on niggers, noobs and next generation fighters

"does the N-word offend youuuuu nowww?"
-white prison guard to "caretaker" farrell, aka chris rock, The Longest Yard


been going through the newspaper reports on hurricane katrina, and what strikes me (other than the reports of people shitting all over the place in the stadium and the unbearable stench) are the pictures. not just of the destruction and suffering, but the fact everyone suffering from the destruction is black. like everyone, you'd think you were in 8 Mile or something. it's not like the 9/11 shots, where your racial distribution was mostly caucasian.

the thought ("they're all blacks! where are the whites?") did indeed come to my mind when i first saw the photos, but my first reaction, like many other people, was to brush it aside. and focus on the universal agony. subconsciously i must have stopped myself from thinking about the fact that everyone dying was black, like my brain was automatically filtering out race-based distinctions. even though the enduring image of the hurricane's impact for me will be that picture of seven big stern white SWAT troopers on that tank riding through streets of desperate homeless and hungry people who were all black.

this was until some columnist pointed this fact out, and also the fact that most of us turned a blind eye to the race issue.

i think our so-cliched multiracial culture and political correctness over all these years has really desensitised and blinded us to racial differences. you're not even supposed to call a mat a mat. it's a good thing of course, it helps us all live together in harmony. i don't need to elaborate on that. but sometimes perhaps we ignore the race issue so naturally we create social problems that may one day explode in our faces - for all our efforts and good intentions to be sensitive to other races.

(perhaps most people here would have less of a tendency to think in terms of american black-vs-white, and be more open to wonder why they were all blacks. but it is a problem for me... i spent 6 months in alabama, USA, surrounded pretty much by blacks and political correctness was drilled so deeply in me it remains like that today)

that was essentially what the columnist was driving at. try to take a politically-incorrect step back, and kick out your racial-harmony inhibitions. gawk at all the desperate black people and ask how come they are all black? where are the whites? isn't it the USA after all? not cuba or something. we can only assume that the whites got out before the disaster came, as any sane person would. the overwhelmingly-black population that remained probably stayed because they did not have the means to go. money, that is. and so, no matter how much we wish and pretend they are not related, poverty and race have a lot in common. and if we ignore this fact out of a wish or politically-correct pretence that it is not the case, then they will pay the price with their suffering - the refugees' traumatic week in the Superdome, where they robbed, raped, murdered and smeared shit on the walls because the toilets would not work.

allow me to be totally candid here today; we have already seen the consequences of a superficial sense of political correctness.

what if this happened in singapore? would we see the streets clogged with malays (omg part of me still recoils at making a racial distinction like this) and a tank loaded with chinese soldiers wearing shades, armour and rifles driving around to keep them quiet? would there be bestial acts taking place in an indoor stadium full of them? it's a horrific thought, but you get the idea.

was it LKY or LHL, who commented on the rising teen pregnancy/marriage, juvenile delinquency and unemployment/poverty rates among the malays. and got the community to implement concrete steps to deal with that. this is a good sign. the best way is to face up to the reality, publicise the undesirable aspects, and galvanise everyone to work towards solving the problem.

the old paradigm - that you cannot criticise any race in particular so that everyone will be happy and harmonious - might sound good, but ends up with real problems being ignored and left to fester, possibly with disastrous results. racial sensitivity must today move from a superficial consideration, where you can't crack jokes at their financial position or birth rate or stupidity or money-mindedness, to one involving a real and sincere sense of concern for one's fellow citizens, pointing out their deficiencies so they can deal with the problems. they should do the same to us too.

this is of course very much an ideal, but it would be true interracial happiness and harmony, and the result would be a more mature, egalitarian and peaceful society - everyone benefits!




another current-affairs highlight of my week, has been the LONG-AWAITED announcement of the result of the competition to select the Republic of Singapore Air Force's Next Generation Fighter. myself and fellow members of the local and international military-enthusiast community are in a celebratory mood now - if only because the wait is finally over. we have been closely following the competition ever since its inception in 2001-2002; that is three whole years of endless waiting, discussion, comparison and false alarms!

the contest started with 6 planes. the russian Su-35, the anglo-german-italian-spanish Eurofighter Typhoon, the french Rafale, and the american F-16E/F, F-15T and F/A-18E/F. along the way, the Su-35, F-16E/F and F/A-18E/F got dropped, leaving the Typhoon, Rafale, and F-15T by around 2003, if i recall correctly.

the long and short of it basically is that all the eliminated contenders (except the winning F-15T of course) got booted because they in various ways did not meet the RSAF's desired combination of capability, technology, cost, reliability, bundled weapons systems, and interoperability with the RSAF's existing equipment and that of our allies (primarily the americans).

there is so much accumulated information running around in my head relating to the NGF program and on military aviation in general that it would be impossible to create an exposition on the topic with all the details in. and i honestly doubt anyone of you readers would be interested in this. so here goes a much stripped-down and simplified version of the long-running NGF saga.... in layman's language.

it all starts with 2 of the 3 types making up our fighter fleet - the A-4 Skyhawk and F-5 Tiger (with the third being the F-16C/D that is still reasonably modern) - reaching an age where they are increasingly outdated and unable to cope with the rigours of modern fighter opposition. they were bought in the 1970s, and extensively upgraded to give them the effectiveness of modern fighters, but it comes to a point where the limitations of the old airframes make further upgrading impractical and you have to get new stuff. this became especially important as malaysia and indonesia acquired Su-30MKM jets from russia, which are very large, powerful and advanced fighters superior to the F-16C/Ds we have at the moment. since military superiority is literally a matter of life and death, we have to keep up, and the money is available. so RSAF held the contest.

of the initial 6 contenders, everyone knew the Su-35 didn't stand a chance from the start, even though it is very capable (think in terms of range, radar performance, agility and weapons load). this was simply because it is russian. russian planes use russian bombs and missiles. our fighter fleet at this point is an all-american affair, so just about every bomb and missile our planes carry and shoot is US-designed. this means that our entire fighter arsenal is american, so if we get the russian plane we'll have to buy an entire new set of kit just for the Su-35. it doesn't make sense.

it was closer for the rest. the F-16E/F Viper is essentially a super souped-up version of the F-16C/Ds we have, with better engine, radar and sensors. this promises big economies on maintenance, since the airframe and much of the equipment are the same and can be shared around. nice, but you must be aware that the F-16 is designed as a small, lightweight, low-cost fighter - with consequent inferiority to the other candidates which are all larger and heavier. for one, it has only one engine, while all the others have two. the power difference is like comparing a 1.6l Toyota Corolla with a 3.0l Lexus GS300; twice the power makes for a bigger plane with better range, radar, weapons load and other funky advantages. we wanted something bigger and more powerful, and this would not do.

the last of the first batch to get kicked was the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet. why the strange designation? it stands for Fighter/Attack, meaning that it was designed from the start to be good at both killing flying planes and ground targets. "Multi-role" is the word. all the others, excepting the European contenders, were originally built for air-to-air, with air-to-ground capability added later. though this is not to say that they are any inferior at that. now the Hornet started as a aircraft-carrier based jet on the lighter side of the range, with two small engines. as a cheap solution to replace the retiring F-14 Tomcat heavy fighters, the US Navy simply beefed up the vanilla Hornet to make the Super Hornet - 25% bigger, approaching heavy-fighter weight and dimensions. try imagining, however, expanding your Corolla to the size of a GS300. would it be as good as the GS300? no! a purpose-designed large fighter will obviously be more capable than a bulked-up lighter fighter, which has resulted in significant performance deficiencies in the Super Hornet. this is a long and controversial tale, and will be another story. in short, not good enough for us, and out it went.



with Round One over, the Typhoon, Rafale and F-15T Eagle moved on.

it must be said that the Rafale and Typhoon are a pair of rather similar planes. they share common ancestry in a pan-European effort to develop an advanced jet fighter for their countries, but at the design phase French arrogance and insistence that the new jet be able to fly from their aircraft carriers let to their breaking away to independently build the Rafale. the striking similarity is in both planes having a "canard delta" configuration - where you have two small wings in front, the canards, and big triangular delta main wings that go all the way to the back of the airframe.

the Typhoon, however, evolved to become the slightly larger of the two, with a bent towards air-to-air combat, while the Rafale was more balanced and multirole. (in fact its makers, Dassault Aviation, hype it as "omnirole"!). the Typhoon's development process, unfortunately but inevitably, was badly hindered by politics between the four countries that build it as well as defence budget cuts following the collapse of the USSR. the Rafale was affected too, to a smaller extent. it entered service around 1999-2000, while the Typhoon did so in 2003.

after Round Two, the Typhoon was eliminated while the Rafale stayed. there were several reasons for this. we were worried that politics between the british, germans, spanish and italians would further delay the programme, and that we would have to negotiate will all four for the deal, complicating things a lot. also, we wanted a more multirole jet. the important factor however was that the Eurofighter Typhoon lacked an important piece of new technology called an Active Electronically Scanned Array(AESA) radar, which the Rafale and F-15T will have.

with this, instead of having a radar dish (the antenna) rotating to mechanically steer the transmitted radar waves, you have a stationary flat panel of thousands of little transmit/receive modules that each emit a small proportion of the total radar waves. the radar waves, or beams, are "electronically steered" by changing the phase of each wave relative to its neighbour. very complex physics that i don't totally understand myself. this means that the radar beam can effectively be steered at near the speed of light. you know that in the movies, there is this line sweeping across the circular radar screen? that is the radar beam, and the incoming dots representing incoming target planes only seem to jump closer after the beam sweeps past them to update the screen of its new location. with the superfast beamsteering you would not see a "beam" sweeping across the screen; the very rapid update rate would result in being able to track every target all the time, and the incoming dots would gradually move closer, not "jump". this means you don't miss anything. and there are a lot more advantages that come from the rapid and flexible beansteering, but it's too complex to be here. a simpler benefit is that even if a few of the transmit/receive modules fail, the rest keep working and you would not notice the difference. whereas if in a normal radar your wave generator tube fails, everything is spoilt. more reliable.

the americans, french, and japanese, in that order, are the most advanced AESA developers in the world. the japanese are constituitionally disallowed from selling weapon systems. the french were very willing to share their AESA research secrets with us if they got the deal, but the americans have a lot of rules against sharing "sensitive military technology" with other nations. rules, though, exist to be bent and broken...

so the final selection was between the F-15T and the Rafale. now the original F-15A entered service in (gasp) 1972!!, when your daddy was still a hippie. there have been many improved versions over the years of course, and our F-15T (T for temasek, with F-15S being taken by Saudi Arabia) is the latest and best. it's a big and powerful fighter, with lots of engine thrust. it's got the most advanced avionics ("aviation electronics", ie radar, sensors, computers, navigation, communications, electronic countermeasures etc). yet the age of the design still shows in the fact that the Rafale has a much smaller RCS (radar cross section), meaning it is much harder to detect on radar, and is more agile. the agility point is rendered moot however with today's missiles that the pilot can target by simply pointing his head, not his entire jet, at the enemy plane. and no matter how agile you make a plane, you can never out-turn or out-run a missile.

the Rafale, being French, would also have allowed us to diversify our all-american fighter fleet. imagine if we were to fall out with the USA - they would cut the supply of spare parts for our fighters, and soon they would be unflyable. the same advantage would also apply as we buy a new set of french weapons if we bought the Rafales. the alternative however has its advantages as well - all-american fighters and weapons allow economies of scale, since they can all share parts and weapons as far as possible.

the US F-15T offer also came bundled with their very latest weapons - among others, cheap but very effective GPS-guided bombs, called JDAMs and JSOWs, that were used to great effect in the initial, rapid defeat of the Taleban and the Iraqis. we want those, and the french can't match that, or their cheapness at least.

lastly, the F-15T offer was simply cheaper, and the weak US dollar made it an even better deal. i honestly preferred the Rafale - it's the newer design, easier to maintain, lower RCS(very important, look at the success of Stealth Fighters), and diversifying our equipment sources. but we can trust our Ministry of Defence, to, in the words of Lee Hsien Loong at last Monday's BMT graduation ceremony, "not go for the most advanced or the most expensive equipment. Instead, we acquire what is cost-effective, what best meets our specific operational needs."
our country, and our freedom, would be safer for it.




(this has been very exhausting. i would not let my fellow enthusiasts on the military aviation forums see this, they would laugh because it is so simplistic and superficial. yet it has been such a long exposition, and i doubt you all would have bothered with this anyway, if you understood it at all. there's a lot of content and side stories on the NGF saga not written down, from years of accumulated knowledge. it's my hobby, but a very deep and esoteric field which makes it impractical to share with others. oh well. just a glimpse of our pastime for all ya guys! i will focus on more relevant topics as usual after this :)