SnowLeopard

In the book version of Battlestar Galactica: The Living Legend, the colonials take out the battle computers of Gomorrah so the Cylon fighters wouldn't have coordinated SAM support.

In reality, 20 years ago, I was told that allied SAMs and allied fighters fought in different cooridors, that we didn't have that kind of control to tell our aircraft from theirs that cleanly.

Regardless of how it is now, here is the question on the board:

Given how electronics and computers constantly improve, would you trust the ability, assuming one had it, to have allied SAMs and fighters in the same cooridors to battle an enemy since it is at least plausible that the enemy might be able to defeat or turn that kind of control against the user?
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("If the Soviets got their hands on ATAC, they could defeat our entire submarine ballistic missile system."--007
"Worse. They could order our subs to attack our own cities."--Defense Minister Bernard Grey, (w,stte), "For Your Eyes Only")

WECIV

I would not trust the computers to do the job correctly. However, if you could keep your casualties from friendly fire to a low percentage and inflict a much higher percentage of casualties on the enemy. Then in a real war (something we have not faught since 1945, but may against the PRC) yes I would be willing to take a few hits to give the enemy air force a true dilemma.

W

P.S. This is considering the fact that the PRC possesses so many tactical fighters that though old could saturate our airborne ability to C4 and fight our air forces.

Dreadnought

To me it depends on a realistic % of mistakes during live testing to define a worst case scenario kill ratio of allied pilots. Respectfully stating gentlemen that nothing is perfect 100% of the time.The question is where do you draw the line for acceptable loss.

__________________
Fortitude.....The strength to persist...The courage to endure.

Jimmy

No system is perfect. There are ways to tell our guys from theirs. But we try and avoid flying through our own SAMs in general, but it happens anyway, either by design or mistake. JTIDS is an example of one way we try to prevent fratricide.

That said, I think Patriots have a better kill record against American aircraft than any Russian aircraft still in worldwide service.

GGTharos

American and British.

Interestingly enough, according to the declassified testimony/report on the subject, it appears that in the incident where the Tornado was shot down, its IFF was either off or not functioning, or for some reason the Patriot did not correctly IFF, or the IFF was ignored.
In the same testimony, although some of this was blacked out, it appears that the Patriot had some EMI issues causing it to classify the Tornado as an incoming ARM, which, again, according to that document Patriot operators are trained to shoot down.