Posted on 05/04/2019 6:44:38 AM PDT by BenLurkin
You could be waiting a long time. A2A combat is largely a thing of the past. Aircraft are destroyed on the ground, wholesale. Much more effective than taking out 1 or 2 “retail” since aircraft spend most of their time on the ground anyway.
Even the F-15 only has around 100 A2A kills in almost 40 years of service. Most of those are Israeli. The rest are Gulf War with a few of those buy the Saudis. So there you have a huge investment in a pure air-to-air killer and you have what?
Not saying that it’s a capability that we want to give up, but the game has changed. It has been changing.
The F-35 is a 5th generation fighter. Thats why its going to be defending the fleet because it can’t shoot another plane down? I don’t think so.
The F-35 has had problems from the git go. The F-22 Super Hornet is a far better choice.
The F-35 is way too expensive for a bomb truck.
The F22 and the Super Hornet are two different airplanes!
Fairly recently a couple of our F22 raptors took on two SU25’s that strayed over the no fly zone in Syria. Then an SU35 got involved and our 22’s ran all 3 of them home.
... so why did they need this half-billion dollar weapons platform to drop a couple JDAMS when it could have been done with a far cheaper A-10?
You’re still sore about hitting that aspirin factory aren’t ya?
Still, better than my RV-6A
The honey bucket crews in Korea.
Some poor slob with a pole across his shoulder with buckets tied to either side dumps the buckets in to the holding tank and passes it up to some other poor slob to dump in to the truck.
Good times.
USAF has been doing boom refueling since the 1960s. Nothing new about it, and it's more controllable than the probe and drogue method.
“... so why did they need this half-billion dollar weapons platform to drop a couple JDAMS when it could have been done with a far cheaper A-10?”
Radar. We didn’t want the occupants in that cave to know we were coming. Enemy radar could alert the occupants and they move somewhere else. Whenever possible, use stealth.
JDAM = Take one unguided general purpose bomb, and bolt a GPS based guidance package to it. Result: a guided bomb.
I’m sore about the people I know who died in this useless, interminable war.
If you knew any you’d be just as sore.
F-22 fan here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUFuojEFtc8
Watch the takeoff at about 8mins into the video.
The F-22 is the Raptor
Well still .. the F-35 was not originally conceived as a fighter, that role was supposed to be filled by the F-22. They were meant to work together. It is just lame as an air superiority fighter. It was meant to sneek in during an attack (after the tomahawks and other self guided munitions did their work) to clean up certain types of targets while the F-22 provided air cover.
It only has 160 rounds, a few missiles, can only carry 2 bombs; it defends nothing as it is designed to attack ground targets.
They only made 189 F-22s before the democrats (Rep Obey, D-WI) inserted a rider preventing export - so without the economies of scale the program was cancelled - particularly so since every Dem and his whipping boy in the media declared the plane too expensive and we needed the far cheaper F-35. The flyaway cost of an F-35A has now dropped to under $90 million.
Of course, the F-35 turned out to be far more expensive that the F-22 - at least until production ramps up. But, had the full order of the F-22 been realized along with exports, the 22 would have been cheaper. Now it lags behind the 35 in tech and even in tech it was supposed to have 10 years ago, worse, one variant of a particular promised tech is now on the Russian SU-57.
Which leads me to believe that somewhere like Edwards or Gloom Lake something else is either built or in building stage. The F-117 Nighthawk surprised the world, remember - and some are still operational - the 35 basically replaces the F-117. BTW: the Russian Tu-214ON recently overflew Groom Lake (an exchange overflight program, the Open Skies Treaty).
Here’s some more on the backstory of the F-35 combat deployment:
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/27464/u-s-air-force-f-35as-first-combat-deployment-to-the-middle-east-has-begun
Could have used a C-130 instead of an F-35, like they did when they dropped a MOAB one a cave complex on the Afghan/Pak border in 2017.
I guess that’s cheaper than running a nosy pump which could wake the base officers ...
I wasn’t sure which one you meant. Both the F-18 and F-22 are probably better than the F-35 at individual dog fighting. But F-35’s excel at fighting in groups with total situational awareness of the battlefield. That’s their advantage over pure tactical fighters, so I’ve heard.
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