"Red" wrote:

The R.O.E. will always require visual I.D. Why? Because somewhere there is
always someone with stars on his colar, (or who wants stars on his colar)
that is deathly afraid that someone will screw-up.

Sure, so long as we face only severely overmatched, day-only, VFR-only
adversaries. Heck, we could probably have won every air battle since WWII
with ROE that permitted only pole arms, brickbats, and claws. (None o' that
namby-pamby stuff at hundreds of yards--ya gotta see the blood flow. Pass
me that there halberd and pop open the canopy!)

It was a sad joke in the late '80s, when we were flying 50% of our hours
at night, and the WWNam veterans who provided our Adult Supervision still
trained on the assumption that we'd never *really* get BVR clearance. We'd
always be driving around in two-ships, perhaps working up our ratios to 2:1
or so. Anything more complicated than a bracket violated KISS.

Perhaps it was a self-fulfilling prophecy for the Tomcats in the first Gulf
War. Let the Air Force do all the shooting, and there are fewer Navy
blue-on-blues! Meanwhile, we'll just CAP against the contingency of an
intervention from Mars.

However, there is one great advantage of 20MM contact-fuzed shells, which
still warrants putting them on combat jets. Unbeatable ECCM!