I’m watching the Discovery HD channel and they are extolling the virtues of the Navy’s F/A 18 plane. It does some amazing stuff and, as a male with more than a bit of testosterone, I like toys like that. Yea, it sucks fuel like crazy but so what. This is cool stuff! They say that this thing really excels in a dogfight. Yea, I watched Top Gun. You can’t be king of the world if you can’t win an arial dogfight.
Now I’m thinking, wait a minute. When was the last time any of these highly trained pilots with all of this expensive equipment, flying off of an incredibly costly aircraft carrier was actually involved in an arial dogfight? We keep these guys trained an primed. We’re in a war. What enemy are they ready to engage. You fill in the blanks and 'splain this to me.
The last country to actually put up a good fight in the air was North Vietnam, who had some air-to-air success, albeit with great help from the USSR.
Aerial combat has never really been about “dogfighting” - it has, even in WWI, been won mostly by the side that sees the other guy first and kills him with a quick attack from behind before the other guy knows what him him. Indeed, the USA in World War II shied away from dogfighting, especially in the Pacific theatre, because it simply didn’t fit the abilities or their aircraft; the preferred methods were team-oriented “Boom and zoom” attacks, using their bigger, faster aircraft to attack the lighter, quicker-turning Japanese aircraft without giving the enemy a chance to shoot back.
Dogfighting is fine and dandy in movies but in real life, and more so now than ever, it’s about detection and attacking the other guy first.
This is where I’m getting a bit mystified. I know enough to know that this stuff doesn’t come cheap. Who’s the enemy? Who are we prepared for? The Vietnam War, that was the 1970’s.
The F/A 18 is a whiz-bang plane. Does it serve any real military purpose to sustain an aircraft that is unparalleled in a dogfight when there is no such thing anymore?
Well, it’s designated F/A because it’s a ground-attack aircraft as well as a fighter. Anyway, I think that the manueverability that is so important in a dogfight would also come in handy for evading anti-aircraft missiles, whether they are launched from other fighters or from surface.
You have just described the balance of power for the last fifty years, if they have not been used for their primary purpose then the system has worked, but really look at it this way , the airforce has flown and retired at least 3 different heavy bombers , whose sole purpose was to drop canned sunshine on russia and china. The navy by contrast has to do everything from smacking a banana republic that needs an attitude adjustment to rescuing people from various maritime disasters, so they train for everything.
I think the lesson they learned in Vietnam was that they should never assume that the age of the dogfight is dead. F-4 Phantoms were initially fitted with missiles only, on the premise that they could shoot down any enemy aircraft before any traditional dogfight became necessary. They then discovered that missiles weren’t as reliable as had been hoped for and gun fights were still happening. The F-4s were retro-fitted with guns.
So, there may not be any current threat that requires a dogfighting aircraft, but there may be such threats in the future and it is much easier to maintain a capability that is not used, than to lose that capability only to try and regain it at a later date.
USAF fighters shot down several Iraqi AF tactical (fighter / attack) aircraft during Gulf War I in 1991. I believe they have shot down several more since then during the extended no-fly enforcement effort prior to Gulf War II.
I expect, but do not know for sure, that USN got one or two as well along the way.
Not sure whether the events were classic manuevering dogfights or sneak up & blast 'em up the ass, but in either case it requires a fast aircraft with a good radar, missiles and guns to pull that trick off.
If we get involved in a shooting war with China, North Korea, or Iran, we will need all the tactical fighters we can get our hands on.
There is also a chicken-and-egg situation with friendly tactical air. If you have it in spades, the opposing air force is pretty much invisible, often destroyed on the ground in the first 12 hours of the war. (See Gulf War I). If you don’t have it, then you do see the enemy air overhead, dropping bombs & doing other disruptive stuff that’s bad for friendly morale.
To defeat an enemy who has a locally effective air force (even if small compared to our worldwide assets), you’ve got to take the fight to them early & often. And if we’re to do that quickly & with few losses, we need a lot of the best tools available.
The chicken and egg effect can make it seem like friendly tacair isn’t real useful for lack of an effective enemy, when in fact the existence of friendly tacair is exactly why there isn’t an effective enemy (any more).
Finally, note that Discovery Channel excels at gee-whiz factoids that are simple enough to explain in a sound bite & show in a simplistic 10 second graphic or vid clip. Modern jet dogfights have very little in common with the WWII variety or with airshow manuevers. From either the inside or out, they look very little like (idiot) Maverick in Top Gun. But they still require vast power & turning (i.e. G) capability.
Do you feel that the superior outcome of US Air assest in Gulf War 1 were a result of better training, or better equipment? Obviously, the guys had guts on both sides, but we clearly had an edge in air-to-air confrontations.
