Replies

Oh, and “Do we even have any real air-to-air engagements anymore in the first place? Wasn’t Korea the last war we had where there were frequent ‘dogfights’? “. . .no. Gulf War I we had a few engagements and most kills were via the F-15.

The strength of stealth is the fact you can see and shoot the bad guy and he never sees you. You try and avoid a “dog-fight” if you are flying a fighter. Why close to the merge when you don’t have to, and if you do close to the merge, you want to remain ‘invisible’ as long as possible in order to give you the advantage.

The question I think is this; do we want to produce jets as good as the bad guys, or do we want to produce jets as good as we can make them?

Modern A/A warfare is not like it was in WWII, Korea, Vietnam, or even Gulf War I.

The strength of stealth is the fact you can see and shoot the bad guy and he never sees you. You try and avoid a “dog-fight” if you are flying a fighter.

If your goal is to fly around and shoot down other fighters than I'd agree with this. However I'd say most missions would be to put weapons precisely on targets which are otherwise inaccessible. To do so, you need to fly past the enemies' air defense network of radars and surface to air missiles. You don't want the ground radars seeing you, and if they do, you don't want the missiles to be able to hone in on you. Hence stealth.

If our only potential enemies were third world nations with archaic defense networks, well then we don't need good new planes, just planes that are better than theirs (and their missiles). But if you want to be prepared to go against China or Russia or rogues armed by them, then you need something better.

You try and avoid a “dog-fight” if you are flying a fighter. Why close to the merge when you don’t have to, and if you do close to the merge, you want to remain ‘invisible’ as long as possible in order to give you the advantage.

During the operational test and evaluation of the F-22, they asked one of the F-15 pilots how hard it was to fight an F-22 with an F-15. Now you have to remember, all fighter pilots think they fly the greatest aircraft ever, and besides, even if it wasn't their skill would make them the winner. So you could expect an F-15 pilot to talk about how he could beat even an F-22. In fact, he said, "It's easy."

The rest of his comment was, "You go up. You die. You hit the tanker and refuel. You die. You hit the tanker again. You die again. And that's a sortie."

Modern A/A warfare is not like it was in WWII, Korea, Vietnam, or even Gulf War I.

The problem with your statement is ignoring the role of EW in denying the stand-off weapon advantage. There will never be 100% hits regardless, missiles are just not that good and never will be.