But see, right there your premise “that you must control the air” falls apart. North Vietnam won and they didn’t control the air. There’s always lots of reasons for winning and losing.
Right now we are in a similar situation. The insurgents in Iraq certainly do not control the air but they are certainly giving our military fits. And yes, there are lots of reasons. Remember, wars ARE political.
Back to the OP . . . I’m not suggesting a dismantling of the Air Force or Navy. The effectiveness of the weaponry and the deterence factor are indisputable. I guess what I’m wondering, as an example, is if 3 or 4 or 10 or whatever number of Warthogs would be much more useful than 1 F/A !8? Are we building a military for the enemy thats out there or something else? If modern militaries have not engaged in dogfights in over 20 years and will probably not do it again then what’s the point of having the top dogfighter?
BTW, another limitation of the F/A 18 is the service it requires. You can’t just keep refueling it in the air. It’s not a long range bomber. While the service downtime is much less than the aircraft it replaced it is still significant. It’s like a race car. You cant just keep refueling, you have to bring it in for tire changes or you’re going to lose the whole thing.
The real answer to the OP’s question is “lobbying by Boeing, Lockheed, and other members of the military industrial complex”. The US spends more on defense than the next 7 nations combined. Is that much spending necessary to secure American interests or would we served just as well by relying on cheaper, existing technology? Well, that’s a question for Great Debates that we can’t answer here.
But this is indisputable – the deployment of the FA22 and other weapons systems is worth hundreds of billions of dollars per year to military contractors. Regardless of whether those systems are needed or not, you can be damn certain these companies are spending ungodly amounts of money to convince politicans and the public that any senator who votes against the FA-22 means is “soft on defense” and probably supports the terrorists, too.
I think Pilot 141 is referring to a military victory, and you are referring to a political one.
You cannot win a military victory without control of the air. Ask the Iraqi Republican Guard about that.
He was bullshitting you. C’mon, Johhny. The F-16 carries 7,200 lbs. of fuel internally and up to 8,000 lbs externally. At 6.7 lbs./gal (fuel being lighter than water), we’re talking 2270 gallons of fuel. Even at $3.50/gallon, we are not going to exceed an engineer’s $70,000/year salary. Since IATA is (today) listing jet fuel at $2.069/gal, I have actually overstated the cost of a maximum fuel flight and I doubt that anyone would consider nine such (refueled) flights a single sortie.
In the mid-80s, at $.90/gal vs a $50,000/year salary, it would have been more difficult.
Thinking this over, he may have intended to say that the overall cost of a sortie was more than he made in a year. If you take the cost of running a squadron for a year, (all personnel salaries, all maintenance, all repairs, maintenance of the hangars and equipment, and then throw in that they really do not like trying to land with a wing full of live bombs, so even on training missions they tend to drop their external ordinance), then divide those costs by the number of sorties, annually, I could see exceeding one engineer’s salary for each sortie. However, I really doubt you could keep a pilot out there for twenty hours each time he went up so that he could expend $70,000 (or $50,000) in fuel.
Again, wars are political. We bombed the crap out of Vietnam and they still kept coming. They were not about to quit despite all of the bombs, napalm, helicopters and mines.
When you take politics out of the equation of warfare you are bound to eventually get your ass kicked. If you get into a fight, you had better be prepared to fight the guy you are facing, not the guy you want to fight.
Are military contractors deciding what our enemies look like rather than learning what they really look like?
Perhaps you should give some thought to what the Vietnam war would have been like if the US had not been able to move around pretty much at will using air transport, and if the NVA had been able to call in airstrikes on a regular basis. You can lose with air superiority, but you’d certainly lose a lot faster and more messily without it.
With regard to the Eastern Front, the Soviets had effective air superiority by the end of the war, mainly by throwing up planes faster than the Germans could knock them down. The Il-2 was called things like the “Black Death” by the Germans. They’re quoted as knocking out 70 tanks from a single division at Kursk. In 20 minutes.
Most things the Pentagon buys are absurd boondoggles, though. That I’ll agree with.
I’m not disputing the effectiveness of air superiority. It is obvious that effective air support can save a lot of lives of the troops on the ground.
I simply took issue with the statement that you can’t win a war without controlling the air. North Vietnam did exactly that. Was that possible because the war was political? Yes. Again, wars are political.