That's fantastically interesting (in case it isn't clear, there's no sarcasm there). I'd never done that analysis, I'd just taken a sentence or two in Wikipedia at face value. Your argument, flippant or not, stands up well. My take is it's an air force who likes to talk about air superiority but can't admit being the top airplane doesn't mean anything when a couple people on the ground with a decent surface-to-air missile can shoot you down with impunity. I agree with your assessment of the USAF, too. I think the same thing applies to the Army. They envision WWII conflicts. The enemy wears a uniform, and anyone not wearing a uniform just wants to stay out of the way. There is a clear front, and behind the front is effectively as safe as being in Omaha. But like air-to-air dogfights, nobody wants to play with us. The military is so much more of a mess than I realized. Thanks for the educational response.
I appreciate the chance to dig into it. It's always bugged me; the footage of these giant F-4s clearly dusting the shit out of MiG-17s, which are obviously a generation or two older, followed by the observation that clearly the fact that an F-4 occasionally got shot down was proof positive that they needed cannons. And then you play even the most rudimentary flight sim and combat's gotta be fuckin' weird for it to be anything other than you and a blip on the radar trading air-to-air missiles. Go guns hot and you are useless. Digging into it there's a lot of speculation as to why fighters need guns/why the F-4 needed guns and it seems to come down to this: 1) If you need to get close enough to look at it, and then decide you need to blow it up, it's good to have a gun. mmmmmmmmmmeh. 2) Early air-to-air missiles sucked ass and when an F-4 used up all its missiles, the MiG could eat it alive. mmmmmmmmaybe. 3) Rules of engagement in Vietnam required pilots to have visual contact on a MiG before they could engage it and by the time they were close enough, any advantages they may have had with standoff weaponry were erased. This one's truthy, although it's nowhere in this 56-page study from the Air Force's School of Advanced Airpower studies. but there is this: required to protect their strike forces. Even when chasing hostile MIGs, US fighters were not authorized to attack North Vietnamese MIG fighter bases until 1967. One pilot explained the situation by noting that "MIGs could wait on the end of their runway until they saw us fighters approaching, then takeoff, make one turn, and wound up in shooting position on the trailing flight of aircraft". The passage directly before is telling: antiaircraft artillery accounted for the most aerial kills. With air defense systems near their peak, summary reports of aircraft losses from 1967-1968 indicate that AAA accounted for more than seventy-five percent of all US aircraft shot down over North Vietnam. 11 Fighters loaded with bombs normally defeated MIGs and SAMs by flying fast and at low altitudes. In Vietnam, this tactic placed fighters within lethal range of the AAA guns. It seems to loop back to the beginning, like Ouroboros eating its tail: If you're only going to be given one plane, it better do fuckin' everything 'cuz you might end up painted into a really, really stupid corner. I'll bet they'd put bayonets on the things if they could. American aircraft were prohibited from engaging MIG's except as
MIGs and SAMs were the more advanced elements of the air defense system, but
Slightly off-topic, but this is just wrong. Yeah, the Army brass would love to fight WWII-style conflicts. The US technological superiority in such a conflict is so obvious and astounding that it's indisputable that they would come out looking very good in such a conflict. But, the operational Army doesn't train for that kind of conflict at all anymore. From the time I went through basic training in 2006 until I got out in 2010, every single moment of training was focused on counter-insurgency. We trained on urban warfare, small unit tactics, and even spent a large amount of time on cultural sensitivity and how to interact with local populations in a positive way. I doubt any of that has changed significantly in the last 6 years. What we absolutely never trained for was total war against the uniformed military of another nation. I never once saw anyone dig a foxhole. Only once in two and half years assigned to a cavalry unit did we do any kind of training involving coordinated maneuvers beyond the company level, and even that was still in the context of counter insurgency. The Army might not actually be good at fighting modern wars, but they're sure as hell aware that they won't be fighting a full-scale nation vs. nation war again in the foreseeable future.I think the same thing applies to the Army. They envision WWII conflicts. The enemy wears a uniform, and anyone not wearing a uniform just wants to stay out of the way.