Back in the early 1980s, while I was still in the Air Force, there was a group advocating "light weight fighters." "Fill the sky with cheap airplanes" was their mantra. No one ever asked where they were going to get the cheap pilots to fill those cheap cockpits. It was clear to me that a "light weight fighter" was not going to have the capability of a heavier fighter. I carried out a study of combat between two equal-cost forces, one of all "heavy" but high-performance fighters, and the other a mix of lightweight and heavy fighters. I parameterized cost as one of the variables, so I wouldn't unfairly penalize either force. I used the Lanchester attrition equations to model the combat between the two forces.
The outcome was that "filling the sky with cheap airplanes" simply filled the sky with lots of targets. In order for the "mixed" force to be competitive, the light-weight fighter had to have as high performance as the heavy fighter.
I presented the results in a paper at a meeting of the Operations Research Society of America. I just missed winning a prize for the paper because I hadn't included actual dollar costs. Since I hadn't intended to do that anyway, I didn't feel bad about it. My intent was to put a stake through the heart of the "high-low mix" theory, and I think I did that.
