Right - this is that whole "top gun" mystique. But let's take a look at the sleight of hand you just performed - I flippantly said "surface to air missiles" and you trotted out the old saw about how the Navy was fucked without 20mm. Have you ever really looked at that? I haven't. But I just did:

All told, the U.S. Air Force flew 5.25 million sorties over South Vietnam, North Vietnam, northern and southern Laos, and Cambodia, losing 2,251 aircraft: 1,737 to hostile action, and 514 in accidents. 110 of the losses were helicopters and the rest fixed-wing. A ratio of roughly 0.4 losses per 1,000 sorties compared favorably with a 2.0 rate in Korea and the 9.7 figure during World War II.

So that's 1,737 that were in some way shot down. How many of those were shot down air-to-air?

Fuckin' 89.

Okay, so five percent of US combat air losses were in air-to-air combat. How many were due to something other than air-to-air missiles? Well there it gets tricky. That chart above lists 83 losses due to air-to-air missiles, 86 due to "cannon", but 21 due to "SAM" and 20 due to "AAA." 86 kills, meanwhile, are "not confirmed". So let's just roll with a percentage - roughly 50% of the recorded kills were missiles, 50% guns. We're down to 2.5% of air combat losses to air-to-air combat with guns.

2.5%. Which is pretty stupid to have a moral panic over but let's also focus for a minute on the fact that nobody has fond things to say about the F-4 as a fighter. It was the F-35 of its day in every way, shape and form. Big, slow, stupid, and intended to drop lots of standoff weaponry on a numerically-superior, technologically-inferior force. Ever been next to one? They're huge. Trust the modelers to put one next to a MiG-17:

It begs the question - what sort of numbers wouldn't the Air Force and Navy freak balls about? I mean, when 95% of your trouble comes from the ground, "air-to-air cannon" is a tough sell. But when you say "we lost to a bunch of 20-year-old surplus Chinese monkey-version Soviet hardware" it's obviously because you don't have a cannon, right?

Do me a solid - ctrl-f "cannon" on this page. You'll find two instances of A-10s strafing the shit on the ground. Now take a gander here and look at how well cannons aren't represented.

Not that this has anything whatsoever to do with surface-to-air missiles vs the F-22 or F-35. I mean, that would be the "95%" portion of the program as opposed to the "2.5%" portion so I think we can call that settled. But I think it demonstrates a certain amount of pervasive mythology that has little to do with actual air tactics.

What is the air force’s job? If you ask the USAF, it’s all Top Gun stuff: Owning the skies, downing enemy fighters in high-tech dogfights. That’s the mission they love, dream about—and spend their money on.

But there’s a problem with that. Nobody will play with us. It’s like investing your entire sports fund on a stable of polo ponies (except polo ponies are cheap compared to air-superiority fighters) and finding nobody in the neighborhood even knows what polo is, let alone wants to spend all that money to play against you.

What the USAF really gets called on to do is bombing raids, usually on small, low-value targets, and close air support (CAS) for US ground forces or their allies.

The problem with that is that the USAF hates that job. For all kinds of reasons. It’s not as glorious as dueling enemy fighters; it’s downright dangerous; and worst of all, it calls for really ugly, cheap airplanes like the A-10 Warthog.

I stand by my argument, even though it was flippant.