ECM packages activated. There are certain weapons which the Israelis can and MUST produce for themselves - to keep the technology from ever falling into Arab hands. I'll leave it at that . . .

[betgilson]

Great! in all this we see how much the Israeli allies "be helped" when they cooperate with Israel.

Wonderful, astonishing Israeli achievements!

[Topmaul]

ECM and BVR are how we fight, like in 2004 Cope India our forces get trounced because we are fighting with one foot in a bucket. At any rate that was an absmall failure for the Navy.