The sick part is that an awful lot of our *ground* systems are geared towards the assumption that we will already have air superiority.
But this is the objective of the current Poser-In-Chief, as well as his two demonRAT predecessors.
General Schwartz get up on Capital Hill and tell those @$$ clowns in government.
Natural Born Citizen...sole allegience...
Hey that stuff actually matters!!!
Ever feel like you are being set up.
I guess we best prepare best we can.....for....whatever....
If an airframe requires 17 hours of maintenance for each hour in flight, that's going to put it much farther down the list of desires than one which requires only two, or four. If an airframe requires a filtered, temperature controlled environment, it's much less desirable than one which is much more forgiving of a bit of dirt and sand.
Notwithstanding our incredible weapons systems, which do make one heck of a difference in any engagement, truthfully, it is our crews that make all the difference. The most experienced, trained, and able people on the planet, whom you can tell to take over the skies, and they will do so, with maximum effectiveness.
Until these other airframes aren't hanger queens which require 20 hours of maintenance for every hour of flight, then they're going to be nice dreams, but while they're sleeping, it's time to get up in the air and get the job done.
How many times now has the A-10 been declared a dead air frame, that the air force is no longer going to use it, in favor of some other ingredient, and then gosh, you look up and see another A-10 launching for a sortie.
I'm sure there's some argument to spend billions upon billions to upgrade all the airframes to the latest technology. Were I a pilot, I'd be looking to fly the most stable airframe that gives me not just the most likely chance of survivability, but also the most likely chance of completing the mission. The new airframes have yet to truly justify their costs, their required maintenance, nor their very pricey nature. Until they do, I'll sleep comfortable not because there's some wow-wee technology on the horizon, but because I know that the pilots that fly our planes, no matter if it's an A-10 Warthog, an F-15 Strike Eagle, or one of them fancy F-35 JSF’s, that they'll have twenty times the amount of flight hours, and infinitely more real combat experience than any opponent on the planet. I know our weapons systems far exceed the airframes they're put on, and the pilots who fly these weapon systems are ready and willing to protect each and every one of us.
The concept of superiority espoused may itself be fighting the last war, for a very simple reason: quality vs. quantity.
Simply put, fighter aircraft used to be bragged up because they could engage and destroy six enemy aircraft at once. But the simple question was never answered: “What if the enemy has eight aircraft at once?”
The answer to that is that the high tech fighter would be out of weapons, and have to run home, defenseless against the two remaining fighters, even if they are just barely able to engage it.
The bottom line is that just one F-35 costs close to $200M. An F-22 costs 3/4ths of that, or $150M each.
So what happens if an enemy can make a simple drone aircraft whose cost is about the same as a new economy car, $50,000 each?
For the cost of a single F-35, they could manufacture 3,389 aircraft. Or 2,542 aircraft, for the cost of one F-22. At that price, they don’t even need a weapon, hundreds of them can just fly into, ram our aircraft. No pilot would challenge a swarm like that.
Expendable aircraft. And short of using nuclear weapons, the only way we could fight such an air armada, would be to create our own air armada, a multitude of cheap and inexpensive drones to fight their drones.
So the future may lie, not in having an air force with three or for ultra high tech, amazing aircraft and maybe eight pilots, but in remembering that the race between quality and quantity has applied to military matters from the very start, and “Deus ex Machina” does not exist.