“Against the level of threat tested, the F-15EX is operationally effective in all its air superiority roles, including defensive and offensive counter-air against surrogate fifth-generation adversary aircraft, as well as basic air-to-ground capability against the tested threats,” a Department of Defense operational test assessment states. The line lands with force because the F-15EX Eagle II arrives without the one attribute most audiences reflexively associate with “modern” fighters: stealth.
Hard to see is not the foundation of the relevance of the Eagle II. It is constructed on the premise of being difficult to handle, too fast to determine geometry, too wired to take advantage of a congested sensor picture, and with enough weapons to alter the way a package is loaded out. In a force organization in which stealth aircraft continue to do the front-door job, the F-15EX is designed to cause all the stuff around them to be deadlier and more survivable, and to be tasked to do those missions in which payload and persistence is as important as signature management.
The digital character of the “engine” of the aircraft is one of the least intuitive benefits that this aircraft has. The Advanced Display Core Processor II of the jet is credited with 87 billion functions per second, a figure which puts the F-15EX more of a compute-and-network node which so happens to fly at the edge of the envelope. That processing capacity is coupled to the workload testing of current air combat, quickly correlating onboard and offboard tracks, handling electronic warfare and threat warnings and ensuring that the displays to the crew remain coherent when the battle space becomes noisy. The cockpit and the crew-vehicle interface of the F-15EX came through a seaplane test too with a good score, an ugly part of a plane that is decisive when intricate strategies and volumes of data are the order of things.
The other half of the equation is speed. The F-15EX is largely linked to Mach 2.5 performance that translates schedules of intercept, reposition and disengagement in the manner that is reflected in an entire air tasking order. Combined with long-range sensing and data-sharing, raw airspeed may no longer be a chase statistic, but rather a choice generator, particularly in such missions as defensive counter-air, cruise-missile defense, and escorting high value-targets recognized as priorities in DOT&E reporting.
Next there is the plain, undonorable quality: carriage. The developmental and operational tests of the Air Force at Eglin certified the use of missiles by outboard stations as part of proving the 12-missile air-to-air load of Eagle II, adding to the capability to deliver in the battle that previous versions of the F-15 had. In a time when missile stocks, reload time, and the amount of fire a group can deliver before it must turn to find the home base are the concerns of planners, such additional ability is no trivia–that is campaign math.
Under non-stealth, the survivability of the platform will depend on the electromagnetic combat. The Eagle Passive/Active Warning Survivability System (EPAWSS) has passed priority tests on its operations, and the Northern Edge 2023 exercises were to demonstrate the ability to respond within seconds in dense environments to emitters that it had never been actively tested against before. A similar discussion in DOT&E also draws attention to the fact that the system is operable only with a minimal number of the software anomalies that demand the intervention of the crew members- an essential aspect to keep in mind that digital benefit will only be counted when pilots and pilots have confidence in what the jet is saying to them.
The limit of the established open knowledge has a limit. Operational tests have observed that mission level testing has not involved all the more modern, longer-range threat weapons that will be present in the future environment, and that subsequent assessment can be biased towards more secure and better-end simulation infrastructure than may be necessary to address the problem space in question without risking sensitive tactics or electronic signature.
The latter limitation does not reduce what the F-15EX is already, a conscious rejection of the notion that “modern” with “stealth,” in this context, has become synonymous with stealth, and the measurement of combat capability in terms of compute, electronic defenses, connectivity, and shot capacity, at speeds that few fighters can achieve.
