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The point of having the 1,000 or so cheapo fighters is to knock the Chinese Air Force into the dirt, followed quickly thereafter by the Chinese Army and Navy. And the reason the fighters would be cheap is that they're light, have fewer systems than a multirole bird like the F-16, and are built to turn and burn--they can carry bombs, but only if they have to.
China will eat Taiwan unless we have airsuperiority on Day One. That's all I got for that tune.

==1000 fighters was not even enough to take out the Viet Congs, not to mention China. Try 5,0000 and 10 years.

You're right about Vietnam. 5,000 fighters, some of them badly designed (the F-4 put the dog in dogfight), carrying Sparrow missiles so bad that some pilots jettisoned half of them on the way to the fight to save weight, with Congress and the Army having to fight like wolverines to get us zoomies to suck it up and actually do some close air support missions, all of these following warplans that made no sense at all when the SAC bomber generals wrote them, and which made negative sense when Lyndon Johnson and his morons were done with them.

The model of what we're doing these days would be the two Iraq air wars. In fact, in his book about being the air boss in Desert Storm, Chuck Horner said the only time he yelled at anybody during the whole war was when a guy came into his office and suggested a geographical assignment plan for the air missions that was reminiscent of the Vietnam Route Pack system.

Times have changed.