Tactics Up in the Air

In its running fight with the Navy over the value of the long-range bomber if war should come, the Air Force holds that today's bomber has an advantage over the fighter aircraft. Last week the man who has charge of developing the Air Force's planes and weapons, General Joseph T. McNarney, Chief of the Air Materiel Command, backed his colleagues' views, but he added a note of caution. In the 1930s, he recalled in an interview, airmen had the same notion, but the supposedly invulnerable bombers got badly shot up by fighters early in World War II.

The contest between bomber and fighter is almost as old as air warfare, and the balance has never stayed in the same position for long. A good bomber may get superiority, but it has never held it; fighter designers, occasionally behind in development, have always caught up. General McNarney thinks that the great 6-36, the Air Force's heavy bomber, can now cope with fighters and can hold its advantage for a while. Though much slower (about 400 m.p.h. in emergencies) than fighters, the 6-36 flies at an altitude where jet engines lose much of their power. Further, the wide turning radius (five to ten miles) of a fast fighter in the thin upper air makes it hard for it to maneuver into position to attack the 6-36, which is fitted out with massive firepower for defense.

But, says McNarney, the U.S. will presently develop a fighter that can lick the B-36. Soon thereafter it will have a bomber (probably the Boeing long-range, all-jet XB-52) that will be better than the B-36. Other nations, presumably, are working along the same lines. No one is sure where the advantage will rest when the new airplanes appear.

Homing Rockets. The fact is that the new power plants (turbo-jets, ram-jets and rockets) have thrown air tactics into unprecedented confusion. One of the few points of wide agreement is that guns will play a reduced part in future air combat. Their effective range (300 to 400 yards) is too low, and the airplanes will flash past each other too fast for guns to be of much use.

The basic weapon for air combat, thinks McNarney, will be the "air-to-air" rocket. It will not have to be aimed very accurately, for it will "home" on its target (probably attracted by radar-wave reflections), chase after it at supersonic speed, and explode by a proximity fuse when it gets within killing range. Such rockets presumably will be used by bombers for defense as well as by fighters for attack. Their development into "operational missiles," says McNarney, will not take long.

Riding the Beam. Rockets, also replacing antiaircraft guns, will rise from the ground to chase the bombers. They will probably ride a movable radar beam kept trained on the bomber. Whether the bomber can dodge in time out of the deadly beam, or jam the missile's radio receiver before it seeks out its target, Mc-Narney does not say. The outcome of this contest between missiles and "inhabited" airplanes is anybody's guess.

One thing is fairly certain. There is no defensive weapon in sight against rockets like the V-2 that strike down from above the atmosphere at perhaps 3,500 m.p.h. General McNarney admits that a missile fast enough and clever enough to intercept them is years away.

Still in the experimental stage are offensive guided missiles which may one day replace bombers. General McNarney says that the U.S. can now build a missile that can fly 5,000 miles and hit within 15 or 20 miles of a given target. "That's not close enough," he admits, "and it's too expensive." Another high authority believes that even this very moderate accuracy is "only a pipe dream."

All the experts are agreed on one point: the next war in the air will not be fought with the tactics or weapons of the last one. Given a few years to develop weapons now in the experimental stage, airmen will make the aerial gunfights of World War II as obsolete as cavalry raids.

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