Shrike
24d ago
Even if you have outer layer air defenses, you don't have a lot of time if they goof up and you need your CIWS. So maneuvering to unmask seems very plausible to me.
I'd also say that the US military, from what I can tell, embraces a mindset of utilizing the full spectrum of their capabilities for the sake of professionalism. Which is a DoD Powerpoint-y way of saying that the military likes to both test and practice things during real military environments, so making a radical maneuver to unmask in the face of even a nominal threat could very well be seen as a "best practices" thing.
Shrike
24d ago
Likewise, if I imagine a general being killed by Russian ballistic missiles, in most cases the body will not be in a state where you can put him in his quarters and pretend it was a natural death.
If you're killed by overpressure I think the body is often pretty intact, isn't it? Which would be pretty plausible for a situation where someone gets hit in a bunker.
Shrike
24d ago
Note my reply here – a decoy without the electronics systems would be pretty useful nonetheless (and that's without getting into using it as an aerodynamic test item or a testbed for new electronics systems, both of which are potentially very useful applications).
to avoid having to explain that under certain conditions (extreme low range, high powered analog radars) your stealth plane isn't that stealthy
This isn't all that secret, I had a B-2 engineer tell me something similar to my face in casual conversation.
Shrike
24d ago
You might recall during the last high profile stealth bombing strike operation about two weeks ago that some of our stealth bomber fleet was used as decoys for the rest of our stealth bomber fleet. If you had a flying decoy that looked good enough to fool peer adversaries you could fly it around, park it on the ramp in Diego Garcia, etc. etc. to fool enemies about our real movements and make it less likely that they actually hit valuable military hardware during an attack.
Shrike
24d ago
2008: USAF fake the crash of Spirit of Kansas using a (probably remote control) flyable prototype mocked up. B-2 inventory is officially -1.
Why would you crash a perfectly flyable prototype when you could use it (as a decoy, if nothing else)? Strong "fake the moon landing on the moon" vibes.
Shrike
24d ago
It would be hard to cover up an actual hit of a carrier (carriers have thousands of people onboard). If that had happened I would expect it to have come out via RUMINT already. Not saying it's impossible, just that it's much harder than covering up e.g. an American Marine getting whacked by Russian Iskanders.
While we're discussing the (possibly) hit B-2 it's worth mentioning the second F-117 that was hit by the Serbians and "covered up" (not acknowledged) by the USAF.
Edit to add – the Spirit of Missouri is still active. Wikipedia has a picture of it overflying an airshow in 2018. If it was hit, then it was repaired, or an extremely convoluted plot as suggested by the Serbians was put into place to cover it up (frankly it would have been much easier just to say that it crashed due to pilot error back in 1999, I don't understand why one would wait for nearly a decade to finish the coverup).
Not specifically.
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