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