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#17
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GIVEN CURRENT WARS, F-35s ARE BETTER CHOICE THAN MORE F-22As
In message , Tiger
writes William Black wrote: What they need is something very reliable that lugs a largish bombload around and can absorb ground fire while dropping it in smallish quantities with great precision. What they don't need right now is large complex jet fighter/bombers that are designed to fight a major European war. In other words."Why pay 2008 Corvette money to do a job your old 1988 F150 could do?" I'm sure there plenty of stuff in the boneyard that fits the bill. A-10's, A6's, A-4's, Phantoms, A-7's. Old stuff, but to drop bombs in zones with no Mig threats they work. I think the A-1 may be pushing the concept a bit, but I hear you..... Fine until the Bad Guys hit it with a 1960s-vintage SA-7 or similar, which is cheap and widely proliferated and very effective against such aircraft (as evidenced by the withdrawal of the A-1 from Vietnam by the end). By the time you've added the IRCM capability to survive MANPADS, included the navigation and comms gear needed to hit *that* building to support the troops, and bolted on the sensors that let you operate at night as well as by day... your solution is no longer quick, cheap and simple. It's the old problem of the Blitzfighter: it's an appealing notion to fill the skies with cheap, simple aircraft armed with a simple but deadly gun and unburdened by complex electronic boondoggles, but the reality falls over when many are blotted from the sky by SAMs, others can't be reached on a swamped VHF voicenet, those that can get to where they're needed get into long conversations about "I see the street, I think, and some red smoke, you want me to hit the red smoke?... okay, across the street and three houses north of the red smoke... I show two red smokes now... was that you calling 'Check! Check! Check!'?" The F-16 and A-10 are good examples, both initially hailed by the Lightweight Fighter Mafia as everything a combat aircraft should be (though the ideal aircraft, according to the LWF, seems to have been the A6M Zero...) and both being "ruined" by the addition of the useless, wasteful electronics that let them do more than excel at range-shooting on bright sunny days (and both subsequently demonstrating remarkable effectiveness and longevity...) -- The nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors, will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools. -Thucydides pauldotjdotadam[at]googlemail{dot}.com |
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