plawolf
Lieutenant General
Even the mighty F22 with those monster engines do not scare Typhoons in WVR. Pilots tend to describe dogfights as similar to a knife fight in a telephone box for good reason, and given the choice, most pilots would prefer to avoid it altogether because in a dogfight, chance and luck play a huge part, and no one likes to play dice with their lives.
In the vast majority of dogfights, simulated or real, you get killed without even realizing you were in a dogfight as an unseen attacker takes you out before you had a chance to even react. The bigger the fur ball, the less of an impact pilot skill matters and the more impact luck and chance will have on individual outcomes, because the more participants there are, the greater the chance someone will get on your six without you knowing about it.
Even though F22s (and J20s and PAKFAs) do not fear getting into a dogfight, the biggest advantage a stealth fighter holds is its stealth. As such, I fully expect all stealth fighter pilots to active try to avoid getting into a dogfight if they can. Why would you voluntarily give up an overwhelming advantage to face the enemy on a level playing field?
Even when stealth fighters get into WVR, I would expect any half decent pilot to once again use the stealth of their fighters to the fullest extent, and get into the most favorable position possible before actually initiating combat. In such cases, I seriously doubt a dogfight would even technically take place, since the engagement would most likely literally only consisting of the pilot of the stealth fighter lining up a missile/guns on an unsuspecting target and pulling the trigger to shoot him out of the skies before he know what was going on.
I think that the biggest reason for stealth fighters to have agile is when they go face to face against other stealth fighters. When it's a stealth on stealth battle, both sides will have trouble detecting each other at long enough ranges to use BVR weapons and tactics, and even if you try, it is likely that the odds of a successful BVR attack would be very low because modern stealth is optimized most against x-band fire control radar, and there is a very good chance a stealth fighter would be able to easily evade incoming ARHAAMs.
The F22s designers showed great foresight in insisting on designing a fighter that can give as good as it can get in WVR combat against none stealth fighters. The same consideration would not have escaped the attention of the J20's designers, but with the added dimension that the J20 was likely designed with a top aim to be able to not only match the F22 in WVR, but also beat it. Whether the J20 meets those design aims is yet to be seen, but it would be naive to think that the engineers at CAC did not have the F22 in mind when they set about designing the J20 and establishing it's various design goals.
As for using J20s to go after AWACS and other enemy force multipliers, well we fully agree on that, and I was suggesting that as soon as the first pictures of the J20 came out, even before western 'experts' started to call it a striker.
Going after enemy force multipliers have 3 main advantages.
1) Successful attacks would massively degrade the combat capability of the enemy main fighter fleets without you having to even engage them. For most land based USAF fighters, if you take out their ability to tank up, you effectively remove them from the battle altogether because they lack the range to get in the fight without tanker support from US friendly bases in the region.
2) Western air forces train extensively with full AWACS and datalink support, and while they are not as dependent on these force multipliers as the Soviet pilots were during parts of the cold war, removing all such assets from the field of battle would be massively disruptive to western air forces. The damage to moral would also be huge and will have a big impact.
3) Successful attacks on AWACS and other force multipliers would likely force causaulty averse forces like the US to redeploy their own stealth fighters in a defensive role protecting these assets. If they just deploy conventional fighters as escorts, it would be a simple matter to mass a force of J20s big enough to overwhelm them.
Considering the limited size of the US F22 fleet, it would likely stretch their availability to the full to provide escorts for force multipliers as well as mount offensive missions, especially when attrition start to bite. Even if the USAF was able to mount both offensive ops as well as assign F22s as escorts to AWACS and tankers, the effect of forcing them to divide their forces would have a significant impact on how big of a role the F22 can play in any war.
