“They didn’t even see that he was flying under their airplane, and then he got on their left wing and then called them and said you really should go home. It has been quoted in its entirety since it was first said by Gen. Mark Welsh, the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, as summarizing an entire age of airpower evolution into one radio message.
The episode dates back to 2013 when an American MQ-1 predator on reconnaissance in the international airspace over Iran was spotted and targeted by two Iranian F-4 phantoms. The Phantoms were designed to be fast and to carry a payload and on paper they would be able to threaten an unarmed drone. What the F-4 crews did not know was that the Predator was being escorted on a high-value umbrella a set-up that had become routine now after the preceding efforts to intercept similar drones.
It was the asymmetry of consciousness that had made the encounter sticky in the popular imagination and not the geometry of the intercept. An F-22 Raptor of the U.S. Air Force, with high-value air assets protection, approached and was stationed without any reaction of the Iranian fighters. The surreal climax that Welsh describes was this: the Raptor pilot was under the lead F-4 inspecting its stores, and then ascended to the left wing of the fighter and then spoke. The strategic lesson drawn was quite straightforward, which was that, the plane with superior sensors, lower signature and control over emissions controlled the whole game as the other party was effectively blind.
That is the real point. It was not just an inferior jet to a superior one, but a gap in sensors and signature that was so significant that the advantages of the older plane, Mach-type dash and exterior carriage, could not be even invoked.
The F-4 Phantom, which enjoyed a glorious kinetic career in the early 1960s, with the top-end performance of about Mach 2.23 and the capability to carry heavy loads on external stations, nevertheless has a long and respected kinetic resume. That mix can have an appearance of decisiveness when it comes to slow unmanned aircraft. However, external shops and historic design trade space are burdens in a battlespace informed by contemporary detection, tracking and cueing. Defending aircraft have an opportunity to decide when to become visible, and how much information to disclose, in case it is able to stay below the horizon of the defending aircraft long enough to come into position.
The F-22 was made to win that competition. It is officially a combination of stealth, supercruise, maneuverability and built-in avionics- an architecture that will create a first-shot opportunity before an enemy realizes that the fight has commenced. The Air Force attributes the integrated sensor fusion and avionics to its capability to track, identify, and attack and remain hard to detect. It also has the capability to fly over Mach 1.5 without afterburner in supercruise and extend the intercept window to over 1.5 without announcing the presence of a burning engine and plume.
In reality, such qualities make “escort” more of an invisible traffic control. Stealth fighter is able to remain silent in its radar, rely on passive sensing and control spacing in such a way that the safeguarded asset is the only visible item on the board. The message that the fighter gives at the end has an added significance since it is given after the stealth aircraft has already demonstrated the ability to get close and classify weapons as well as get away on its own terms.
The “go home” moment of 2013 continues to exist due to its demonstration of a recurring engineering fact: in the contemporary air battle, the game changer may often initially manifest as information: who sees whom, and when, even before it is manifested as a missile shot or a maneuver.
