Chmee wrote:
I guess I'd look at what happened to Iran's air force when it fell to the fundamentalist whackoes .... half the competent officers were killed in the purges (for not being fundamentalist whackoes) and the lack of spares turned the air force into a joke in less than a decade.
The other half of the competent officers proceeded to kick the crap out of Iran for the first half of that decade though. The US is not without competent enemies in the world.
Only the Pakistanis actually have enough aircraft to form even a credible threat against any other NATO power, much less us, and since they have medium-range ballistic missile nukes, possession of some F-16's seems like the least of our worries.
Actually, given that Pakistan managed to make two gun type nuclear weapons fizzle, something that basically wasn't thought to be possibul before then, we probably do need to worry more about the conventional weapons the country has (all nicely adjacent to US forces in Afghanistan) then its nukes, for now anyway.
But anyway they know using nukes means they die, and we have countermeasures to nuclear missiles deployed and building in case they go wacko. But then what happens if one of those F-16's has a nuclear bomb or cruise missile, and we have no air superiority fighters to intercept it with? You cannot simply defend against what is seen as the largest threat, and ignore all the other ones.
50 years ... that's crystal ball reading. In 50 years we went from the Fokker triplane to landing on the moon.
Yeah, so we need to be building the most advanced possibul combat aircraft to counter all the new and more powerful aircraft, which will be developed during our planes service lives.
The research for advanced air-combat UAV's is being done today.
And they are easily fifteen years if not more from service. As it is, besides armed Predators, and an armed Predator is just not comparable to a major fixed wing jet, we are still toying with only a few prototypes of UCAV's for bombing missions. Those aircraft are still years from service. The requirements for an air-to-air UCAV are immensely more demanding. And of course, the issue of time lag in even satellite transmissions and the possibul jamming of those singles makes relying on UCAV's for air defence a quite absurd notion. Such an aircraft has little hope of being cheaper then an F/A-22 anyway, espically when the cost of remote controlling it (which would require fielding more communications satellites amount other expensive things) is factored in.
And ... who is building and deploying 4th-gen air combat craft that a Super Hornet couldn't take on?
Russia is
already exporting fighters such as the Su-30 which are better then an F-15 and which have superior air to air missiles, both radar and infrared guided. The F/A-18 is fairly agile, but it has shit for speed, range and payload and is simply not comparable to a dedicated heavy air superiority fighter.
All the advantages in modern air combat are in command & control, advanced radars, and the best missiles. It didn't matter how good any of the Iraqi Mirages or MiGs were in the Gulf War because they couldn't even get in position to take a shot.
The US has the best command and control. On existing aircraft however its looking at equal radar at best and inferior missiles. The F/A-22 fixes the radar issue, and while our missiles are still outranged, its stealth and high sustained speed make that unimportant.
Keep building top-flight AWACS, keep making cutting-edge stealth strike planes to take out enemy command & control .... but deploying hundreds of expensive air superiority fighters when nobody else in the world is doing it? It's hard to justify.
A flawed conclusion from a flawed analysts
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
Viel Feind; Viel Ehr´.
