But the reality is that we have fewer and fewer of both. The Chinese have a lot of missiles, and they are hoping that they can bring down a fair number of American planes without depending on dogfighting.
I don't know if they will, and I don't know if they won't. But we have something like 150 F-22s. Not much margin for effor there. Any war of attrition would deplete our fleet pretty quickly.
The people in the Pentagon are trying to figure out how to fight a war to keep the Straits of Hormuz open AND protect Taiwan in an attack from China ... with this new budget proposed by obama, they realize they don’t have enough resources for both fronts!
The Japanese lost almost all their first team of experienced naval pilots in the first year of operations after Pearl Harbor, many of them at Midway. That was about 1,000 trained pilots and aircrew in a year.
They never recovered.
So how long would our F-22's last in sustained combat operations against a major opponent flying Sukhoi and Mikoyan-Gurevich iron, including the T-50 and J-20? Do the math.