You guys are discussing one of the hottest subjects that totally
captivated the whole fighter community from the 1950's to the end of the
Cold War - the identification, analysis, and comparisons of enemy
(Russian and Chinese) fighters with our own - and in most cases the
original investigations were a disaster until Boyd / Christie / Hillikar
/ Richioni, and others I am ashamed to have forgotten now pulled
together the concept of Energy Maneuverability that started to review
the defining characteristics of fighters (actually all aircraft) and in
snap shots of time, configuration, power, speed, altitude, and AOA they
could let you know fairly well how the aircraft was performing against
your at the same conditions. Now the whole effort was wasn't always
concise it took a whole lot of effort and actually until our pilots
starting flying the enemy jets on a regular basis did we really learn
what they did and how they performed. It may have been the greatest time
in fighter history because it evolved with the spirit and skills of many
people tempered all the time with real combat experience and subsequent
exploitation.

The Foreign Technology Division (FTD) tried very hard to get to the
performance specifics of enemy fighters by modeling performance and it
took an incredible effort because there were not the computers of today.
Now almost all computer games have exact aero and performance data on
the whole spectrum of western and eastern fighters so you can play with
them on your laptop or Playstation.

Some stories of course - the USAF flew the MiG-21 in early experiemnets
and together with the restrictive Russian flight handbook considered it
a piece of cake against the F-4 - then the Navy took a lok and Tom
Cassidy the salty CEO today of the Predator company who always was a
handful and SOB to boot took the MiG and started flying circles around
the F-4 simply because he was flying it by the seat of his pants through
touchy areas that had Russian designers worried (certain fuel state
changed the CG radically and made it quite unpredictable for a bit) and
ruled out for Russian pilots - that is they could not fly slower then
400 kph except to land. Cassiday took it to zero and flopped it around
like an acrobatic toy, drilling the F-4's who were trying to flight the
slow fight with a heavy wing loaded beast that would not do it. As time
went on people recognized that the F-4 could beat the MiG-21 with power
using the vertical and slice turning (cross-controlling using the
adverse yaw and dihedral effects) to get your nose around. But US
pilots flying the MiG's also assumed US properties like better missiles
and better avionics so the MiG was at its best flown by our folks.

Now going back to FTD and their many evolutions of bad assessments - the
MiG-23 Flogger and Su-17 Fitter (swing wing) family of aircraft had more
powerful engines but also many new restrictions - but in the pure state
the resultant energy envelopes could be stagering so they were briefed
that way yet in reality when the Isreali's (who were the first) started
engaging them they performed worse then the MiG-21 although they could
carry more and go faster longer. Many times the pure analytical
assessment was way off - in fact it was not until the MiG-29 came around
that anyone believed the geeks at FTD and in the MiG-29 they
characteristically under-estimated it. In short - it was our great
relationships with the Israeli and Pakistani Air Forces that perhaps
provided the US the greatest amount of real combat data in how to beat
the Russian fighters and their weapons and very little of what was
learned was ever predicted correctly - so take that for what it is worth
thinking about the future now. Our experience against North Vietnam
with the beginning or Topgun and the USAF Aggressor Program was a
turning point for all of this, a point in time so profound that it
shaped ouir military capability. Only in the Iraq war since 2001 when
the Army and USAF parted ways has the overcoat of air power been
stripped from our troops - and if there is a thombstone for this decade
of war to underscore our failure it will be in the Army's refusal to
understand the vertical dimension and the Air Forces's half hearted
effort to try to jerk them back to reality - the services all grabbed
for their budgetary pots and gave up trying to sorth things out. Today
it is a compl;etely different war and you see outposts and convoys
standing alone with virtually little air cover and even less air
presence because attack helicopters are too vulnerable, UAV's are too
difficult and too few, AC-130's are grounded, and tactical fighters with
pods and bombs make too big a splash for the restrictive ROE's and we
keep loosing people to complex ambushes with no capacity to go after the
attackers let along try to stop them before. The Army dumped all this
and billions on the IED Task force that only grew in organizational size
(4 star level no less JIEDDO) and not in the generation of solutions to
IED's and ambushes and after five years have nothing to show for it
except the continuing casualties - now the Congress will gut them but if
it remains an Army war and not a SOF or Marine joint war nothting will
change. The SOF and Marines have figured out the third dimension but
they also need the right air vehicles for COIN.



wrote in message
ups.com...
A little aware of capabilities of both types, I don't think mistaking
Fishbed with Fitter would have "no impact" on the troops. Fighter
capabilities of Su-17 are poor, but MiG-21 cannot haul heavy air-to-
ground ordnance (like H-29 missile) or a nuclear bomb, though I don't
remember if the latter capability was well-advertised in the Warsaw
Pact forces...

Best regards,
Jacek

On the other hand, mistaking one type of hostile
aircraft (a Su-17 Fitter) for another type of hostile aircraft (a
MiG-21 Fishbed) would generally have "no impact" -- except "if
friendly countries were flying some aircraft types that are normally
considered hostile."